skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: how to tell when an idea is terrible or great?
I've been ruminating for quite some time on this issue and can't seem to get anywhere with it, so I'm hoping you guys might throw in some interesting points of view I hadn't considered.

My peers and I have spent some time debating the worth of an idea a few of them had, and we're essentially in two different camps: some believe the idea is too complex, too vast and too risky for a team our size and with our expertise, others think the idea is the future and we should pursue it at all costs. According to this camp, even if we don't have the qualified manpower to execute on the idea, it's ok because once VCs take the bait, we'll have vast resources and hire a bunch of experts who will fill the vast gaps we currently have. Making smaller MVPs is also according to them impossible because it won't truly shine without all of the pieces in place, which is likely the work of several years.

This is the problem, on one hand you know that something like 90% of startups tank because they've bitten way more than they could chew, and were working on massive assumptions that didn't even bother validating. They're basically rolling the dice, and the odds are bad to say the least.
On the other hand, you don't want to be the grumpy conservative dude who doesn't want to take risks and cannot see a brilliant revolutionary idea when it's right in front of him. Yes, you have experience, you've seen projects fail over and over, you want to bootstrap and grow in predictable steps rather than making big leaps of faith. At the same time you suspect that if everybody around you was like you, nothing new would ever be done.

At this point I basically don't know how to address the issue. It seems like in these situations you have to rely on your gut and risk being wrong, or never know if that concept would have taken off. Even the trick of "asking 20 random people to see if all 20 are super excited about the idea before pursuing it" doesn't really help you if you're creating something that wasn't here before. The iPad was deemed foolish by most, only to become an unbelievably successful product. Also as I mentioned, if the team believes that Lean-style innovation accounting will be not applicable in your scenario, then you have one less way of answering questions early on.

Is there really no way to tell if an idea is brilliant or completely irresponsible? Any suggestions?
tl;dr

Big drones have little drones,
upon their backs to launch them
And little drones have lesser drones
An so on ad infinitum

And the great drones, themselves, in turn
Have greater drones to go on;
While these again have greater still,
And greater still, and so on.
The author posts this criticism of DCA from a pilot's perspective, but sprinkles it with cynical opinions on why passengers prefer DCA over IAD, which undermines the whole article. The reality is that I—and many others—would rather pay more to fly out of DCA than IAD. For me, it's Metro access that seals the deal. We'll see what happens after IAD becomes metro accessible.
"Right to read" http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/03/stallmans-the-right-to-read-... (Related: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20069648-264/richard-stall... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read)

Here's a lot more in the articles: http://stallman.org/#politics

Edit: IFSO: Richard Stallman: The Dangers of Software Patents; 2004-05-24 (transcript) http://www.ifso.ie/documents/rms-2004-05-24.html

Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.h...

2nd edit: You are a Terrorist (Du bist Terrorist) German, English Subtitles - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24
MongoDB Masters Summit
IOS Developers, let me know what you want from your push notification provider
I'm developing a push notification back-end for other developers at http://backstandapp.com I based it on my own experiences and problems I had to solve, but I really want to know what other developers are looking for in a push notification backend?
Intuitively, I think similarly--and then I put two pieces of the same text next to each other, one in Helvetica and one in Roboto, and I immediately sense a subtle difference in personality that I can't put my finger on but I know is there.
Segurança Virtual Home Page
This whole "Stallman doesn't carry a phone" thing is BS.

I spent a couple days with him in Hawaii. He most definitely has a cell phone.
as of right now, nothing because this is super raw and hasn't been fully tested. I think since this has built in Node.js from the ground up and since it is designed to be front&back end integrated with the shell it will free up lines of code and be more flexible--also issues of translation will be streamlined.
Not all government regulations are bad. The worst thing anyone can do in support of free markets is somehow insist that there should be no government regulations.

We have regulations on vehicle drive-by noise limits. Yes, this costs consumers and manufacturers. But overall, it is a net gain as it results in a quieter society, which is better. Visual pollution is just as bad as noise pollution.

It's a sensible move for people to adopt if they choose to do so.

I actually think it would be broadly neutral. A lot of value invested in advertising is actually wasted. So redistributing that back into the economy may turn out to be marginally beneficial. For every signwriter that had to get a new job, perhaps a magazine editor, online ad creator or telephone sales operator got a job. Or perhaps the companies that saved in constructing advertising changed to improving their products instead.

