skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About 2 weeks, my startup was targeted to students at a specific location.

Not much marketing was done; besides facebook and flyer distribution.
Is the idea really for people to make their own napkins? I thought based on the article that the point was that napkins could be manufactured cheaply in the village, rather than on half-million dollar machines owned by multinational conglomerates.
That's not StackOverflow. That's StackExchange Gaming.
I love that this guy figured out how to make and re-sell a cheaper manufacturing machine!

I have some questions though.

One is about the suggestion in the article that not using disposable napkins results in reproductive tract infections. That seems unlikely.

Another is that while good, cheap, reliable period-managing supplies are useful and liberating for women, there are movements to use menstrual cups and washable, reusable cloths as an alternative to disposable stuff. "Rags" sounds negative but "reusable cloth pads" less so.

So while this is great, maybe there is still more opportunity for disruption in this market!
You assume that education for most must be done by the state. Yes, what I stated is a solution, and it does work around the state education problem. I admit the possibility that the state education system can be fixed, but I also admit the probability that it won't be in my lifetime.

If you have a problem, and you can use a different infrastructure to avoid it at an acceptable cost, it makes sense to use it.
I've only had the chance to visit once, but it's wonderful! The best news I've heard is that (i seem to remember) 80% of people that live in slums (slums all over the world), only live there for 1 generation. That means in 80% of cases, people get out of the deepest poverty (people usually come to slums from rural areas, so slums don't shrink). The world is getting better, but it does take a LONG time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_d...
more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3368607
It probably is a better solution (I use one myself and my only gripe is that I wished I'd known it was an option as a teenager and not already been 30 when I discovered them), but if the menstrual taboo is as strong there as that article implies, then it may be an even harder sell than a man designing a napkin machine.

There's a lot more potential hand-contact with menstrual blood when using a cup than pads, and while someone in the western world might scoff at the idea that using a cup could "ruin" a women's virginity, that could be a real concern for an unmarried girl in rural India.
We would figure out what /dev/tty our friends were using and echo a ^L into their VT100. I remember one friend had a whole ASCII-art picture that he would spray into a tty and really freak them out.
The New Online Education
I find it interesting that a government which allegedly funds terrorism [1] also funds a company which is supposed to be the shining beacon of transparency and a tool which has been crucial to the Arab Spring movements.

Wonder how much of an influence this will have on Twitter's self-censorship.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables...
I started replying, and it turned into a long story: http://trapm.com/how-to-get-hired-or-the-silly-but-adorable-...
There is a big list of them in Patrick's post, maybe that would be a good place to start.
They are great, but I can imagine they might be difficult to manage and to keep clean in some situations.
Verizon hit with net neutrality lawsuit over Google Wallet blocking
Breaking: Bloomberg Chooses Cornell to Make New York a Silicon Valley 2.0
Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/
http://sunlightlabs.com/
I've worked with Duane & the guys at Kashflow - they've built a great business. Congratulations!
open source or not, did you know you can't buy this chip? Broadcom only sells it to their partners that can do 100k+/yr quantity.
I personally feel that exploring the motives for our choices is one of the most important aspects of creativity - be it creating software or otherwise. Since this experience has resulted in the writer choosing this particular career path, I believe it's relevant.
> That myth that "this will make it hard for the 99%" thing has been trotted out during every single anti-piracy failure ever. (There have been no lasting successes.)

I would call the dramatic decline in the relative size of the peer-to-peer music "sharing" world to the iTunes world a lasting success. Steve was right that 99¢/track was a winning proposition, but it's easy to forget how effective the RIAA's legal and technical jamming efforts were at pushing Napster and friends out of the mainstream.
Well, he solved the problem of creating a machine which costs around 1,200$ instead of 600,000$, the machine used by J&J and P&G.

Now, his idea is that lot of NGOs in various villages have to make this investment of 1200$ (which is a LOT of money for people living in villages), install the machine, make the napkins and then sell them.

What the OP and I suggest is that he should create/install machines in his own factory, optimize the process even further and then using economies of scale create cheap napkins which every women can afford. Having a central location to drive the prices lower is much easier than installing machines in a country as big as India. And I think he should be able to easily get Investment because his invention is featured at the national level. [And if he can't get Investment, I will start a kickstarter project and send him the money.]
Also, what did you like / dislike about other hackathons / startup weekend type events? (no name calling)
Better transparency and awareness is only one part of the solution. I strongly feel that people need to create a crowd-sourced lobbying group in order to get things heard and done. Money has always spoken louder than words in Congress.
In a country like India the Best way to bring Awareness - is to Film a Movie out of this.

