skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I get reviewed on TC/Gigaom/etc ?
We recently started a new service (freeringer.biz). We flooded our press-release through a number of PR agencies, but it has zero effect (as it was expected). So, I'm desperately trying to contact bloggers and other startup press while the product is still hot, but all my attempts are futile. Any suggestion on how to get big guys' attention ? Thanks.
Disgusting as usual. Yet another reputed scholar going out of his field and posing a controversial set of ideas with mostly anecdotal justification.

In particular, IQ is a very old and limited measure of cognitive ability with many controversies about culture bias. For example it doesn't reflect long term goal focus, a more important ability for success.
Update: my driver was supported, upgraded, all was quite smooth. Bonus: couchdb package in 8.10.
Am I the only one who still reads /. ?
State-by-State Polls Compared to Economic Indicators
Social Networking is nothing new, and is still inherently useless. It's somewhat good at keeping in contact with people, but largely there is no contact between people using it. People stay 'in contact' by reading other peoples facebook status updates, not actually talking to them.

I met my wife through the internet, but she was a friend of a friend. Ask most couples how they met and a lot will say they were introduced by a friend. How do I say it? Well I was introduced by a friend!

Social Networking allows people to spend less time talking to people and still feel somewhat connected. There's no use in it except staving off the loss of a friend. I cut all my friends when I left high school, I moved country and I live in Canada. I don't miss a single friend from back in England, 99% of them were people who I'd have on a facebook account and completely avoid talking to.

The way to make social networking sites profitable, is to make people use them frequently enough without draining resources. Google makes a lot of money, because the data use by a single user is tiny. The data use by a Facebook user is huge, my wife probably uses 10 megs of bandwidth every time she checks the site. Yet everytime she hits google, she probably uses 10k of bandwidth from a google server to get where she wants to go.
This is certainly interesting. In the grand problem of making sense of bounce messages, there seems to be three sub-problems:

1) Determining if the message is in fact a bounce. VERP doesn't seem to solve this.

2) Correctly linking a bounce message to the original message. VERP seems to solve that via encoding the message ID into the return path. I could implement VERP with "plus addressing". Thanks!

3) Identifying the error that the bounce message represents. Unfortunately, the presence of HCMSSCs in the hash format does not seem common. Even Gmail's bounce messages do not provide them.
You assume correctly. My day job involves a lot of Windows programming and a healthy dose of procmon use :-)
Hanyu pinyin system turns 50
Hanyu Pinyin to be standard system in 2009
I looked at that site, and saw mainly mention of the role derivatives played. Honest question: would it have been possible for the derivatives to securitize bad loans if Freddie and Fannie weren't guaranteeing them? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the derivative crisis is an effect of the bad loans guaranteed by Freddie and Fannie, not the cause.

Some interesting video of earlier attempts to put the breaks on the problem that were unsuccessful in congressional hearings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68D9XrqyrWo&feature=relat...
NOTHING? Tell that to all the people with skills, assets, time, connections and tenacity but a poor idea.

To say idea's are worth nothing is asinine.
Seems like an internship, only full-time.

On another note, Twitter makes financial models??
I agree with the reasoning. However, more from a hacker's point of view, wouldn't you rather hide the implementation details of your email system you use behind something that you know will stand the test of time?

For example, if gmail were to no longer be the preferred email address system of techies (because they start charging, they are no longer reliable, or as seen more recently, you get totally locked out with no way of getting real support, etc), you would have to struggle with letting the word out about your new email address, or something.

With your own email address, you would have the flexibility to switch out to a different mail provider with your domain's MX records. You also can print business cards without worrying about reprints and the like. :)

Anyway, I don't necessarily think bigger customers will think you're bigger just because you own a @stormpulse.com email address.
Facebook's social graph only describes my life if I use it as my primary medium of communication. Network effect aside, the value it holds for me in my day-to-day life drops off exponentially the less I use it. Either online interaction will supplant interaction in the real world, or online approximations of our lives will continue to be lossy and somewhat trivial.
Ask HN: Suggestions for Mac Laptop
I'm interested in purchasing a Mac laptop, but have very little knowledge about them. My prior experience is limited to a few brief tristes in various Apple stores.

