skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, the mom blogs are probably the most active (and interesting) part of the blogosphere.

I think this whole gender is wildly underserved, but especially mothers with kids 18 and under...there's huge money to be made building services/communites around these specific needs. BlogHer, etc, is good but just the tip of the iceberg.

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1330-En-gendering-the-next-gr...

Another similar demo is teachers. Trying to "reinvent education" is great but the the meantime millions of teachers and millions more students are underserved and struggling.
What if angels are few and far between, and those that are there lack any experience about angel investing?
Zed Shaw's Son of Sam Email Server: Write Email Apps in a Modern Style
It looks like your site might be useful for planning hikes and such except that I can't figure out how to get it to work. I think it's probably about 50% that I don't know how it works and 50% that the UI needs some polish, but besides that trailbehind looks like a good idea.
I'd have to understand more about your situation to really give any sort of advice. A few questions come to mind:

1. Do you believe what the startup is doing is worthwhile? How much of what keeps you there is just a need for a job, and how much is due to you wanting this job in particular?

2. Does his code function correctly? Is it overly fragile? Has it proved to be a maintainability problem in the past? Have others complained about your boss's coding style and defensiveness? If so, what action have they taken?

3. Have others commented on how you approach your boss in these instances? Do you seem overly abrasive? Do you stand your ground when he disagrees, or do you give in as soon as he does? If the latter, do you think you would face severe consequences if you did stand your ground?

Lots of questions, but narrowing down what is important to you will help me and others give you better advice.
Wow, that's a terrible article, short on facts and long on ideology.

The vast majority of the subprime mortgages doled out were never sold to Fannie or Freddie -- they were bought up eagerly by investment banks who had lax leverage requirements. Many of these mortgages were originated by in-house origination units, so, yep, they knew what they were doing.

Blaming government regulation and lending to low-income borrowers for the financial crisis is like blaming the janitor at JPL for the Challenger exploding.

Talk about clueless...willfully clueless.
How are you making money on referrals for djangohosting.org? Most of the links are "straight-up" without any referral id..

edit: oh, I see, just on webfaction
I second pedalpete 100%.

Additionally, I would like to be able to see what the app does for me before signing up. Maybe that's a live demo, at least a good intro video, but so many new apps roll by on HN and other sites that I usually won't make an account unless I'm already really interested. I suspect that last bit is true for a lot of people.
BUSTED: Steve Jobs Caught Looking Like A Dork
RE: Main page... Whoops: fixed (my session was preventing me from seeing that..)

What issue were you having with openid? what provider? I've tried clickpass and myopenid.com, as well as a custom server built on the JanRain Library, and they all worked.
(What should happen when you try to login with oid is to get the 'buy' page.. at that point, don't subscribe, e-mail me and I'll manually approve your account.)

The video idea is good, as a 15-30 sec video could explain just about everything, but I'll probably wait until the design is finished.

I don't plan on managing this much, other than possibly adding the most requested features, and upkeep. It's 100% a side project.

I feel like I could charge more, but I don't really have reason to. The differentiator is that it is cheap, simple, and light on features.

I don't need to make money on this, I just made an app for myself, and then decided to let others use it.

Thanks much.
Here's the backstory of Auditorium's development:

http://blog.cipherprime.com/?p=6
Yeah, I'll definitely do a video, and a live demo wouldn't be too hard.

If there is any real interest (i.e. other people would use this besides me) I'd consider a live demo.
He only looks like a "dork" because pretty much any photo of someone from the late 70s and early 80s is funny. For the time, that was a pretty cool look.

If you want truly dorky, despite the era, try this one of Bill Gates throwing floppy disks with a "sexy" pose:

http://community.uaf.edu/~cde/wiki/uploads/ITSFuturama05/sex...
I'd cut the hassle. Find someone who's working on (or leading) open source projects that are complimentary to your overall technology needs and approach them directly.
Actually, in the US, the t-mobile data plan is $24.99/month and includes 400 messages. Be careful though. Apparently, the 400 messages includes both SMS as well as IM.

http://www.breakitdownblog.com/massive-confusion-over-t-mobi...

Also, right now Walmart is selling the g1 for $200 with only a one year contract. They are also throwing in a $50 gift card.
Yes, that's true. One of my best contracts was obtained because of the book. It is surprising how much caché a published book has. And for folks looking to make a living from Open Source software, I'd recommend writing a book about your project, since it gives you a huge amount of credibility within the community.

Though there are some publishers who put out crappy books that I would think would have a negative impact on your credibility. I won't name names, but two folks I know to be very smart and definitely experts in their field (I believe both are users here, though not frequent users), wrote books for Apress and Packt, respectively...and both are pretty sloppy, occasionally repetitive, and sometimes even wrong. The funny thing is that I know they're both capable of writing great documentation, because they've done it for their projects for years.

