skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What, pray tell, does this have to do with hacker news?!
I think it's pretty obvious. Cuban is a majority owner in ShareSleuth.com, a website "aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery":
http://sharesleuth.com/about.html

Cuban also funds bailoutsleuth.com which is supposed to track the government's use of the $700 billion.

You can't expect to put yourself in such a visible position of moral status and think that others won't try their hardest to bring you down. I'm sure Cuban knows that and hopefully he keeps his slate clean.
Nope, I'm not in OS X so I couldn't try out the software. I just assumed it did what it said it did.

http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home :
"create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF"
Hiring only "essential" employees is often not a very intelligent strategy, if you have the funding to hire more aggressively and the opportunities to use the employees productivity.
Digg commentary is at times, physically painful for me to read. Like someone punched me in the gut. What stupidity and ignorance. What a cesspool.

What is it about certain internet places that make people so awful? Anonymity? Or are there people actually that bad all around me, in real life, and I simply don't notice?
How can this be a Fail? Give it for free if that what it takes then adapt it to make money.
PinchMedia is super friendly and would be more than happy to talk to you. Send them an e-mail (info@pinchmedia).

* Disclaimer: I just use their analytics package.
If I give my certificate that says "this is Brian Smith" to Amazon, and then Amazon uses it to claim to be me, then that is very misleading. It is very similar to me giving my driver's license to my underage brother so he can buy me beer.

If CloudShare used its own "this is Amazon.com's Cloudshare Service" certificate then it might be okay, except (1) they would be using it to sign content that they haven't verified the authenticity of, which is misleading (like notarizing something without any authentication), and (2) you almost always need to mix those static assets with dynamic assets or HTML forms and that all has to happen on the same domain--the domain that receives the POST requests, not the CDN's domain--in order for things to work reliably.

As for tone: the tone with which I wrote my reply is apparently not the same as the tone with which you read it.
Now that the mainstream knows that this is some type of gold rush, we'll see a lot more crap being thrown at the app store.
Inventor or Innovator - Are Both True Entrepreneurs?
This article is a nice continuation of the questions first discussed in "Are You An Entrepreneur?"

I like the clear definitions of each person's role at a venture.
I'd start here:

http://planet.lisp.org/
Apple Continues to Resist Bringing Flash to iPhone
Developing better Value Propositions using the NABC Framework
When designing for remarkable customer experiences designers are often confronted with countless innovative ideas that need to be synthesized and bundled into dedicated value propositions. The NABC (Need, Approach, Benefit, Competition) framework can help to better understand and sharpen the value proposition of your product or service.
Flash continues to not be on the iPhone and this story continues to be news. I don't get it.
Ahh... no, you can only export static images to PDF AFAIK.
I do think getting the communities to form is a challenge, and I think the challenge is even more difficult amongst non-nerd demographics.

I actually set up a slinkset site, http://www.bababase.com, a few months ago based on the very premise we're discussing, but I've had a tough time finding a way to get traction amongst a non-nerd crowd! (Moms, in this case.)
Given the small target audience, I don't think it would be worth it to convert it into a free web app. Anyone that wants to toy with it is welcomed to download the desktop app now anyway.
The filing fees can add up quickly. Intent-to-use applications are touted as quick ways to get your trademarks on file (which they are) but they end up costing more because you have to do multiple filings. Based on a survey we did, companies have - on average - four unregistered trademarks. Registered trademarks can also help against cybersquatted domain names.
CEO Interview: Costco's Jim Sinegal
"Give it for free if that what it takes then adapt it to make money." -- I laughed.

With a lot of work it might one day make some decent change, but again, it's not worth it at this point.
Have a look at these too, some better outputs.
http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2008/11/another-processing-adve...
Links between Paul Graham's essays
Today (2008/11/18) I had a whim to look at the
links between Paul Graham's essays, so I futch
an index page, massaged with awk, futch the
others, extracted the links, output a digraph,
and used neato.

The result is here:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?yc
as a sysadmin, i can only wish i had the power to kick people out of meetings...

i guess i haven't tried shrieking.
so... what do you think women who want to use a digg-esque website ARE into?