I don't need anything fancy as far as graphics or gaming. I'd mainly use it for Rails and web development.

What do you guys recommend?
It's pretty amazing how utterly terrible Google's customer service can be.
To play Devil's advocate here, isn't your personal thesis that "long term goal focus" is important for success also based on anecdotal evidence? Or do you have a study that you would like to reference? I don't know too much about education or psychology or any related field, and I'd be very interested in looking at any material that you might have.
Language Specialization
As the TechCrunch news tip page says, they'll feature you only if you are news worthy and if you break the news thru them. Its the same with Mashable.

But I suggest you get your first batch of users with just word-of-mouth marketing. These users would stay with you if they like the service. Those visitors who come by blog and advertising traffic give you no gurantee that theyll stay with you. Most will just be one-time visitors.

By the way, is Talkster your site? Coz when I clicked the link 30 countries I was led to Talkster. Incase this is your competitors's site, don't link to them. Just create your own page. You might lose users this way. Coz when users click the 30 countries link and then click the home link(they'll be on tlkster and signup for talkster).

I tried signing up my country isn't listed. Talkster also supports using Google Talk if I'm gonna call from a non-supported country. Thats what I noticed from their register form. Do you have any plans to support this feature?

Your service sounds cool. You don't need TechCrunch/GigaOm/Mashable/etc. All you need is a handful of friends to tell them about this. Free calls to 30 countries(!). Who wouldn't save phone bills?

Nice service! Good luck! :)
Well, I'm 18 and I'm interested in tech startups... this seems like it could be a great way to get my foot in the door and get to a place where I can meet people I could found my own company with. I also feel like I have every quality listed there... so I'm updating my resume tonight.
3 free tools to make IE bug fixing easy- IE Tester, IE NetRenderer and IE Tab
the reason is probably related to adsense, they probably think you spammed-clicked ads on your site.
Few miscellaneous observations:

- Seeing the ".biz" domain immediately made me suspicious of the site. Right or wrong, ".com" still rules. I'd strongly recommend finding a better domain.

- Why does the registration ask for DOB, gender, profession, marital status, and children? Seems like a scam at first.

- I signed up with bogus info and made a call. The app asked me to grant it use of my microphone and camera. I declined, though my phone did ring and tell me to call back a #. I stopped there.

Overall, its just... eh. Doesn't seem legit. It may very well be, but the overall poor design really makes it seem shady. My 2c: Hire a designer to improve the interface and go from there. If it really does let you make free calls to all those places, you should have no problem getting your publicity.
We have now more technology and more people than in the 19th century and people work less and have higher salary. Why would it be different in the future ?
Ask YC: Add a 'non-hacker news' tab?
Even PG could be accused of violating the cardinal rule of posting only 'hacker news.'

I really don't feel like going to another site like http://newmogul.com or http://nonhackernews.com to see non-hacker news. The discussion by the users here is what makes that news valuable.

For sure, feature suggestions might have another place, but perhaps this kills two birds with one stone. 1) Keeps the current HN front page focused on hacker news to the pleasure of all in the community and 2) provides an outlet/resource for those of us too busy to comb RSS feeds, et. al & looking for intelligent discussion on political, economics and all other varieties of non-hacker news.
The answer depends on your budget :) Personally, I would go for the 2.4Ghz MBP and buy my own extra memory for it. Saying that though the cheaper 2.4Ghz MB also looks like a good machine. Question is if you really need a laptop. I really wanted one, but ended up getting an iMac instead. Looking back I'm very happy I got a desktop rather then a laptop.
>why would you lend you stock so somebody else can make money out of it?

You think it's going up, so you keep it. They think it's going down, so they borrow it from you and sell it.