I had quite a bit of editor input throughout the process of writing my book for No Starch, and I was one of the technical readers for an O'Reilly title, so I know that a lot of effort goes into making sure books from top name publishers (and mid-tiers like No Starch) are readable and reasonably accurate.

Then again, I don't know that anyone who ever hired me because of my book actually read it. So maybe it doesn't matter if the book is sloppy. Maybe it just matters that it's available at Amazon.
I would love to have primary care for cash here in Canada. Given the current system, you can't receive a given medical treatment unless you can convince a doctor to authorize it. Even if you are willing to pay out of pocket, you are out of luck unless you can find a doctor who is on the same page as you.

Right now, I'm trying to get a blood test for Vitamin D, but all the doctors I've gone to see are ignorant of the latest Vitamin D research, and don't see the value of doing the test. If I can't find a doctor who will authorize it in the next year or so, then I'm probably going to drive down to the US and pay cash using Direct Labs (http://www.directlabs.com/) or the Life Extension Foundation (http://www.lef.org/). It's terribly inefficient but I don't see any way around it.
What. A. Mess.
After sarah paulin chose her glasses that brand become unusually popular. I don't think the idea it was "Free" advertising really matters the effect is the same. Tom Cruise has a long history of exposure which is part of why he is paid that much. But, you could also consider he the idea he is worth 50,000x as much because he increases the movies revenue and he helps the movie get financed.

In most cases I suspect "brand" acts like a multiplyer so Apple's HDD might be worth 1.25 times as much as another just because of the reputation. IBM might be 30% better and have 2x the brand so they charge 2.6x what other consultant companies charge etc. Clearly major movies have great hairdressers but they don't get to charge 50,000x as much because a lower increase in value and a lower level of brand recognition.

PS: This get's confusing when considering something like breitling watches where a lot of the value comes from the price tag and not the physical watch. When someone knows you spent 250,000 on your watch they know you have money even if they can't see your car / house etc.
TrailBehind is going really well! Our big news recently was winning an fbFund grant, ands we're going to have a cool launch tomorrow.
Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe in Your PC
ZFS tutorial part 1
I think that many start-ups fail because they try and build enterprise systems at the outset, for their small business.

You just gotta do what works and what's fast, and focus on your product. It's not that hard to scale up your finance system later when you have some money.
We're talking about startups here. If that unavailable person is your co-founder you're probably screwed anyway.
Does this mean that the Android Dev Phone will also require some sort of data plan with your carrier? That would be a total buzz kill and for some people (just me?) defeats the purpose of having Wi-fi on a phone.
I've been the in the same situation(s), and I just left when I couldn't handle it anymore.
In the search box when you first load the home page.
The 7 Deadly Linux Commands
The button says "Find Trips."

How might it be made more clear?
It may be funny to us males, but females may actually find the confidence and ambition in both pictures very attractive.
This is roughly what we are going to launch tomorrow. The current site is at: www.trailbehind.com
It's trivially easy to take bad pictures of people. And doing so is neither notable nor valuable in any way whatsoever.

Contrast with this photo taken by someone who knows what she's doing:

http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/y_walker08.html
haha, for the sexy pose
That could be even worse, even if your co-founder is still available. What if your co-founder is stuck on a difficult problem, and needs a second set of eyes on the code to help him out? If he has been writing vomit-code the whole time, will you be able to help?

The point behind tip #7 was to advocate having a single person in charge of editing a component, to avoid two people making changes to the design and confusing one another. The point wasn't to suggest a total lack of caring about the other developer's work.

This smells very much of political fence building, and an overly zealous drive to strictly segment responsibility.
Ask HN: What are your web app ideas?
Hey guys,

I'm looking for ideas for a web app, that you want to build, but just don't have the time for. At this point in my life I am of the belief that ideas themselves are worth very little, and having somebody else interested in working on it with you may either spur you to work on it yourself, or at least get your idea manifest into the real world.

So, if you have a great idea that you don't mind getting stolen, post it here!

I'll go first: I think it would be neat to build an easy-to-use web calculator, so high school kids could do their math homework without having to buy expensive calculators. I am actually considering this: it's not too hard to write a graphing interface in Calculus, or write tools to do things like Linear algebra, derivatives, calculate integrals... anything more advanced justifies using a university Mathematica license or something :)

What do you think of my idea? What are yours?

Zack
While I can't edit the main post anymore: I've re-worked OID so that for the time being, using your OID takes you directly to your account, no e-mailing me required.
Animated video of "Green Eggs and Ham"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdR0LXOiEB8
This is awesome. Is that usgs data? Best representation of way points I've seen yet.
For the most part they are written by folks who in some way make their living off of entrepreneurs, either preying upon them as investors or service providers.

Says the company who does just that.

