skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In theory I like this concept, in practice it blew up in my face.

After two years and two ideas that failed, (executed poorly, no traction, no market, trouble in cofounder paradise -- you name it, I've failed it), I decided to try a different approach: rapid exploration of niche products. In the course of a year I spun through about one idea per month.

I got remarkably good at (in)validating my ideas. (Hint: write down who you think your target market is and then pick up the phone. Have a conversation. Ask if they would pay $X dollars for your product where X is something that makes you cringe because you think it's too much. If it's worth pursuing they won't hesitate to say yes. Then tell them if they give you $X right now you'll start building it for them -- if they ask where to send the check you're golden, otherwise you need to rethink your assumptions. If you don't know anyone to call run some ads to a fake landing page, collect emails, then offer an amazon gift card or something for a 30 minute phone call. I wrote about it here: http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking-wi...)

I finally landed on something, (and feel free to steal this) -- filtered google alerts for PR agencies. I had customers using the service and waiting for a bill. But I never implemented the billing system, I procrastinated it hard core. It wasn't because I was afraid they wouldn't pay, (they would have). It was because I was afraid of supporting the project. It was like I built myself a job I didn't want.

So for me the biggest pitfall of this approach was a total lack of vision combined with a drive to pivot to product/market fit at all cost meant I created something I had no passion about whatsoever.
When Wikipedia blocks an IP address for abusive behavior they are taking a stance in defense of their goals which are to provide a high quality, free, open, and unbiased repository of knowledge.

PS: Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act it's fairly neutral if a little long.
Protest SOPA : Blackout all the images on Google+ and Facebook on 18th Jan 2012
This was my noob submission to HN. I appreciate the helpful feedback on Mistash and have started to make some changes. I think next time I will have to post earlier in the day to HN to get more eyes. Thanks again everyone!
There's a specific touch optimized site that works for mobile. It doesn't look like it or the iPad optimized site are done yet either since they redirect to preview.fourseasons.com, but they're definitely aware of mobile devices.
After the iPhone "antenna gate" with a rubber bumper as the resolution, how did 1,053 backers conclude surrounding an iPhone 4 with a metal band would be a good idea?

The author even owned Apple's bumper, but perhaps had not realized why it was rubber. Then the author's other stated reason was frequently dropping the phone. How shock absorbent does he imagine solid metal is, compared to that rubber bumper?

As easily discerned from the photos, this antenna blocking, shock transmitting, "case" doesn't even extend past the face glass, allowing it to shatter if dropped on any front face corner.

Seems like this project's backers should consider it a $65 lesson in weighing the plausibility of marketing claims for oneself.
>"if guns were banned, then gun violence would go down!". No, it wouldn't. Those outside the law would get them in the black market, and those of us that abide to the rule of law would lose a valuable weapon (no pun intended).

How does it follow that violence would not go down? Clearly if only 'business criminals' have access to guns, as opposed to everyone, there are in total less gun holders, and thus less gun violence...
A good addition would be to use supervisord for running the uwsgi process at system startup.
(as described here: http://brandonkonkle.com/blog/2010/sep/14/django-uwsgi-and-n...)

For a good comparison on different WSGI servers (aka uwsgi vs gunicorn, etc):

http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers
> That 30% has to be paid without getting anything in return
Really? Considering Apple will introduce something groundbreaking for textbook publishing (I'm a little skeptical about that myself, but just let's assume that), is that really 'nothing'? Without them, you'd be stuck with dump, hard-to-read, un-zoomable PDFs. With their (imaginary) tools, you'll get some incredible, beautiful, multimedia textbooks (imagine CLRS's algorithm book, that is full of interactive demos showing various sort algorithms, ect. without you having to crawl the internet for a 12 year old JAVA applet that sucks). I think it's a good deal.
(BTW, I think 30% is way too much. I think Apple should charge around 15% for everything they sell.)

Also, note that the prices will certainly be less that paper textbooks in a few years.
How the Beatles success funded the development of the CT scan
The niche market accessible to one person working part time sounds very much like what Rob writes in "Start Small, Stay Small", and I think it's a great concept. In particular, one aspect of it that's good is that it works fine in "the rest of the world": you don't need to be in Silicon Valley or get VC or anything else.

That said, I'm not sure about parallelizing the process, that presents some risks if you're already spread thin.
If you don't think the question of benefit to society is relevant to this discussion.... well, that isn't my problem.

"if we put all the speeches in the public domain, professional speechwriters would find it much harder to make a living"

Yeah. If I were to give a public performance of this speech in my public library that would really hurt speechwriters.

I'll give you a hint, it works like this:

Person A needs a speech. They ask Person B to write one.

Person B agrees in exchange for money. They both sign a contract.

Person A receives the speech. Person B gets paid per the contract.