Most women I know are far more into snarky commentary/comedy than I am, and are very interested in politics, the economy, and way more into tv than I am, etc...
I do like their tone so I have written them. I just find it a bit disappointing that these ad networks expect you to sign up without knowing what the advertising rates are.
View Revision3 shows optimized for iPhone and Android handsets
Unremarkable or not, they do make a lot of money.
This sounds like a good problem to solve, create a typing program for programmers.
I guess the lesson there is that you have to clearly show how spending the money will benefit the customer. I agree, the homepage didn't do it very well. Thanks for the post. What did you think of StoxEV?
Ask HN: best way to find christmass presents online?
Any recommendations for sites that give recommendations?
I agree that MetaFilter is great. There's something about the monetary barrier to entry that keeps people from spouting nonsense that may get them banned or actively disliked.
I went through the presentation he references at http://python.net/%7Egoodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/p...:

A lot of what he says makes sense, but perhaps someone can explain why this is wrong:

def bad_append(new_item, a_list=[]):
a_list.append(new_item)
return a_list

and this is correct:

def good_append(new_item, a_list=None):
if a_list is None:
a_list = []
a_list.append(new_item)
return a_list
and most iPhone users continue to not care.
"The proliferation of drones is well underway."
Help Hack the Water Crisis
Successful niche forums/boards have a social contract that the participants enforce on each other. The fact that you on HN need x1 points to vote comments down, and x2>>x1 points to kill stories (and on Slashdot, the karma-system), ensures that new members are accepted into the contract by peers based on contribution.

In older times, boards had moderators, and admins picked out active members as mods based on their performance.

But this model is susceptible to group-think, especially when a topic falls outside the contract. It just happened here during the presidential election that apparently the body of users are sufficiently politically diverse, that intelligent, respectful debate prevailed over mindless up-voting of anything adhering to one specific mindset. It could very well have went in the other direction. It's absolutely no guarantee that you because someone make insightful tech/startup comments, that he also is going to vote down a stupid comment, even if it's in favor of his political POV.

Solving this problem; making sure that a community like HN can stay intelligent, and not be diluted as it gains popularity, I think, is a very big opportunity.
Top Candidates to Run Yahoo
No (x3)
I just wrote this for the school paper, thought I might as well submit it here. I would love to hear what HN thinks.
I've never even heard of Philo before reading this. Did anyone else know that he was responsible for inventing the modern television? (He definitely wasn't the innovator who profited from it)
FAIL (Because of your reply tone, please try to be more civilized next time, shame on your up-voters too.)

Not everyone is interested in making sure your feelings don't get hurt on the internet. The sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be.
Thanks for that feedback!

The physical buttons argument is a good one.

I don't think the battery life issue is a real one--when you're not actively calculating a new graph, the app is doing very little. I suppose we should actually benchmark using it for 3-4 hours at a time. Can't argue about legal calculators.

Though saying "friendly [physical] UI" seems like an oxymoron to me--physical graphing calculators have some of the worst graphics I've ever seen.
Good for them.

Flash is good for animation, as in vector graphic pictures with movement.

It is in no way a superior form of video, as in actual movies.
Not yet; that's what we're working on. The initial response was strong, but, like most apps, sunk quickly into the morass as the AppStore became overwhelmed with lots of silly little apps.
Expressions for default parameters are evaluated only once. So the default a_list is the same list on subsequent calls to bad_append

good_append(1) -> [1]
good_append(2) -> [2]

bad_append(1) -> [1]
bad_append(2) -> [1, 2]

Presumably, keeping an ever-growing shared list is not the desired behavior.
It's important to note that being a competent typist and being a competent programming typist are different things. On the test that Jeff linked to in his post, I scored 101 WPM. Throw in enough symbols and numbers and other non-standard stuff and I am forced to look at the keyboard occasionally which lowers that number significantly.

As someone coming back to Vim after years away, this is complicated by the need to memorize and be able to instantly recall a font of often complicated commands. I am so inefficient currently that if a task simply requires some copy/paste operations or I need to work with a very long file I will usually just fire it up in TextMate and use the dreaded mouse to speed things along.

I don't believe conventional typing courses are sufficient for gaining the sort of seamless connection talked about here because the focus is on proficiency in typing common characters / words. I much prefer the "Words & Numbers" test on that site (http://typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed_alpha_numeric.php) because it forces the practice of shifting between common characters and less common ones. There's another test I can't recall the link to that basically just makes you type never-ending series of single numbers and symbols along the top row.

Learning conventional typing is pretty easy. Becoming a highly skilled programming typist is a task that requires much more practice.
Is it unethical to have a society where only a small percentage can program computers?
Isn't this a fundamental skill just like reading/writing?
So did you want to e-mail me? I haven't received anything.
Exactly. And they all have to get done in whatever limited time you have.
That's basically what has happened. Most of the articles are interesting, but these essentially content free posts about his legal battle really aren't.
Venture Capitalist Becomes Web 2.0 Entrepreneur
It's an obscure Python quirk that default parameters are constructed during compilation time and then never re-constructed. So, to illustrate:

>>> def hello(a=[]): a.append('hello'); return a;
...
>>> hello()
['hello']
>>> hello()
['hello', 'hello']

On post, what mindslight said.
What makes programming computers a fundamental skill? What will forbid me from being a productive member of society if I don't know how to program?
> It was a bad contract, yes. But it takes two parties to continue something that painful.