BZZZT. Thanks for playing anyway.
...plus 171 USD shipping to the UK - I couldn't stop myself, I wanted one.
Yeah, the site includes a list of millions of USGS waypoints, along with other data we have collected.
You can't this is where the Android business angle is, it must be connected at all times, and you naturally need to pay for it.

What's more if you'll insert an Android sim card to a different phone the data plan won't work!!! It only works on Android!!!
http://www.vibramfivefingers.com - The only footwear innovation I've seen recently.
Sure! Overall advice-- think more about sales/marketing/distribution than you do right now. How do you get in front of potential customers? Some specific advice along those lines:

1) Get good at SEO. SEOmoz.org is the best place to start.
2) First, prove that you can bring in 100 people and have some meaningful percentage turn into customers. Might take a lot of design/wording iteration-- might not. Depends on the product simplicity/value prop.
3) Price it in such a way that you can afford marketing. If you can convert 3-5% of your visitors into customers and you have a reasonable high price point, you can afford adwords, which is a huge win.
4) Understand the "lifetime value of a customer". What's the average customer worth? How long do they stay with you? This will tell you how much you can spend per user on marketing efforts.

Let's see... Other generic advice:

1) Don't offer a free plan unless free users provide some other value.
2) DO offer a free trial. It seems standard practice to ask for the credit card # at the time of the trial... If your service is sticky enough, you might consider doing it the other way.
3) Use BrainTree payment services. They've treated us pretty well.
4) Price it high, but offer a "seasonal discount" so that people feel like they have a bargain if they strike now.
5) Measure like crazy. Understand your funnel REALLY well.
Not precisely a web app per se, but a product I'd really like to see someone produce. It seems to me that the BBC's iPlayer sets the standard for TV stations broadcasting their content over the internet. They have flash streaming at reasonable quality, plus various species of download for different platforms including portable devices, and they don't discriminate a huge amount by operating system.

What I think would be wonderful would be if someone would produce a similar system packaged up and ready to be installed at any TV station. Just add a few racks of machines for encoding. Hell, if you were going for real shiny-shiny, you might even do the encoding "in the cloud" on EC2 or somesuch.

I'm not entirely sure how much money you could make doing this, but its certainly an idea.
You don't need a data plan for WiFi to work, but yeah; if you want to access the internet using your carrier's network, you'll have to pay for a data plan.
Well, Bill certainly had something that attracted the ladies.

"At that point in time, Microsoft had gone public and Bill Gates was Bill Gates. If you were in the business you knew him or knew of him. The girls I was with were in the business. Long story short, I went to the bar to get some drinks for all us, I come back, they aren’t there. Come to find out the next day, Bill stole my girls."

http://blogmaverick.com/2007/12/24/success-and-motivation/
You may find http://www.sagemath.org/ helpful for your project, if you haven't seen it already ^_^
Quick Solution to a Detroit Auto Bailout
It'll be nice that you deploy it somewhere with better bandwidth at this time it’s hard to try it.
I've now posted a _very_ provisional video without sound that shows baseline functionality.
Honestly, that's really not that bad.

Especially compared to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
By having a landing page that isn't just a giant map. You need to explain what your site does. As it is, I suspect most of your visitors will arrive and depart almost immediately.
Twitter is going to die
The G1 is loaded with T-Mobile firmware. It has features that will only work with T-Mobile's data plans.

This phone is not the G1. It's an android developer phone with it's own (replaceable) firmware. The features it provides are listed on the Android market site http://www.android.com/market (login required).
When could Sun at last make ZFS available on Linux? Stuck on license is stupid or intentional.
Yeah, right now it's running off of Django's dev server, forwarding a port on my laptop through an SSH tunnel to my production server. So it's a little slow :)

I'm surprised it hasn't crashed under all of this traffic actually, since Django's dev server isn't threadsafe.
Their website [ http://www.zappos.com/ ] looks like their office space... ...cluttered.
The article is perspicuous with this disclosure.

We certainly provide services to bootstrapping entrepreneurs and I suppose it would be in my personal best interest to encourage more folks to start bootstrapping a startup. I don’t think for the most part it’s a reasoned decision.
We do have a bounce rate of about 40%, which is something we're trying to manage. I think part of that is not knowing what to do on the site, and part of it is because the site is really slow (until tomorrow when we launch the new version).

We're thinking about switching from a giant map home page to having the "Geo News" (in the main menu) as our home page, once the news page is polished.
Only certain IMs are counted in that 400; and only when you're using the default IM app.

Google Talk IMs are included for free. And if you want to use something else, there are other IM apps out there that don't use T-Mobile's gateway.
This is probably more a function of the fact that languages change over time, so if a common task is hard to talk about, new forms will appear that make it easier. Programming languages see very little change (and even rarer are ambiguity or "non backwards compatible" changes introduced.)

