skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a side project, if it is done then it should be done for fun and not relied on for any sort of income.

Here's why I don't like this idea:

1) Niches are failing. TechCrunch just covered yesterday about a social network for shoe lovers that folded after two years. Yes gadgets can encompass a lot of niches but you're really only appealing to the niche of hardcore gadget freaks, the ones who drool over every new phone (well, they did before the iphone.)

2) Your monetization would be horribly difficult. Reviews would be your biggest draw, but you're drawing the hardest of hardcore buyers, they are smart and able to find the best deal. If your advertiser isn't the cheapest then they're not going to see revenue. Sure the SEO might be such that you get less hardcore fans, but the community is going to be extreme gadget users and thus very likely unfriendly to newbies. The classified idea may get some use but you can't charge for listing, the user might as well use Ebay which promises a bigger audience to see the ad. And handling the transaction such that you can take a fee is a hairy business.
DOWNLOAD Don't Stop The MusicMP3, DOWNLOAD :Umbrella: Pepsi Smash Exclusive MP3,DOWNLOAD Shut Up And Drive: Pepsi Smash Exclusive MP3,DOWNLOAD Pepsi Smash Exclusive Interview MP3,DOWNLOAD Hate That I Love You MP3,DOWNLOAD Shut Up And Drive MP3,DOWNLOAD Umbrella MP3,DOWNLOAD Rihanna - We Ride MP3
Statistical Modeling: The two cultures. (Not frequentist vs. bayesian)
thanks! i was worried that it was lost for a second.
Reality does not appear to be deterministic in any sense of the term.
This is not my area of expertise so this may be 100% wrong, but my understanding is that the separate domain is pointed at a completely different DNS entry where as a subdomain still uses the same DNS and is routed per the subdomain.
Terry Childs is still in jail and it seems SF's DA would like to forget about him
Do you need to create some new indexes?

This sounds more like a problem with your database design and queries, than a problem inherent to mysql.

PostgreSQL does provide some tools (EXPLAIN for instance) that can give you visibility into problems with your data design.
Age of the Earth - Graphical Representation of Geologic Time
Maybe they are looking to hire!
You'll find that if you dig down into the situation, credit for consumers is credit for investment purchases. That's one of the root problems here; your default doesn't just hurt you, it hurts everyone invested in you. And that cascaded, big time.
BTW, whether you should care that your startup is noticed by non techies is totally dependent upon your industry and model. Especially if you are B2B... this may not be important.
Yes, it's clear that Rails blazed the path for Merb. At the same time, the Rails people really shouldn't be surprised (or feel badly) that their "opinionated software" has created a market for flexible, agnostic software.

Both projects are great, and will probably appeal to different sets of developers. In a lot of ways I think of it like the dynamic between Python and Ruby. Both are excellent languages with very similar capabilities, yet they appeal to different developers. It's like there's an element of personality in there, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Kallow: simplified shopping for electronics
US private-sector job losses worse than expected
Moving to a start-up? Fasten your seatbelt
SPAM.
One thing to realize: If you Inc/LLC in 2008, you'll have to pay any taxes/fees due for 2008. Forming a DE LLC right now would cost you more money than waiting until Jan 1 and paying the $150 because you'd have to pay the $250 franchise fee for 2008. LLC on Jan 1 and you don't have to pay it for 2008. You're up $100 even with the $150 fee.
Ask YC: Your experience w/ cross domain AJAX and SaaS?
Has anyone here deployed a product that relies on cross domain AJAX. What work around did you go with to avoid inconveniencing your customers? What was the reaction?

I'm planning to release a TinyMCE plugin that uses a webservice I host. My plan is to sell access to this webservice.
considering finding a niche group that you can really saturate with marketing in multiple forms (flyers, bookmarks, display ads, PR in industry magazines, etc.), and who then might talk about your product.

but if its a tech product targeted at an audience you can't reach online, be prepared for very low conversion rates from offline forms of marketing.
thanks for the positive feedback. They will be launching a new section of their site. Its an article section. They said no commitment and I would be allowed to link back along with a pic and be called a "Staff Writer". What ever that means.. It would be a bit of cash injection.. Maybe I will see what they have in mind. It seems to be a really slow moving/loading site... Doesn't look like it is very well maintained. I guess the exposure would be a really good thing...

But do these things actually work well. Do the visitors that go to the site for an article like mine actually go visit my blog?
New Coalition Drawing Up Nationwide Broadband Access Strategy
Sorry, I'm new to this whole thing... what is the $250 franchise fee? Is it federal or state and is it required for ALL LLCs or just DE? I'm looking to incorp. in Michigan with a buddy of mine, is this going to to screw us come tax time? We probably wouldn't make ANY money until next year at the earliest, in fact we'd have losses (web hosting).
More interesting to me is the question of what actions can be taken to get on the winning side of this.