They'll return it eventually, so you don't care - you don't need it right now.
It's always like that - someone sells, someone buys. It's always exactly 50/50.
the real evan williams: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=evhead
Developers are often seen with MacBook Pros. For example, RailsConf: http://flickr.com/photos/twylo/173895378/

With the new MacBook/Pros, it's basically whether you want a bigger screen or not, and if you want more GHz of processing power. There are 2.0 and 2.4GHz MacBooks available, $1300 and $1600, respectively, and MacBook Pros start at 2.4 up, starting at $2000.

To put things in perspective, here is what you're getting for $400 more in the MacBook Pro 2.4GHz than the MacBook 2.4GHz:

- bigger screen
- extra NVidia <strike>8600M</strike> 9600M GT graphics card
- FireWire port and ExpressCard port
- and of course, 2" more of real estate.

Or, you might be okay with the 2.0GHz MacBook, if all you are doing is Rails work, in which case you would save another $300.

So the question basically is, 1) do you want 2.0 or 2.4GHz (suggest 2.4), and 2) do you want the bigger screen, and if so, if that is worth $400 to you (along with the other stuff.)
It's for that reason I use a non-gmail account for my adsense account.

Consumerist has a few articles about this, but they don't offer a solution:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/complaints/gmail-disables-us...
Maybe Google should outsource their customer support. The Vatican has a billion customers and answers everyone who calls them up without the use of any machines (even the guy who calls in every day claiming to be _Saint_ John the Baptist): http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-phonenun...
Before and after benchmarks of "unibody" MacBook 2GHz/4GB upgraded to an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD: http://tinyurl.com/5g2afd
Unrelated, but I saw from your previous submissions that you built mibbit, which I use frequently and think is great. Hope all turns out well with your Google problems...
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Architect, loves StackOverflow
Thanks for the tips. Why are you happy about the desktop?
This happened to me once. I guess it was because of "'Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected'".

I was using a different account for my adwords and used to login on multiple accounts from the same box or simultaneously use gchat with one account, adwords editor with other and open mail in yet another one.

Result : My account was blocked for a day and I felt cut out of the world. This is how I felt - http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-does-google-k...

I went through the same frustration, just had to wait for 24 hours.

You can try this if you haven't already - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46346... Pick Not listed then I think 1. unusual behavior and 2. certificate issues could be a cause.
Internet collaboration still in infancy: Wikipedia founder
I hope this works out for you. Please let us know what happens, this is one of my fears about being so reliant on Google.
"He says he was especially turned off when he learned she had left her sick baby at home with her husband to come to the office (Ms. Matsumoto says work emergencies sometimes must come first.)

'That's definitely not the life I want,' Mr. Nishikido says. 'No way.'"

I'm proud of him, and I hope he's the future.

Work to live, don't live to work.
Wow, that sucks :(

I'm going right now to back up all my google stuff!

Oh wait a minute... there's no backup button.
Dr. Banfield at Harvard University wrote a book in the 70's based on his study of this question ("The Unheavenly City"). His main finding is that long term success is tied to "long term goal focus".
I appreciate your opinion, thank you.

The service is ad-supported, so we need to know about user as much as possible to target ads. The ads will be interactive flash applications shown while user is on call.

The problem with .com domain is known: there no more unregistered domains left and all decent names are taken by moro^H^H^H^Hclever guys, which they sell starting from $5000. We developed service on a very tight budged, so we could not afford such expense on domain name.

Adobe Flash player always asks user to permit access to microphone, there's no way to overcome this "issue".

By poor design do you mean design of the website or the app itself or both ? :-)

Thanks again.
You've got like 3 choices, it's not that complicated.
hfwang@google.com

Send me an email with whatever your username is (but not your password ;) I'm not a phisher). I can try to poke someone and see if I can learn anything, but no guarantees.