Person A gives the speech.

Person C through Z copy the speech and give it themselves. Nobody cares.
That I'm wasting my 20's on a profession that offers no room to innovate, whose training is no more difficult than learning how to drive a tractor, where the work is not stimulating and involves seeing the same patients with the same diseases day-in and day-out, and that will soon be uprooted by technology.

The career is hardly meaningful, despite what others romanticizing the profession might have you believe.
I suppose many here work on multiple projects, in fact is there anyone who doesn't? It's just that people don't usually brag about their failures (or non-successes). Personally i start a new project every 2 months, usually minor ideas or things i couldn't find online. It doesn't take that much time anyway ...
I agree. Daniel consistently puts out rich, interesting and educating posts, enough so that I was just about to make my own comment stating so before I noticed yours.
We're talking about Four Seasons here. If this project cost $1m instead of $18m, I'm pretty confident that the other $17m would not be going into our profession.

Unless your metaphor is more about the legitimacy of our profession. If that is the case, I'd point out that we have no inside knowledge on the situation, and then I'd use Four Seasons as a counterpoint -- they charge crazy rates for a fancy hotel room, yet they're not destroying the hotel industry.
Interesting move. I see this as more than an attempt to disrupt publishing - it's about pushing a new tablet-centric model of education and pushing Microsoft to the margins. Apple have already been making a hard sell for iPads in schools - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educ....

And anyone can see why - getting into schools is probably the easiest way to make the iPad practically omnipresent. Especially if they have a lot of key content (textbooks and apps), education strikes me as an area where one platform could build an almost intractable lead.
Forest, Trees, and acko.net
Cloud-based finance helps Pandora manage growth, CFO says
I think you're both begging the implied question: why should this work be protected?

Regardless of the importance issue, we are discussing a speech given by one man nearly half a century ago to a huge audience in a public place. Today, that speech has somehow become the intellectual property of Sony.

As the relevant jurisdiction here is the US, we can ask directly what the Constitution has to say about this:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I fail to see how

1. the above situation promotes the progress of science or useful arts,

2. Sony is the author or inventor of this work, or

3. protection that lasts longer than the average human lifetime is limited in any meaningful way.

After three strikes, I think you're supposed to be out.
The sentiment I have is that of the 30 year old. When I was 19 and working as a hardware and software designer at a start up, my boss found out that I had come in on a Saturday and worked all day. I thought it was cool and awesome to design hardware, and then write the firmware for it.

He was #5 out of 120 employees with 20+ years of experience. He took me to the side and said, one day, you will have a family. Working on the weekend and long hours should not be something you strive for. He worked 9 to 5, and so did the rest of the team.

I'm 33 now and have a 2 month old. I work 9 to 5 Mon to Friday. No more, no less. His was the best advice ever given by a manager of mine. Only took me 14 years to "get it" :)
This legislation isn't about fairness, it is about a Congress that wants the option to erase data on the internet (leaked slimy deals/emails/corruption from congress, Wikileaks, CIA docs, spy id's, propaganda, theft and human rights violations).

Remember when Congress levied financial warfare against Wikileaks?(seizing credit card, bank and paypal transactions). SOPA is a future foreign country Wikileaks silencer). The "stealing", "fairness" and digital rights management talking points are red herrings. SOPA and the future bills like it are about control, specifically Congress losing it bacause they bankrupted this country and alienated everyone in it with a 11% and dropping approval rating.
It is not the best written article but I think that some people here are wilfuly misrepresenting it (maybe being a bit defensive?).

He is clearly talking about clarifying your business model in the early (pre-launch?) days of a startup. In that context everything he says about simplicity and focus should be kind of self-evident.

To crudely paraphrase, if you haven't got one solid good idea (revenue stream, whatever) then 5 bad ones probably won't help you.
Interesting, not to get too off topic here but is there a reason you didn't use a 3rd party service for billing like Paypal or something? Sounds like you went 90% of the way and stopped at the last 10.
And FORTRAN and Pascal and Scheme and...
Wanting to be alone when you're working is not antisocial. If you claim to be able to do serious work while being constantly interrupted by people -- whether on IM, IRC or face to face -- then one of three possibilities exist:

1. You are a superhuman with Buddha-like concentration.

2. You're lying.

3. You're doing trivial work.

However, it's a major problem if the OP goes out of his way to avoid communicating with people after his work session. In that case, none of the work he did has value. Code that other people can't understand is worse than no code at all.

There is a time for work and a time for communicating your work to other people. You cannot do both at the same time.
When 3D printing meets iPod nano
It seems fairly disingenuous to point out the misaligned incentives of regulators without mentioning the misaligned incentives of industry.

The FDA was created in response to the state of industry absent regulation. It is not an ideal construct, but arguments against its very existence don't pass the smell test.