In India Its extremely hard for making Conservative people - in accepting new radical reforms and accepting such changes. Very Conservative Mindsets.
8 industries that will likely make you rich
How & What To Outsource Effectively With Fiverr
Stay Hungry (Kim Jong-il)
Start with any industry/business you like. Find any business process which involves a telephone and a set of repetitive instructions involving it. Turn it into a Twilio script. Take that to business owners, office managers, etc. Demo the script for them. If their eyes light up and their checkbooks come out, you have a good idea.
Or self fund since it sounds to be a profitable idea.

His plan is bad because he creates yet another cause to give money to. With a business, he gets the same outcome and doesn't need help. It's a win-win-win!
The Rise and Rise of Game Mechanics
A great point about 'ruining virginity'. It is definitely a very sensitive topic in India and would severely affect product adoption.
You'd also land your lobbyist in jail pretty quick. I'm fairly certain it's more than a little illegal (on the order of treason) to accept foreign money to influence congress.
Facebook can be sued over use of ads liked by friends, rules court
Well then they're missing out. The only time I visit Stack Overflow is when it comes up in a Google search or when it shows up on hacker news with something actually useful and book-markable like this.
Amazon with the Kindle Fire. Moneygrubbing for Every Dollar.
Not sure about the natural rubber ones, but the silicone ones can be boil-sterilized. But again, then you run into the taboo. If you can't afford sanitary napkins, can you afford a pot specifically for boiling your cup? Would you even be able to get past the taboo to boil it in the same kitchen that you prepare food in, even if it did have its own dedicated pan that never touched food?

Edit: Oh, and as jackityquack mentioned in the sibling comment to this one, that requires running water. I didn't even think it that far, but yeah...that's an even bigger barrier.
Google Search used to be great: fast and cached pages made it great! Now it's slow, no cached pages are available, and it tries to load 'miniviews' of each page (which is ridiculous).

I tell everyone I know to avoid Google+... stick with Facebook.

Google has severe quality problems... only use them if you have to.
Because if they actually build to demand and make some money in the process, they will be in a far better position to meet their educational goals than if they deliberately hobble themselves. Failing to take advantage of people throwing money at them is positioning themselves for failure. However good and fuzzy that may make you feel, in the real world they will be failing to accomplish their goals to the extent that the could have, and I for one think that trumps fuzzy feelings about not sullying one's hands so they could serve thousands instead of millions. YMMV, I suppose.
this seems rather pessimistic; while the initial run is 10,000 units, they have said things like "We have a very low fixed-cost base, and will break even when we reach sales of 20-30k units per year," which imply to me they have much higher goals than just the first run. And unlike many of the open source efforts around things like this in the past, it's being produced by experienced engineers with close ties to a large electronics corporation. Calling them "a non-profit from the UK focused on education" is pretty misleading. To even consider selling to the government via the education system suggests they're ready for serious scale.
Like without running water.

And, yes it might be the most cost effective, but if you can't convince a white person to use it, then we shouldn't be telling Indians to use it either. It's an option, but the market should and will decide. (p.s. my roommate uses one too.)
I personally think that the "internet" does need to learn about Congress, or at least be aware of what is going on. ICANN controls the root DNS servers for TLDs, and before ICANN, the US government did.
Write a power dialler, that is a system that takes a list of numbers and the number of agents you have available and will ring enough customers so that the agents are on the phone more often than not.

Sell this to people running call centres, make sure it stays up all the time and they will love you.
Overloaded vs. Generic Commands
Tableta Asus Transformer 3G 10.1" TF101G-1B171A
What To Do When AllThis Steals Your Photo & Bio
LED mounted in a contact lens for possible virtual / augmented reality displays
Belay Lessons: Smarter Web Programming
Hey thanks for that, a good read. The part that stuck out the most for me was pushing questions back to the interviewers. I tend to do this naturally as well but I came about this method differently than you.
I see interviews as a chance to sell myself to the company but almost and equally as important, for the company to sell itself to me. Mentally, I take the approach that I'm a good engineer and could work for many different companies so what can this company offer me?
You can usually tell quite early on when interviewing with a company if they believe somehow that they're doing you a "favor" by even talking to you. I avoid those places like the plague.
Fascinating read, can't wait to look into it more closely. So far this approach seems somewhat similar to CHIRP [1] in that both concepts use bins or grids to find the most effective pairwise feature combinations.

[1] http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~lzhen001/activities/KDD2011Program...
Android on a USB Stick
There are tons of cool little ideas out there, and plenty of big ones as well.