It will always be impossible to know. But don't argue that all government regulation is wrong.
Appeals Court Upholds Baring Hiring High IQ Police
Interesting to see if it worked for Louis C.K. because of his notoriety and popularity or if the model can actually work for everyone.
Easily distracted: why it's hard to focus, and what to do about it
There's no control over what is bought for customers, or if they're nice, they allow opening it up but there's an automatic gag order. Thanks to anti-circumvention laws among others. Part of the powerful copyright lobby.
Doesn't that prove that people do check it? Isn't the point of open source that you can have problems for a time, but eventually you'll be ok? Certainly better than you could write yourself or trust in a closed source system.
Thanks for all of the responses. I found someone. Thanks HN!
The per capita figures make the other countries look better (although ultimately that doesn't change the underlying point), although the fact that USA has more of the top 1% of papers than all the other countries put together tells a different story. And the other countries do get to free-ride on this... I mean you could set up a communist state with a religious dictatorship, and still it would get the benefit of what the American economy comes up with. You have to question how much of someone's quality of life is down to the chosen system of government, and how much is down to technology (and possibly other things like foreign investors and foreign buyers) they have access to.
The New Dynamic Pricing
> When I was at Lockheed, I was deploying CENTOS

Just curious, was it to save money or was it just easier to go that way?
I currently work for AWS in Seattle, but am wanting to move back home to the midwest in the next 6 months or so. I want to stay relevant and involved in a cloud related job like I have now. Does anyone know if Red Hat would allow me to work for them as a consultant but out of the midwest? Any help our advice would be appreciated.
I am interested in freelance programming work. http://whsjr.soistmann.com/work/
This is the IP of the hacker: 188.75.86.66 (It's possible this is a bounce server, but geo locating it suggests against this.)

I know because I was involved in cleaning up one of the hacks. (I have to stay anonymous, but my main account has more than 7000 karma.)

In the one I dealt with they did not copy stored cards (because they couldn't), but rather added extra code that would email a copy of the details to the hacker as the order was placed.

(So even with PCI compliance credit card numbers can still be stolen.)
Not a big fan of Disqus here, same goes for using Facebook comments.

Thanks for the Octopress suggestion.
You're not alone. If I want a place free of visual clutter then I head outside the city. But advertising is a form of speech, and without it I would feel silenced. Corporate propaganda is similar political graffiti: sure you can make a case against it, but the principle of free speech should outweigh all objections. So yeah, public advertising gives me the warm fuzzies too.
Very, very rarely. I rely on Google alerts for my name.
Phone numbers are not unique identifiers. In several regions around the world, phone numbers are reused. Please keep this in mind because it is very short sighted to say you will never expand globally.
But honestly doing the compression in tar instead of through a pipe doesn't actually help very much
Discount Nike LeBron 9 Shoes for sale
You know, this assertion cannot be decided by one individual person, such as yourself.

The fact that he attracted customers to his platform (paying or not), that aggressively used his service means he solved a problem.

The issue was his ability to generate revenue from his product.
Show HN: Duologue.me - is a new way to create and publish conversations.
My weekend project:

http://duologue.me is a new way to create and publish conversations. Think of it as a "blogging for two" where you and your friend collaborate to create new content.
It would be great to try it with ~50 beta testers at this point. Mostly to see if the idea has legs. See http://duologue.me/roadmap for more details. I'm also looking for a couple of people who want to help (RoR engineer and Designer) move this project along. The app is built with Mongo, Rails3 and Heroku.

Please drop me a line at 'zepplock (at) vova.org' if you need more information. You can also invite me (zepplock) on Duologue.me and start a conversation on subjects like RoR, APIs, Russian Literature, Reef fishtanks or whatever ;-)
While that's true I don't think this is a real test case. There is a good bit of difference between a performed audiovisual show and a collection of music tracks.
Hackerspaces are a new type of space
I often still marvel when reading the biographies of enlightenment-era people, who often travelled and worked extensively in all sorts of cities and countries. There are often tales of going to Rome for a year or two, then returning to Scotland, then off to Germany for a while, or wherever.

While the modern-EU person can do this without any trouble, anyone from outside the EU (or the US), this is just a pipedream without serious legal money to throw at the visa manufacturing industry.

Nationalism is still heavily with us, and even more so than in earlier times.
I talked with a startup that wanted to project ads on your car's back window. I asked them if they planned on measuring their revenue in blood.
SEEKING WORK - remote or occasional travel to Philadelphia or New York City

Python, Perl, PHP, xhtml/CSS, iOS

http://whsjr.soistmann.com/work/
Do a small market test. Put up a one-page signup and try to gauge interest in it.
Bill Kerr: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" explained
How do modern distributed OLTP systems deal with generating unique sequence numbers? Back in the day, this was a big problem, and I always thought that GUIDs would someday be a solution (though at the time, any string was too big/slow to be a primary key). Having one key-issuing server was a SPF; sharding the key ranges by server made it difficult to add new servers.
Yes, that's understood, I realise I used the terminology incorrectly. I've just been reading up on DNS and regulatory control and now more deeply understand that DNS is an extremely difficult problem to solve so that it outside of overt disruption by both governments and rogue attacks. However I do hope to see in my lifetime a system implemented where DNS is no longer affected by a single country's politics.