PS: Also use http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?ara=1 if you haven't already. I've heard that sometimes it helps, so it can't hurt.
Programmers' Dvorak Keyboard
Easy: buy whatever the cheapest laptop Apple sells, at any point in time. The 2ghz white Macbook is standard issue at our company; we use 'em like a chef uses a Global chef knife: software development, C code compilation, running Windows tools under VMWare, and running custom VM's for target software during analysis.

There's no feature of the Macbook Pro anyone on my team ever misses. The larger screen is a liability when traveling; at the office, you want a monitor anyways. You're almost never going to be CPU bound, and even if you were, the difference in processor performance is negligible.

Just get the cheapest Macbook and spend the rest of your money on more important things.
Yes, but what about back links?

I have a site that's "You have done blah. Want to return to previous blah?" Now where do I put that previous arrow?

(Its made more annoying because I have lots of parallel "You are viewing an old version. Check out the newest version >>", so we want to stick an arrow in for visual similarity... but its confusing.)
I think twitter isn't looking for an admin assistant but a really smart would-be entrepreneur with most of the capabilities that the founders posses but at a lower level. Hence ready to do some leg work or dont-know-value-add-yet work which the founders aren't sure of spending their time. This is a great opportunity to tune ones self, better than joining twitter as a developer, marketer or anything else.

The most you get out of any job depends on whom you work with and how much you extend your profile.
1. What better than direct interactions with the founders. I can imagine one stopping to read all these pep material around startups as you a have a real people telling you their tales first hand on and off.
2. This can very well be what Marissa Meyer did for the Google founders to save their time.

Unfortunately I am in India!
Right. I read through their news-tip hints, but I still cannot get what it means to "breaking the news through them" ? I send them a couple of tips, a week before the launch, noone responded back. How do you make them responding to your emails at all ? I believe my emails were deleted before reaching the destination :-)

FreeRinger is a joint service made by us (GTalk2VoIP, Inc) and Talkster. We are developing the gateway and the flash app parts while Talkster runs their extensive voip network. That's why we refer to them on our site. The app currently allows to make calls to SIP phones as well, calling to Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo is coming soon. :-)

Thanks for reviewing.
Pretty much.

Use the $$ you save to buy a big monitor, more ram (coastmemory.com is my fav for the last decade, don't buy from apple), or a better chair.
Wouldn't now be a good time to consider ways to lessen your dependence on Google?
"I let the CFO choose the profit-sharing plan and blindly trusted her choice, until 6 months later my accountant showed me it was giving almost all net profits back to the employees, and had doubled most people's salaries."

How could a business owner be ignorant of policies for a full 6 months? Wasn't his signature required to implement the plan in the first place?
Gmail has IMAP. Google Docs has an export feature. Google Reader lets me export my subscriptions.

It'd be nice if they had a one click export that'd send you a tar with all your data ever, in every reasonable format, but that's not as easy as it sounds ;)
Many people object to nanotechnology when they think that we can't self-assemble anything of significant size in any reasonable time.

I think that rather than it being "3D printing" vs. "molecular self-assembly", it will be a matter of joining the strengths of the two approaches together, with 3D printing helping to provide large-scale coherence and guidance (probably by embedding some sort of guide into the object for the nano-assemblers), and the nano-assemblies focusing on the small, detailed work like embedded circuitry or whatnot.

As cool as self-assembly may be, this hybrid approach will be much more practical, much sooner.
To be picky, whether or not you want/need the bigger screen with you all the time. I have only a MacBook and I use it with a 20" lcd at home, which is where I do the majority of my work. (I also have more than one desktop, so if the laptop is going to be a sole machine, yet another thing to take into consideration.)

I couldn't justify the additional cost, size/weight and fragility of a MBP over a regular MB, having owned one previously. My productivity doesn't suffer with Spaces and Expose on the 13" widescreen (although this is personal preference), and the external display is a cherry on top of the cake.