Stuff like this is why I became interested in PL theory in the first place actually.
I suggest you read the wikipedia article. Theres a pretty good summary of its current status. "well, dub it has some effect, but it doesn't make certain thought impossible"

A better example is that some languages have more words for color, and thus people are able to differentiate between slightly different more shades. Though I'd argue thats more a function of training than the mere existence of more word.
Does Twitter have message-ids like email?

I ask because email has the property that all replies are linked to the original message, creating a dependency tree of ID's. Any system that doesn't create a unique message-id is a step back from email.
U.S. Job Losses Signal Recession Will Be Long, Deep
www.instapaper.com
I don't think I could any work done there, either. There's one thing to have "character" and another to be distracting as hell.

I probably belong in a basement with a 20cmx20cm window...
Cannot the iPod touch be used for such purpose?
The case has been made, many times, by many economists of a variety of political leanings. Don't forget that the longest and deepest depression in US history was accompanied by the largest expansion of government power in US history, which was ineffective.

FDR greeted a collapse in the money supply with measures designed to keep the price of labor and food high. Unsurprisingly, shortages in jobs and food lasted a long time.

In my experience, most people that think FDR "saved us" from the Great Depression got a history education from government schools and never studied Economics.

The "do-nothing" Hoover administration was also very activist, to boot.
The source to Hacker News, actually. (http://arclanguage.org/install) I'd gotten so used to software being bulky and complicated, I was quite inspired by what resulted from Paul's goal of minimizing the needed code size for an application.
This very site is a good example of passive income. If you put ads on it, it will generate by itself 1000's a month.
That's sounds like great advice. I heard 37signals mention that they're moving to BrainTree recently so I'll certainly look into them -- the only negative is that their site is not very informative/transparent.

I certainly like the idea of not offering a free plan at all and it's definitely the way I'm intending to go (at least initially). One of the advantages I can see is that it positions your service as a serious app targeted at professionals (which, in a way, encourages professionals to use it). Also, even if free users cost you nothing up front, you still have to store their data and support them. I'd rather 10 paying customers than 1000 free + 10 paying.

As you mentioned, if free users contribute (perhaps, depending on the context, by making their data public) then a free plan becomes more useful.
Message-Id is actually optional in email (recently brought up when trying to make a threaded email view: http://www.mail-archive.com/couchdb-user@incubator.apache.or... )
Tech Leaders of Tomorrow: Nivio
Anyone who says they know exactly what went wrong with the current crisis and exactly how it should have been done is full of it, IMO.

This is the kind of rule that works until it doesn't. Seems better just to judge each explanation (of this or anything else for that matter) on its merits. And the place to start is with some specific thing the article says that you believe is false.
That's what I am talking about - some computer types might use twitter, normal people don't. Unless you are building a product for programmers twitter is too niche and all this busy activity outlined in the article will be useless.
SitOrSquat.com: Find a toilet or restroom anywhere in the world
No microphone or GPS. Not to mention that the OS isn't open source.

That being said, the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is pretty awesome. It would be cool to have "Developer" iPhones with less restrictions too.
Hi, thanks for pointing this out. I know that some web mail systems or Outlook mailboxes seem not to have the original ID, and one has to be generated in some random way (that breaks the links).
Ask HN: Can you recommend a blog writer or service?
I have a lot of content that I would like to post, but my writing skills leave much to be desired. I've been looking to outsource the blog writing or re-writing of my content, but the search results on Google look more like spam than helpful orgs for this type of service. I am not even sure how much to pay for something like this.

Have you used a service to write (or proof read) blog posts?

How did you locate them: craigslist, elance, mechanical turk, some blog writer site, or something else?

What is the going rate for a small 100-150 word blog post?

I've seen prices advertised "per page". What the heck is the length of a "page" on a blog anyways?

Thanks in advance!
Home-runs are more likely if VCs invest, but it is hard to say whether this is because VCs select the companies most likely to be big successes, or because their participation makes companies big successes. So it is very hard to predict what would happen if startups stopped taking VC.
I wonder why people upmod me, there seems to be nothing special about my little plain job listing site.
If you have time check out Korzybski's general semantics. NLP also deals with this. One of the classics is Benjamin Worf's 'Language, thought and reality.
Generally speaking, it seems we describe the world to ourselves with internal dialogue and then react to the words of our description rather than responding directly to reality.
I've never seen a game as beautiful before.
“We don’t get the job losses stopping until 2010,”

That is the scary part. The way out of a recession is to get people working and spending. So does that mean it is going to last until 2011?
Why would any bootstrapping startup drop cash on a marketing consultant? At what point in your first 6-9 months is a dollar ever well-spent on a workshop or "strategy session"?
Building an albatross
well, if you're interested, i might be able to help. i can write reasonably well but don't have anything to write about.

drop me an email (in my profile) and perhaps we can work something out.
The Mouse And The Rectangle
17 different button configurations that were considered for the first pushbutton phones