If its really so inevitable, what sort of positions can I put on to profit the most from this?
Quick note: Apparently you need to click the link and use the code "MYGIFT" to get the $150 discount.
Ask YC: Feedback on my community website
this is interesting - couldn't a bayesian get many of the same guarantees by computing the posterior distribution and choosing a range that contains X% of the mass?
I control one endpoint (the 'server' / computer being connected to), and to some reasonable extent, can dictate how the other end is setup. To the extent that it matters to me, both approaches solve the same problem, that is, I need to allow somebody to use a computer here in BFE while they are in a different part of country as if they were sitting right here. I want whatever works best, preferably free or cheap; I don't care if it's web-based, VNC-based, or RDP-based. I'm comfortable working with any of those - _I'm only wondering if there is a shiny bit of software, of any of those types, hiding somewhere out there that I haven't heard of, which other people have found to be particularly nice to use_.

At any rate...this post isn't really getting me anywhere. :P Outside of copilot, nobody has even said a specific piece of software to use (except one for mac, which isn't terribly useful).
I've been building this in my spare time for the last year or so. It's time to go into open beta, but I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks of it. (I know, you're probably not my target demographic, but, hey)
This is the hard part.

I would look at advertising agencies, they do this stuff for a living. Look at how they sell detergent and cars. It's very lowest-common-denominator stuff, but that's what works. Unfortunately the stuff they do tends to be quite expensive, but learn from what they do.

If you don't have money I would suggest reading up on marketing psychology, there are a lot of tricks, and try out different ad platforms on the Internet monitoring your return on investment through funnels, click-throughs, etc. to find out what works.

Create different ads, viral videos, games, silly websites, and whatever else you can think of. Don't be afraid of "punch the monkey" and "you have just won" ads - they work or they wouldn't be there. You don't have to tell us here on HN you made them ;-)

And don't sell on technological merit, nobody besides techies care about that. Sell on emotion.
I will cautiously agree with that - cautiously because I don't want to become a part of it exacerbating the problem.

To everybody wondering why there is such an echo chamber in the rails and (increasingly) merb communities: consultants. They all try to build a profile online to get better paid gigs (and to boost their egos).

Resorting to the rules of (self-)promotion, these consultants write link-bait, (fake) flames/controversies, etc. They give noobs and hype sheep the warm feeling of "being part of something big" and enterprisey folks can point to the "wide adoption" and "active communities" around them. That does not make them great or better than other solutions technologically. (As an aside, they're still very good web dev tools, no doubt, but not the second coming of <deity of choice's son>).
Well, it seems that it isn't a secret anymore.
Last time they had this deal (a few weeks ago), there was an option to defer filing until Jan 1st, to save on 2008 fees and administration tasks. I assume you can opt to do so again.
Guys, this doesn't have to be a binary decision.

There are degrees of failure and success.
I don't have time to do an in depth review but here are my first two notes:

1) On the front page, you have text in a field I need to put text in. Instead of having me delete it, use some javascript to clear the field 'onfocus' you can find the code easily online, it'll make for a better user experience.

2) I entered my zip and up comes a map of my city. Now I'm lost. The map is blank. I'm assuming there will be markers when you have communities to show. But there's no obvious guidance as to what's going on now.
Rebasing avoids cluttering up your history, and can help make your patches more useful. Instead of showing a fork in your history, followed by independent development, and then a merge, you instead show your branch applied to the tip of the other branch/repository, as if that had been your intention all along. This can result in more meaningful changesets as well: if a change upstream forces some changes to my new feature's code, it will be more useful for reviewing my feature if I rebase my changes so that they incorporate that slight fix. This is superb when you're keeping a fork of an open-source project, and have a collection of patches you want to keep applying cleanly to the remote software, for example.

In my opinion, lightweight branching is mostly just a performance hack--and since Mercurial already did cloning with hard links on a local file system, you've been able to get the same performance benefits since before Mercurial 1.0. I do think it's worth understanding, though, that there's also a UI benefit to making building throwaway branches really easy, and I think it's silly to discount that purely because it's a user experience benefit. That's why I do think that having the bookmarks extension in Mercurial 1.1 will be a very good thing.
I'm still looking for a simple editor that can auto-indent code/text. (Not even context sensitive, but at least keep the indent of the previous line). I've only found buggy or overkill implementations.
Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
The trick is to give people something they want to tell their friends about. The more viral, the better. It might start with a few geeks but once it's got out to non-geeks it'll spread.

Obviously viral will only help you if you have something worth sticking around for. Otherwise you'll just drum up a huge bandwidth spike and nothing to show for it.