Of course, you could also do the same thing with a MBP, but assuming that budget may be a limiting factor and all..
Anything with an Intel core duo or up. G4 powerbooks are slow, always thrashing the hard drive. Also would avoid 1st gen MB pros, from early 2006, they were blazingly hot, and you'd get just a few months apple care right now. avoid Airs, i don't think they've solved core shutdown problem:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/10/26/hopping-on-the-new-macbo...

for inbox specials, refurbs, look at apple store. Also

http://www.smalldog.com/

http://www.powermax.com/
Buy the least expensive new Macbook. I am in love with this machine. It plays World of Warcraft at 40-60 FPS, I have 4 spaces at all times, it never lags on anything I do. With all my windows on full screen, 13 inches is enough space to do everything comfortably, including gaming. The aluminum casing is truly revolutionary, there are no screws at all on the entire case, it's incredibly sturdy and light.

I am currently developing on it on a daily basis, 12 hrs at a time (Ruby on Rails too). Macs are really good for Ruby on Rails because they have Ruby built in, and it's easy to use gem to get Rails and all those other goodies.

But if you want to keep yourself up-to-date, you should probably ditch the Ruby that comes with your Mac and use Macports to get the newest Ruby, some new programs are dependent on it, ie. Capistano.
My personal experience from myself and everyone I've seen, is that there are very few true geniuses (much less than 20% of the population), and that the major differentiators are luck and effort. You're lucky to be born into a family that turns you on to reading and learning, or even to be born in a country where you have the freedom and equality of opportunity to try for your dreams. But you also make your own luck, in that those who put in the effort make things happen.

I don't know any really smart or accomplished people who would say that it was just their intellectual superiority that got them to where they are. Rather, they are usually eager to cite luck first, and in reality it was their effort that got them places.

Myself, I know I'm lucky as hell, but I do put in a lot of effort too, not just in my chosen field but also reading everything I can. My hope is the effort in combination with a little luck will pay off big :)

This guy has some interesting points, and there is a degree of truth in it, but he's way too absolute in citing a single determinant factor of success, and his idea of additional systemized testing is ridiculous. There are differences in intelligence levels, but through effort they even out in practice in most cases. And as if his tests could ever be completely without bias, or even perfected enough to accurately determine true intelligence vs acquired knowledge.
Web startups have costs that are far from zero - as your example mentions, Facebook is not profitable because they retain too many people - but it is precisely their large work force that maintains their competitive lead in the social networking sphere. If they pared down their headcount to merely "sustain the server farms and fix bugs" size the company would disappear very quickly, having been out-done by someone else.

They're not empire building, they're doing what they need to survive.

The lack of costs on the web is precisely why web startups have some of the highest costs of all. Hosting is cheap, bandwidth is almost free. The only way Facebook avoids being out-done by two college kids in a garage is because they have big money backing them, and are building out like mad.

On the flip side, traditional startups sell something that is of intrinsic worth. Most web apps have very little intrinsic worth, and is easy substituted - they have no patent-protected edge over the competition, and the COST of cloning an innovative feature is FAR less than the cost to reverse-engineer an ingenious new solar panel.
But there's the stylish one, the other stylish one, and the other other stylish one.
Freeter and neet are basically the same thing, whereas hodo hodo zoku are at least out of the house... I kind of feel they've pretty much got the whole spectrum of "don't find work enjoyable" covered. (Unless theres a way to be extra-unemployed...)
thinkingobjectively is a rather ironic website name for this article.

It is completely biased against Democrats and ignores any Republican contributions to the debacle.
CPU's a big help if you're compiling a lot. Then again most projects are small enough where it doesn't matter. But my MBP's a necessity when it comes to compiling Firefox.
For those to lazy to think about it too much...

(In general) Obama does better in states that are doing poorly economically.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Plot: A WWII-set story as seen through the eyes of Bruno (Butterfield), whose Nazi-Officer father (Thewlis) has just been made the commandant of a concentration camp outside Berlin. Bruno’s eventual friendship with Shmuel, a boy his age who is detained at the camp, will usher in a troublesome reality for Bruno, and lead to a fateful attempt to alter Shmuel’s situation.