As bad_user comments above: "to change the world you don't need to change the laws. The alternative is to make them obsolete and technology has a habit of doing that".

Back to Stallman: if anyone could help us imagine an truly democratic DNS system, I'm sure he could point us in the right direction.
The difference being that the people involved wouldn't be aware there was oil under their feet if our country hadn't invented the market for it, told them it was there and given them the equipment to drill it. Left to their own devices, the only thing they'd be hacking right now would be the back end of a camel. What do you think the chances are that their brute force method wasn't one of a million snippets written by someone in the west? Or in Israel, for that matter? How about the computers they used to get on the network they benefit from, but didn't create? Reckon the intel chips were made in Israel?

After all the petty bullshit, Saudis like to party too. The problem is their government and society is repressive as hell, and they're so scared to confront it, they have to go into this whole make-believe world where they act as heroes by attacking Israeli servers. It's pretty funny. I'm sure Israelis will recover. The Saudis on the other hand still live in a medieval hellhole where women can't drive a car... and this really doesn't do much to change anything. Their time and energy would be better spent trying to bring civilization to their own wasteland.

[Edit] I should add, the fact that if you did this in your own country, you'd probably have your hands cut off, is a powerful motivation to go after somebody with more liberal values.
dnb is a credit ratings related scam. if your business routinely has credit checks run it is helpful to have a dnb entry for the business.

if you operate mostly on cash basis and don't need to have credit checks run, e.g. for vendor accounts, there is no need to use dnb.

NOTE: once you are in dnb it is very difficult to be de-listed from their site/service.
While not a specific claim to prediction of form X will happen in the year Y, it is a bit unsettling how since its original publication in 1997, RMS's "Right to Read" [1] has almost served as a playbook for the intellectual property lobby (1998's DMCA + UEFI's Secure Boot, trusted computing, etc). especially in light of the author's notes [1] that demonstrate that the laws required to create that dystopia are either available in some form already or have been proposed in the past, or are actively being worked on (SOPA, Protect-IP).

Ultimately it's not one particular statement that is eye-opening, but rather taking a holistic view of how the landscape of law and the aspects of what general-purpose computers (and programmers) can do and how that will continue to step on more and more industries' toes as pointed out by Cory Doctorow [2].

It's not so much that he's some sort of prophet as it is the unfortunate fact that his paranoia is increasingly justifiable with every new law creating new IP restrictions and laws dealing with civil liberties (PATRIOT, NDAA, etc). It's a self-perpetuating negative feedback loop.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/473794/
Thanks. Odd that VISA would let the third party auditors get away with it, until they don't... which I'd hope so in this case.

Related: http://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-auditor...
You must live in a very small town where locals actually know that. If you asked me where to make a copy in my neighborhood (much less city) I would have no idea.

Big stores don't really need much advertising - it's the small shops that need this, and it's exactly those smaller shops that would be less known to the locals.
Yeah I did the same http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406144

I approached them with a reason why they are flawed, and how to fix it. I am expected to do a small chat with the CTO on Skype around 5-6 hours from now. So right now I'm preparing by coding on my game :)
I threw a couple bucks in his virtual guitar case.

Four tracks for two bucks, that's more than fair. We all spend that on an iPhone app easily, I'm happy to pay for these songs.

Nick Dooley's songs are really beautiful. I'm going to enjoy having these.
Does anybody know the legality of checking these lists? I'm always concerned that the access logs are sent to various authorities.
The Act is called "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012". Is this something that is passed every year? Could the indefinite detention clauses be removed in the 2013 "version" ?
Its so refreshing to see someone launch software with an OSx, Windows, AND linux version. Thank you for your hard work.
Anonymous Imposters: Hiding behind the AntiSec identity
Yeah, it would be pretty sinister if Santa wanted to know where your child's room was so he could come inside.
It's similar to the metacircular Scheme interpreter in Scheme in SICP. It's not that interpreting JavaScript in JavaScript (especially if that JavaScript is running on a full-blown and more efficient interpreter itself) is a practical end, but that it demonstrates a concept: language as data and data as language. As an implementation, it is merely interesting -- but imagine writing code in a language closer to the problem domain you're working with that just happens to run on JavaScript.
So you think you know something about Iowa
I've seen quite a few examples from both sides of the coin, though when it's going bad there are some very common themes that keep coming up.

I don't think it will ever be achieved industry wide, that would be akin to all cars being BMWs. But for those people who want to build quality things, there are tried and tested ways of doing it.
The words "superior race" don't appear anywhere. The most you've shown is that I've cited the same Sanandaji blog post a few times.