Facebook app was the perfect example of getting it right. While it was still novel (rather than annoying) the ability to invite people to use apps (and Facebook) was interesting enough to a lot of people they did share it.
A Bayesian can compute that confidence bound easily enough - it's plain old probability, after all. The thing is - the very moment you try to get from that confidence bound, to saying anything about the real value of the coin in a particular case with a particular result - you are performing a Bayesian update whether you like it or not. A Bayesian is aware of this. A frequentist clutches their confidence bounds and goes on trying to say something about the coin without admitting that this is a Bayesian step... or something.

As the saying goes, there are a million lies but only one reality. I know what it means to be a Bayesian; it means you acknowledge the sovereignty of probability theory as the law governing uncertainty. I'm not sure that even frequentists know what the rules are for being a "frequentist".
Kinda like Victoria's.
Look at the cell phone industry in Canada, there are 3 companies all of which no one in the western world has heard of. There's the good (rogers) the not so good (telus) and the outright bad (bell).

Bell was state sponsored and still has all the protections of it. Last year they sent out 'free' wireless router-modems, however if you didn't subscribe to the service that gave you it for free then you'd get a bill essentially saying 'pay us $200 or send back the modem, or we'll take you to court'. The multiple late payment notices requiring payment 3 days before the bill could even be paid was the last straw, our phone and internet is being switched and bell can go stick their modem up their corrupt and incompetent asses.

Rogers seems to be the only competent cellular company in Canada. This is probably because it was independently owned from the beginning and the original founder apparently kept a lot of influence until late into the game (he died like this week). They didn't hike their SMS charges (bell and telus doubled it by charging for incoming messages), however I can't speak for the quality of their other services as I have a Rogers cellphone, which is because when I came here with a T-Mobile UK phone it switched to Rogers and they seemed competent enough... I was really vindicated in my decision when the competitors hiked their prices, however mocking my wife for it wasn't a wise choice.
I would say there is a difference between people and companies. You saying twice as big is different from Hummer saying it. They should know the dimensions of their vehicles.

Secondly I think that making a claim that was reasonably rounded up or is conservative is much more reasonable than making a bold claim and then under delivering. Saying "My patented snake oil cures cancer" and then claiming anyone who believes you is an idiot, is a pretty flippant argument. If the iPhone 3G had a 1.89x bandwidth capacity for example then the 2x claim might be reasonable.
In git, a use case for rebase that I'm intimately familiar with is interoperability with SVN. You can maintain a branch that's a mirror of an SVN repository, but if you do any merging and then try to check the results into SVN the result is a train wreck. In the somewhat acid words of the git-svn manpage:

Running git-merge or git-pull is NOT recommended on a branch you plan to dcommit from. Subversion does not represent merges in any reasonable or useful fashion; so users using Subversion cannot see any merges you've made. Furthermore, if you merge or pull from a git branch that is a mirror of an SVN branch, dcommit may commit to the wrong branch.

The proper technique is to make a branch based on your SVN repo, make a bunch of changes on the branch (using svn rebase to keep your development branch in sync with changes on the SVN master branch, and -- god help us -- diff-and-patch if you have to merge in changes from some other git branch; this is your penance for working on an SVN-hosted project), then commit the whole thing back to SVN once you have it in shape. It sucks compared to true-blue git but is still nicer than SVN, because (e.g.) you get things like...

... the other use case for rebase, git-rebase --interactive, a.k.a. "take the last N commits and let me reorder, combine, and edit them however I want." I love this feature. See:

http://blog.madism.org/index.php/2007/09/09/138-git-awsome-n...

For more useful ravings about git's features:

http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git
That's true; it's like walking a marathon instead of running so you guarantee that you'll make it to the finish line without passing out, however being unconventional would be running the entire thing facing backwards.
This is one of the things that amazes me, that it's not actually illegal for advertising to issue falsities in the US. I'm pretty sure that's not true back home in the UK, or at least there is an industry watchdog that can punish people who do.
Profit always comes from risk.

If I can borrow a house and live in it and get bailed out in the ensuing default storm, I win.

If I build my house in an area prone to flooding and can get bailed out, I win.

If I can originate a gazillion loans at a fee and without repercussions for defaults, I win.

If I can run a company into the ground while getting nice perks and a salary without any repercussions, I win.

If I can get elected to high office through lies or distortions or conduct my term in an incompetent or questionable or criminal fashion and leave the mess for the next office holder, I win.

Welcome to capitalism, now increasingly featuring socialized risk.

And with the recent discovery of Too Big To Fail, this form of capitalism just gets better.
guerilla marketing is a pretty interesting book..in summary it says try a whole bunch of things for many months and track what works
Alternatively, in many states the forms are simpler and cost less (I'm assuming this free deal has a catch), and don't require you to give your info to another company.