True - And a skilled contractors need to be able to deal with these situations - it's part and parcel of their job.
If I were SteveJ, I'd also block it. The iPhone App Store is going to be a substantial source of revenue. Why would I let people bypass the store and get apps through Flash for free?
Try it!

The empty list in the first one is only created at the time the 'def' is executed. All subsequent calls to 'bad_append' hold the reference to this list instead of a new empty one.

The 'good' one uses a sentinel value to indicate that you want to start with an empty list but also gives you the ability to pass in an existing one if needed.
I don't think that's true at all. It depends on how much use you really can drive. With an online app, with no app install, and purely organic growth and a whole ton of community evangelism, I could see it be a really successful web app.

Aren't online gambling sites some of the biggest spenders on online ad sales? With revenue of $6+ billion per year, I think a good chunk of that must go to lead generation.
um, no, definitely not.

here are a few skills i would consider more fundamental than programming that are also lacking:

* math
* spelling
* logic

in addition, it would only be unethical if the society at hand were enforcing some sort of limitation. anyone can learn to program (or learn math/spelling/logic) if they want to. maybe its easier for some than others for various reasons, but everyone can.
Right, but remarkable and unremarkable have nothing to do with making money, but I don't really want to turn this into an argument about semantics. A similar quote that I prefer on this subject is "Be so good they can't ignore you".

I think the message is simply you're better off focusing on making a great product than making a really great ad campaign for a product.
Moms are incredibly active on the web. All you need to do is get in with the "Mommy Blogger" crowd, which is quite large and influential, and tends towards activism.

iVillage is filled with moms, as are wahm message boards, etc., etc. Your audience is there, and they want what you've got, I'm sure.
Funny you ask, I integrated AdMob into our mobile site last night... it was painless. We're also integrating it into our physical iphone app but that's still a WIP. I don't have any statistics for you, we just started with AdMob.

I really like that they offer progressive loading with their .js system so your app content loads first, then the ad will load. This is pretty important to me so that Edge users don't suffer, and a quality customer experience is prioritized above ads. I believe they track this metric as "fill rate" if I'm not mistaken.

On 'story' pages, I can actually fit 3 ads pretty nicely but I credit this more to the applications design which is heavy in text-content.

http://m.breakkup.com

I selected AdMob because their system seems to be the most robust for our needs... I also like the empowerment campaign they are doing giving away $1m to developers. I hope some of it trickles down to the bootstrappers. :)

Feel free to reach out, be happy to keep you posted about our results and experience.
First post - I didn't realise the URL wouldn't
be clickable. Sorry for the inconvenience.
> You don't want your 404 to be too helpful, it's something that should be fixed (if at all possible)

Sure you do - It's not just a bad link that could cause a 404. Could be an old bookmark, a bad link from another site, a bad cut'n'paste, a link to deleted content, or whole bunch of other things.

A useful 404 would do things things like (1) search for content based on your url and give suggesttions and (2) allow you to conduct a search... and (3) well, probably all the other things in the article.
You're absolutely correct. I do not mean to say otherwise. My experiences in this regard may not be common, but they are almost certainly not unique.
I kind of disagree with this. I've seen many startups make poor hiring mistakes that eroded culture, slowed development, and added layers of management that were unnecessary. All of the hires, of course, were made based on the theory that the employees could be productive to the organization.

I've never once seen a company with a good hiring strategy for acquiring employees before actually needing them that worked. The fact that Digg has 60 employees is absurd. What in the hell does eBay do with 13,500 employees? A 4-person startup could rebuild all essential parts of eBay in six months.

Startups have shown over and over again that you can make great use of technology with very few people. As people are added to the team, especially in engineering departments, productivity starts to slow. There is a ton of overhead in integration, teaching and building company processes, and management.

Employees are toxic.
Unethical? How? I'm not aware of any limitations in society that prevent anyone from being able to learn how to program computers?

Or are you suggesting that somehow computers should be dumbed down to the lowest possible common denominator?
I'm really confused by what you mean by unethical in the first place.

Programming is not at all a fundamental skill, and I hope that as software gets better and better people will be able to do more with their computers without knowing how to program our configure some stupid setting. There's still too many simple tasks that are out of reach without some technical knowledge.
What it means on the homepage is 32000 discussions so far, 'today;. Sorry, English isn't my first language, will improve that :) Thanks for the compliments!
I don't think these people really believe what they're saying, but it's very easy to let the Id take over when your name and reputation aren't on the line. All these young boys want to be the class clown, without the unfortunate ramifications, and Digg is the perfect outlet.

I think this is why HN tends to be more civil and worthwhile -- you have active editors, and most people use their real names as their usernames or in their bios.

ps - her crack about compressed air cars must have really hurt...
I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The only reason why I'd want flash on my iPhone is for some websites...but a lot of those rely on the assumption that the user is using a mouse. Lots of menus are difficult to navigate without mouseovers, etc.