Your second and third links don't even mention race, though the second does conditionally postulate a superior gender (i.e., "if the post I'm replying to is correct, then women are inferior").
I'll pass this onto my Dad, he'll love it, thank you very much :)
I'm sorry, not to be a cynic, but there is almost no similarity between this and what Louis C.K. did.

One was a massively successful, near household name who has his own cable television show releasing what he normally releases, but doing it without a formal distributor.

This is an unknown street musician that I doubt anybody has ever heard of. Musicians like this have been giving their music away for free on the Internet as long as I've been here.

For him, there isn't a real risk. At best he gains popularity, at worst his situation doesn't change.

I hope he gains that popularity, but there is nothing new here, and this certainly doesn't have anything to do with Louis.
I think we'll find it comes down to clever marketing. I suspect that this project works because it's a) the first to come off the back of C.K.'s project and b) targeting HN which is usually responsive to innovation. He could probably get some good traction on sites like Reddit right now too. But as soon as we see tens, hundreds of sites like this we'll stop paying attention and need something more new and innovative to get our attention.

Is there a socially-charged music site where independent musicians can load their music into a radio station, and get traction by upvotes? While I'd be hesitant to listen to such a radio station at length it could be a way for more musicians to get their better songs listened to.
TileMill is great, I used it to style our replacement maps, since google maps decided to start charging. Here is an example: http://tile.ridewithgps.com/leaflet.html

TileMill is addictive to play with, though very tedious if you don't have a fast machine with some SSD's, as refreshes take a while to reload various zoom levels to see your work. Not much to be done there except throw hardware it.

Edit: I am hosting our maps on my own hardware, mapnik2+mod_tile. I just used the slick client to create a mapnik XML file for rendering.
How to Select the Best Lace Front Wigs
This kind of thing would be a great use for http://gumroad.com
Wikitravel is available -- wget http://wrmlbeta.s3.amazonaws.com and you'll see all the dumps they have available, e.g.:

http://wrmlbeta.s3.amazonaws.com/entrav-20111105.7z.001

In the age of nearly unlimited connectivity, I still find my Wikireader an invaluable device when traveling.
Building the same app for iOS and Android
http://bandcamp.com

http://cdbaby.com
No Windows version.
Actually, after controlling for ethnic composition, the US and Norway are not similar. In fact the US outperforms Norway by roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
looks like a list with no real data for most of them
Belarus is the last stronghold of Soviet style oppression. It's one country needs a lot of hacker support.
Actually, right now, even Hello world is a disaster. My guess is that this will drive some interesting improvements to emscripten and LLVM so there may be some benefits down the line.
I never understood the point of using a less capable language and then using a tool to compensate it, e.g automatically generate code for it.

I definitely agree with you on this one :). Sure, it's better to use a language that lets you have less complexity even as your codebase grows quite large. You mentioned Haskell. Since I don't have any experience with it, what do you think is the reason that it's not used very often for building large enterprise applications (or maybe it is, and I just don't know about them)?
ROFLMAO racist dogs!
All government regulation is bad because none of us has the moral right to dictate the behavior of strangers.

The aggregate gain in a quieter society that you describe is not an aggregate gain in happiness. It's a society in which we're silenced.

Advertising is a form of speech, and we should all support free speech in all forms, lest we find ourselves silenced.

Hacker News would be free of visual clutter if we all stop posting. If a government mandate forced us to stop, supporters may argue that it makes the world a cleaner place. Clutter-free as it might be, those supporters don't have the moral right to prevent us from speaking. That in essence is why all government regulation is bad.
Hey Uber, I Like Your Ride… But Not Sure It's Worth The $143 You Charged Me
This law passed a few years ago and there were empty signs for a few months afterwards. They are all gone now.
> It would be nice if this object would provide us with some ability to safely communicate with other processes. We can't share memory, but we want to be able to send a message. Let's add a void sendMessage(Process receiverProcess, Object message) function to the Process class

Ha! So basically Handler.sendMessage(...) from android then?

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Handler.ht...
After tinkering with the source for a bit longer, I can see that it will be very difficult to make ibniz go fast because of an inherent inter-pixel dependency in the stack. The semantics of the language seem to imply that the pixel kernel can pass information on to the next pixel via the stack. To be able to split up the rendering work that dependency needs to be eliminated such that each pixel depends only on x,y,t- and values pushed by the last run are implicitly cleared in single thread implementations. What sort of impact will that have on existing demo programs?
SEEKING WORK - iOS Development+Design - SF Bay based, remote OK

iPhone & iPad Apps, everything included. Six Apple commercials, top ten apps in two categories. Two pros and we do all the work.

Splash page: http://grey.co

Contact email: hn@grey.co