I'll plug one of my recent creations:
http://shouldbeback.com/
Google Chrome Extension Tells You Not To Shop at Amazon
Reading Digits in Natural Images with Unsupervised Feature Learning [pdf]
With girls it's a libido thing; either she turns you on or she doesn't. It's not the same thing as choosing software.

My only concern with software is how usable it is. If it looks pretty, but I have to do a whole bunch of operations to get something done, it has a poor UI and I'll pick an alternative. If it doesn't have the flexibility to do exactly what I want, I'll look for an alternative (which is why I choose a commander-style file manager instead of the OS default). If the UI is misaligned or has some weird color scheme or ugly pictures, I really don't care so long as I can get things done quickly. I don't care enough to get nit picky about looks when it comes to software.

It's not about shallowness; it's about priorities.
I am reminded of the way the media handled the vaccination scare: they always had both sides represented, even though one side was rational science and the other was misguided if not openly fraudulant. I saw a lot of complaining on the Internet about journalists giving equal footing to "crazy" viewpoints. Of course we don't want that, either in journalists or legislators.

The question is how to determine what is the "rational" view and what is the "crazy" view. If we can address that in some way, we may be closer to a solution.

In government, it seems like following the money is a good start. The deeper the pockets of the original source of the money, the more crazy the source seems to be. If an idea is coming in being funded by a lot of individuals, it is probably more rational (where rationality is defined as the true will of the people).

I agree with TFA that you have to work inside the system to change it (short of open revolt). It reminds me of a friend who wanted to get rid of highway billboards. His idea was simple: Raise money to buy a handful. Sell ads and use the profits to buy other billboards. Once they control all the billboards, take them all down.
Yup, it's a really nice natural filter. If the companies don't feel comfortable doing themselves what they've asked you to do, you should probably duck out of there with a polite declination as quickly as possible.
If UPS existed 110 years ago: "After years of horse drawn cartage, we're going petroleum first, and we're very excited about it."

Of course digital first should be the first inclination. Succeed where the success is, not where the past has died.

Good for the Atlantic.
From the linked Wiki page.

"Cup manufacturers urge the use of clean water for cleansing. This may not feasible in all countries or conditions, and alternative ways of managing menstrual flow will need to be employed"
Pivoted?
First Take: Microsoft Lync 2010 Mobile
We're planning to use hosting in Europe for part of this reason. I simply do not trust the US government not to come fishing after my customers data, and I don't want to be in a position of getting "National Security" Letter. The company itself is located outside the USA for this reason as well. What footprints we do have in the USA (namely, gmail, and a tiny bit of AWS) are being offshored as we prepare for going live with our MVP.

Further, the tendency in the last year for the US legislative branch to pass really quite unconstitutional legislation does not give much hope that matters will improve. I'm talking not just about SOPA, but NDAA, and even the so called "Stimulus" act which contained provisions giving the federal government the power to centralize all hospital records under federal control. (at least in the revision I read.)

I have some concerns about eruope. I would not host any data in Britian for similar reasons, as the USA. It seems continental europe has reacted negatively to the results of the PATRIOT act, and one would hope, are not going to impose similar measures as a result. If necessary, we may move our services to the middle east or to asia, but that would be unfortunate.

It is a real shame to have to consider all these factors that have absolutely nothing to do with providing a quality product. I'd rather have servers in the USA to provide better service to customers in the USA.

But I consider my customers data a sacred trust, even if its almost all pretty trivial data. Thus I anonymize what I collect and I don't collect more than is necessary, but these measures can be reversed for surveillance purposes, and thus honor requires me to protect it.

I hope I never get into a situation where my business faces being forcibly shut down if I refuse to betray the trust of my customers.

I find it very sad that so many american companies are not even putting up a fight.
Add an issue!
Startups who will get US$40k to join Start-Up Chile
Generally, they are. They get their Windows compatibility certification and everything.

Oh, wait, you mean for Linux? Good luck with that. The sad thing is that either providing drivers for Linux or providing detailed enough specs that drivers can be written by the OSS community offers little for no payback for the effort. As a Linux user, I feel lucky that any hardware manufacturers even acknowledge people might be running something other than Microsoft.

When you're in bed with Microsoft, you probably have even more reasons to blow off the OSS community. The sweaty chair-chucker wouldn't like it, and you don't want to get him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.
What is usage on Google+ like now? I still don't know anyone, but internet celebrities and Google employees, that use Google+. I've yet to encounter a single person who has recommended that I use Google+.