I also don't think Flash will be the iPhone's undoing. What's the biggest use of flash nowadays? Youtube and the like, and possibly some apps like games. Some games will be nearly impossible to play, and Apple already took care of the Youtube aspect...
Privacy Redux
Comcast Boosts its Bandwidth Speed | TechJaws
Yes, I already show ads only to users that are not logged-in. Don't know the percentage of the top of my head...
We've seen it used w/ success for original content. e.g.
http://justhackit.slinkset.com/
None of those are particularly interesting or lead to better coding practices.

For example: dropping braces for block statements is a convention; it doesn't inherently make someone a better programmer. It's also not by any means 'advanced'.

Also, the else shortcut should be seen as having different syntactic meaning. Instead of emphasizing it as a convenient shortcut, it should be seen as a particular variable has a default state and belongs to the lexical scope that the if statement is contained within (even though PHP doesn't recognize block statements as new lexical scopes).

Finally, ereg_ functions should never be used. And favoring str_* over preg_* only makes sense when a non-trivial[1] regular expression is not involved. The suggestion is tantamount to saying use a function for it's intended purpose. str_* functions search using a string, preg_* search using regular expressions.

[1] By non-trivial I mean a pattern that involves more than a terminal. E.g. '~hello~' is a valid regular expression but is composed of a single terminal, 'hello' (or if you wan to see it as five terminals) but nothing else (e.g. repeating, conditions, etc.) and so '~hello~' is a case where preg_* functions are overkill.
Tool Tips: InCopy Shared Dictionary
Has been around since 1998!
Perhaps I'll just shut up and count my blessings then?
I've thought about packaging the travel info, like here: http://poorbuthappy.com/colombia/travel/print/ into a book, and sell it on Amazon, make perhaps 5$ per copy... I'm gonna try that next year. We'll see...
I hate those sites, they all try to sell you loads of stuff about how to make money, it's like 1 huge pyramid scheme or something. Not to say there's nothing to it, but still. "Buy my guide on how to make money on the internet", thanks but no thanks.
Hoooooollllllly Crap! That was breathtaking to read. I can hardly type.
Paul, man, how could anyone say it better?!?!
So I guess that the general consensus is: I'm doing ok with adsense, I could add some affiliate sales, or perhaps do my own travel products somehow?
The only reason I argue against this is that I think it would be a shame if a great product fails because of a wanting advertising strategy. I think not even Apple would be where it is now without advertising.

Sure, it would be nice to be "so great they can't ignore you", but how likely is it to be like that? Is it more effective to keep trying to create that super product, or maybe invest more to make your normal, really good product sell?
Oops, excuse me for not reading the full description :)

Still, I think you should show minimal ads to logged in users too. Maybe the adsense ad link format (plain links).

When something is free, users should expect to see some ads.
Feast on the LIFE archive at Google Image Search
Appreciate your offer, would love to have a few people to compare notes with on this. Right now working on getting our app through the door.

Like your idea - dangerous time consumer!
Or...don't write bloated code. Same result. There's a point in life where you just need to understand your weaknesses but not obsess over them, and focus on your strengths instead.
That concept only works as long as the makers of python really have found the optimum way of doing things. It sounds like it could be stiffling innovation to me. At the very least it doesn't encourage flexibility of the mind - rather you are trained to believe that there is only one right way.

Also, the approach sounds familiar: didn't Java have the same rationale? And of course Apple - to each their own, I guess (I don't like "the Apple way", but others love it - probably would be the same with Python).

That article is really putting me off learning python, to be honest.
You can work around that with multiple hostnames, but lower latency is still better.
Researcher Claims “Attention Spirals” Hold Key To Predicting Success Of YouTube Videos
I think he meant Yang is not quite as genius as Jobs.
I was mentioning it because there may be people interested in a web version of the poker calculators. As far as I know the known names (pokerstove etc) are all Windows-based and only Ed Miller has an online equity calculator in his page.

There may be more poker players like me who doesn't use Windows at home and I could see the value of having a re-sized small web window while playing with just three boxes (pot, my stack, opponent's stack) plus a small pre-selection of opponents ranges (ex: top 10%, top 40%, any two) so it can be used in real time.
They better ban all birds, too, then (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149).
The Python default parameter rules cause a_list=[] to share the same mutable list between all invocations of the function. That's probably not what you want. If you set it to the immutable None then it doesn't matter that the instance is shared.
The Art & Science of CSS is Free to Download
Interesting point. I did some searching and pulled up a few references from mailing list archives, in case anybody else is equally curious:

* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/47841

* http://groups.google.de/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/5454cb...