Also not passing the smell test? The idea that a regulator trying to protect his government paycheck and reputation has more power than billion dollar industries. Not in the United States. Not when our regulatory agency's recent histories read the way they do. It's laughable to cast the FDA as an impassable obstacle.
OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output?

I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar.

I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.
This kind of depends. At the company I work for we had a wide-range of coding styles for several years, then decided to standardize and run all code that was not explicitly excluded through a pre-commit hook to enforce standards. We replaced a significant amount of code using tabs with 4 spaces. I don't remember ever really having a problem with conflicts. May be a setting in your source control software.
Test Your Ideas and Potential Demand – Make The First Sale Early
Drop test: Iphone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S2.
I don't see why anyone expects Woz to be a die-hard rabid fanboy of all of Apple's products ... he hasn't been involved in Apple's product development for almost 30 years, and he's obviously not someone to blindly evangelize based on marketing hype. Now if s/Woz/JonyIve/g then this article would be more noteworthy.
Adaptive Web-Design & Advertising
Person A needs a speech. They can't pay person B enough for person B to make a living as a speechwriter. Person A writes themselves a crappy speech that no one wants to copy. The end.

Is that really better than:

Person A needs a speech. Person B writes a speech for them and collects $x royalties when person A gives it, and each time person C-Z (who really liked it) give it. Now everyone gets a good speech, and person B is actually able to write speeches for a living.
I've deleted my post as it won't do anything except get downvotes, but I do agree with what you are saying.

I'd imagine that all great man have had a private life that's colorful, to say the least.

But at some point your personal and private conduct does being to reflect on your character, as true character is consistent (as you said), whether you're in front of a group of people or are in the bathroom by yourself. Otherwise, it's more of a persona than anything else.
This actually looks pretty neat :) I'll have to play around with it in a bit. I have a feeling this could keep my ~/code directory much more organized :P

As a note, you have a broken Github link on that post at the bottom.
I need to nitpick this point:

The reason to get the DNS provision into law is to shut
down websites operated from outside the United States
where the US does not have jurisdiction.

Could more accurately be stated as:

The reason to get the DNS provision into law is to keep
American's from accessing and funding websites operated
from outside the United States OR where the US does not
have jurisdiction (foreign TLDs).

The site can (and most likely will) remain up for the rest of the world. Just not those using US-based name servers and ISPs. (...IANAL)
In the link the top rated comment makes the same observation.
supervisor is great, but if you want to host multiple applications the best way would be the uWSGI Emperor http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/Emperor

Regarding the benchmark, it is a bit outdated and the apache+mod_wsgi analysys/configuration is totally wrong (i am one of the uWSGI authors, but mod_wsgi is great, and seeing it blasted wrongly in that url is a bit disappointing)

By the way, do not choose your application server looking only at performance.really.
Adverse Credit Remortgage Review
Adverse Credit Remortgage Review
One is because applying for a remortgage gives you a chance to improve your credit scores Most of the terms and conditions of this kind of remortgage
Another OS bites the dust: Samsung to fold Bada into its Linux distro
Apply Advanced Conditional Formatting & Data Filtering to PivotTables
The long awaited version of Aspose.Cells for .NET 7.1.0 has been released. It includes a number of enhancements for Pivot Tables. The formula calculation engine is further improved now. In older versions, you can utilize advanced conditional formatting (Excel 2007/2010) and filtering data features on general data but not on pivot data. Now, you can apply conditional formatting and filter data on Pivot Tables. Moreover, we have also supported some missing options (get/set) regarding Pivot Tables. In this release, we’ve improved formula calculation engine that you can calculate huge list of formulas (in the template file) in quick time. Also, you can take advantage of calculating formulas on your desired cells only. The desktop based Grid control provided by Aspose.Cells for .NET, now, supports to read Excel files with grouping data options on.
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks
Stop Censorship app by CloudFlare (It is excellent)
The title is a bit misleading. It ends with him saying that he thinks the Iphone is best for most people. He really just praised Android for a few features but maintained that the Iphone is a better product in his mind.
Lucien: A Key Value Store With Smarts
I guess they overlooked the complexity of writing and maintaining a new OS. Even Android uses the Linux kernel.
Beautiful, now let's establish a permanent human presence there and Mars as well.
Are you kidding?