These few improvements only seem interesting to people who are current users of G+, and I feel like that's a really small group -- but maybe I'm wrong.
Effective Labels for Products
To get you started you might want to implement a Google Voice like application. Though that sounds that might sound difficult, using Twilio it can easily be done in a weekend. It will teach a lot about how to create Twilio applications plus it gives you the freedom that Google Voice lacks.

For example I hated getting phone calls when I was in meetings. So I hooked my Twilio app into my Google Calendar API and bam, when I was in meeting Twilio would ask them to leave a message or press 5 if it was an emergency. Also greeting people by name when they call is pretty awesome.
Heart attack ended the life of great North Korean president Kim Jong Il.
He was originally looking to splash money on a football (soccer in the US) club, but could not find one to buy, so... ;-)
Unfortunately, Avatar only had budget for a total of four dimensions. So they gave three to the visuals, and just one to the characters.

Holy hell was that an awful, awful film.
Very helpful - thanks!
This boils down to a following old algo: 1. plot all possible scatterplots 2. order them due to an area of white space left 3. claim the top-whatever novel exciting relationships. This way it is anti-robust and produces too much false-postives to be seriously useful.
19 Dec 2011 Job for Product Manager 
Job Description : The Candidate must be M.Sc in Agriculture with
3 to 5 years work experience in product management of an Agro Chemical/Seed
Company or FMCG.
Still, you would get all kinds of "Ensuring freedom and security for all citizens", "providing new opportunities" and similar crap.
AllThis misrepresentation and/or copyright infringement?
@amyhoy has written a post about possible misrepresentation and/or copyright infringement going on over at AllThis. Even recommending unhappy individuals send in DMCA takedown notices to their service providers.

Honestly, I'm not sure where I stand on the issues she raises. But I do wonder, is there any real copyright infringement going on when taking Twitter's TOS into account?

All this reminds me of 37signals and Get Satisfaction,
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else
Indeed, but not every one of the reactions described idan, mattdeboard, or roqetman is attributable to a disorder. For example, freezing and trying to analyze the sound whenever an explosive noise occurs (or even ducking for cover) is not necessarily a pathological reaction - it could simply be a learned and throughly ingrained response. The patterns you learn in situations where your life depends on a trained behavior tend to be imprinted very deeply.

There are a couple of other things that need to go wrong until the diagnosis of PTSD is applicable. Sadly, this is not exactly made easier by the fact that people tend to have vastly different reactions and symptoms.
Trust Me: Here's Why Brands Sell Trust, Subconsciously
I've been looking at Twilio on and off for more than an year and would really like to make use of it and do something interesting. But they're still mostly US-centric that makes it kinda difficult for anyone not targeting a US market to use efficiently (I don't blame them - I'm sure the paperwork itself to run something like this in each country must be a nightmare)
I'm new to Ruby as well (getting back into programming). I'll definitely pick up Dix's book - thanks for the recommendation!
19 Dec 2011 Job for Assist Mechanic 
ob Description : The Candidate must be can assist machinist, mechanics
& shop technician etc.
EU Council Quietly Adopts ACTA
Are Tiny Nuclear Reactors The Power Plant Of The Future?
Bugs and Battleships
Building a Web Site To Be Successful
I find in the interviews that the Americans like to ask questions based on what you learnt in college. It's almost like a test on your university abilities. The tests on your ability to do the actual job seem to be rather scarce. Your ability to remember different sorting algorithms is much more important.

> It seems they expect interviewees to scream out loud that they are the greatest programmer the world has ever seen!

It is the American way to tell everyone how great you are and then once you have kids, you have to tell everyone how great they are. I suppose it is to be expected in what was/is a competitive capitalist market. If I interviewed in the UK and told everyone how great I am, it would be a sure fire way to not get the job.

Some US companies have a tendency to ask questions that are tricky or are obscure. Even worse is the interview that is completely overloaded with buzzwords and jargon.
Minor nitpick.

A spouse, a mortgage, children, student loans -- life quickly throws you all kinds of things that you don't have the option of escaping.

Once you've made the choice to get married and have children, yes, you cannot escape your choice. But life does not "throw" these things at you; you choose them. Some people do not make these choices, and therefore remain free of these constraints forever, regardless of age.
TL;DR : Don't naively use user input (AKA validate user input)

(well.. duh! :)
Google promises to release 'tablet of the highest quality' in 6 months
I'd like to add a similar question: what are the lesser known but cool control structures?
How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')
The Sunlight Foundation's APIs look great and some of their projects are pretty cool (and well-designed).

Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists.

PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated.

http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html
Flickr is Dead