For example, this is the Indiana form to do it online:
http://www.in.gov/ai/appfiles/sos-registration/landing.html . Cost? For profit organizations: $85.00

Granted, this wont set you up with bylaws, formal/complete articles of incorporation/organization, etc. But if you are small, those don't matter, you can do them later, and if you arent small/simple structure you wouldn't use mycorporation anyways.

According to most Attorneys I know who deal with investment/securities stuff, unless you are in a handful of states, the idea that you need delaware org is sort of a leftover thing from the past. As usual, though, you should check with an attorney or accountant who knows your state.
It's a shame Dopplr isn't in that list instead of Trippit. I prefer them in almost every way to Trippit, and the chaps who work on it are jolly nice.

Trippit have been excellent at Business development though, and I wonder how much better Dopplr might have done if they were based in The Valley.
I will, actually. That's a good idea, thanks!

EDIT: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/_feathers_ick, http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/controls_for_layo..., http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/work_better_with_..., http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/make_songbird_a_b...
Apple IPhone 3G Black (8GB) Unlocked
Apple iPhone is here. In fact, it is back with a bang. This time, it is power packed with 3G connectivity and a lot of other invincible features that would be a sure excitement for users. Apple fans would simply love this invention.
Perhaps the Mozilla backing? When this was introduced, I remember Digg falling over itself and calling this a revolutionary product. This was after Firefox 2 came out and could do no wrong.
Permission Marketing
http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/
But this isn't necessarily a bad thing: all costs of incorporating can be classified as tax-deductible business expenses. Also, when you start a corp or LLC, you can technically choose when to start your business cycle for the tax purposes: that is, your fiscal tax year can be whatever you want, it doesn't have to coincide with standard calendar dates.
Good catch, I formed an LLC way too soon and got stuck paying the $800 franchise tax in CA before I was even making any revenue.
I don't think the lenders were being terribly irrational. Credit-card issuers make their profits from interest and late fees. If a customer racks up a large balance on a card, makes only the minimum payment for years and years, and then defaults, the credit-card issuer will walk away with a net profit, even if it has to write off the principal of the original loan. And usually customers in this situation can be squeezed for quite a while before they default.

One simple way to ameliorate the problem in the future would be to require every credit-card statement to include a warning: "If you do not borrow any more on this card and make only the minimum payment every month, it will take you ____ months to repay your debt completely." Such a requirement was considered when Congress amended the bankruptcy code a few years back, but the bank-industry lobbyists kept it out of the final bill. That should tell you how much the banks wanted their customers to be fiscally responsible.
Aside from the content of the article I actually really enjoyed the honest reporting in this article. It was really nice to read some techpress that wasn't wrapped in a layer of the usual BS and just talked candidly about what happened at the conference.
A less critical commentary has been posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381145

I particularly like this line, "If we could harness 0.1 per cent of the energy in the ocean, we could support the energy needs of 15 billion people."
Very nice, they actually bold and 'recommend' it (for tax reasons)
Please remember that the only thing that is "free" is the fee that you would pay this company to do your paperwork. You will have to pay business organization fees to the state of formation no matter what you do (check your state). As noted by others, most states also charge yearly franchise taxes, which is in addition to any federal taxes you are liable for if you see revenue.
This may be because I'm not logged in, but you don't show me any buttons to create a new community. Especially when there are zero communities in my area, such a link would be beneficial.
The real problem with the iPhone commercials is not that they say the phone is 2x as fast as the first generation model, but that the demonstration they give is at least 5x faster than reality. I guess the 2x claim is an easier thing to base a court case around, though.
Yes but for someone like me (Read: not a lawyer, can't afford one) a service like this can save me a ton of money. I understand there are risks when not working with a lawyer, and I haven't actually submitted yet because my partner and I are discussing this, but in general I think it's helpful if you know you want an LLC/S-Corp and don't need anything complex. You'd have to pay the state fees no matter what, so it's like doing it yourself, only you get some experts to help you out -- free.
Are these conferences still happening? I can't seem to reach any more recent than 2006.
Universe explained by quantum randomness
It's a state fee and it varies by state. It can go by different names in different states. (In MA an LLC pays an "annual report filing fee" of $500 a year.) It can be different for LLCs and corporations. (In MA corporations pay only a $100 filing fee. Apparently somebody in Massachusetts does not like LLCs.)

Ask a Michigan accountant.
Bribery is not a huge obstacle to a determined entrepreneur. You just pay it like any other tax.

What makes it different (and much more damaging) is its unpredictability.
Wait, are there wood shelves in there!?
And at least it's not this: http://www.sysadminday.com/horrors.html
How to Foil "Phishing" Scams
"Any company with less than a year of cash in the bank is in the intensive care unit"
Good point. It's gotta be easy. Is it acceptable just explain that they need to create an account first, or would it be valuable to you if I allow creating an account and community on one form?