(not a very high-level HN contributory comment, I know)
I've learned a lot about this issue from books such as Fast Food Nation and movies such as Food Inc, which tend to focus on the incredible power that food industry lobbies seem to have over congress and the FDA. In the case of Fast Food Nation, the issue isn't the expected premise - that McDonalds et al serves low-quality food and causes obesity - that is merely the result. The issue, he seems to claim, is that certain people in the government are literally paid off to allow the industry to do so, both with passive defensive methods (not implementing laws that would restrict them) and active, offensive methods (creating laws that impede initiatives that aren't in the food industry's interest.)
Here's the part of the interview that's relevant to the link title. Don Norman says:

"Actually, I would like to see web designers disappear and become designers. Web design was this specialized activity because we had these screens, we had this fixed format and we had to figure out how to display it so that it was understandable, usable, so you could find the stuff, so you could navigate the complex architecture of the website. On top of that, you had amazingly little control over what it really looked like on the screen.

Well, that lack of control is going to expand with the modern smartphones. They come now in all sizes and shapes. They come very small, to larger and larger and larger, and when they become too large we don’t call them a phone anymore, we call it a pad. But it’s really the same device, just getting larger and larger and larger. And pretty soon they’re on the wall, they’re big TV sets, or displayed, or projected. And so the designer’s job is much more complex and very, very necessary. But it’s not web design, it’s information design, communication design."
wow really? I thought being a doctor is as stimulating as it gets... trying to find out causes for diseases, evaluating worst case scenarios, etc.

Have you thought about partnering with someone with an IT background to pursue something with mobile health, EHR, or something that's in the crossroads between the 2? There's a lot of innovation there.
How many more of these tutorials do we actually need? It doesn't actually go into any real detail on what is happening for someone new to trying to bring up a dev box, and it certainly doesn't help those of us more experienced.

What about setting up logging, email, exception emails, time zone, https - things that are actually important for those that haven't done installations much.
Confirmed. I use NoScript and I saw no warning noticed until it was turned on.
Rights were already being sold for printing, delivering, and televising speeches. It would not have been a new idea to license those rights.
If we could plant the seeds of civilization on the moon in the next 100 years, that would be a fantastic advancement on conquering mars next and then the universe.
Why should this work be protected? Protection is the default for copyrightable works. The onus is on the author here to show why this situation is different from the normal one, different enough to justify changing the rules. As for your specific questions...

1. Speech writing is considered a useful art. Creative works of authorship generally are. If you want to argue that point in general, fine... but let's put it into a general context instead of just focusing on this one speech.

2. Sony is of course not the author. But MLK is, and he never put this speech in the public domain. He certainly could have if he wanted to, but he didn't. His rights passed to his estate. His estate isn't the author either, but it has the right to sell or license. None of this is controversial or unexpected.

3. I tend to agree with you here.
Page timed out for me. Found an alternative article about it:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/17/idUS149045+17-Jan-...
Good news, but looks like the site is down currently.

In summary: Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Bing will permanently turn on IPv6 on June 6. Some ISP's also joined, but it's not yet clear what they do at that date -- it may be as little as allowing users to opt-in for IPv6 testing in restricted areas.
I've found that I will have times of really, really productive programming, usually around 5-6 hrs a day for 3-5 days. I'm not one of those guys that can claim to program 18 hrs a day for weeks on end, but I'm pretty happy with the quality and amount that I can program. However, historically, my biggest weakness is that once I finish a milestone in any particular project, I get too pleased with myself, I admire what I have built, and then take the next 2 days kind of milling around.
I recently decided to take 1 yr off to pursue my own side-projects, so this is the one thing I'm trying to change about myself.

I'm not one to advocate Performance enhancing drugs, but I've discovered that taking a 5 Hr energy around 11 am really helps me concentrate the rest of the day, especially when I'm learning new things.

Every programmer has their own style, but the one thing I disagree with the OP is programming in a complete vacuum. I agree that programming by yourself really helps in terms of getting rid of your distractions.

But the one thing I miss is sitting around and talking about problems with other programmers. I've found throughout my career that when I stuck on a particular bug or issue, as soon as I try to talk it out with another programmer, the answer comes pretty quickly. The physical act of trying to explain the situation seems to force you to take a different pathway in your brain that gives you another perspective that you might have been otherwise stuck on if you just say there thinking about it.
What to look for in an Angel Investor
Woz is a hacker at heart. He is always going to find Apple's limitations on iOS apps annoying. People read too much into his statements. He is a very straightforward guy. If he really believed that an Android phone was superior, he would say that without dissembling.

He complains about being misquoted all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens again.
I feel the same way. I still enjoy my books printed for the most part (textbooks and novels). However, I think this will go away when kids are raised on digital books. Once 1st graders are issued an ipad (or more likely lower priced e-reader) with textbooks pre-loaded on it, they will grow up and never know what it means to '"know" a book by its thickness'. Just a guess, but I think it is only a matter of time.
for those "scared of complexity" or "scared of computers altogether."
Gamasutra - Minecraft, Intellectual Property, and the Future of Copyright
Study of the Day: Humble Leaders Are Better Liked and More Effective