skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What makes a good non-technical co-founder/team member
I was wondering what skills/abilities are most valued in the startup world when considering a non-technical member of your start up team?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2575266

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758865
Tech Entrepreneurship = Huge Opportunities, No More Working for “The Man”
Regarding the menu, no vertical space may have been won, but definitely a bit of horizontal -- it looks like there's enough room for an additional tab there now, which is nice. (maximized on 1366*768, it's rare that I never have tab overflow)
Who are the best SEM agencies? Don't ask Google
I can assure you, straw bales are better insulation than modern fiberglass. A family member lived on a sustainable farm where they had a 40 foot diameter roundhouse with 25 foot ceilings and an upper loft. Basically, a big volume. It was easily heated, and kept incredibly cozy, by a single woodburning stove.

Additionally, it was fully plumbed with water (though used composting toilets outside), as well as electricity.
Cryptome Webpages infected with Blackhole exploit kit
Liketube: preview youtube like:dislike ratio (greasemonkey)
I make www resolve but just forward to the URL without it. I don't like the way www looks and having to say it is annoying.

Whichever you pick, you should use that one and redirect the other to it, just so there is one consistent set of URLs.

nasa.gov doesn't resolve because www.nasa.gov is a CNAME to Akamai hosts for load balancing purposes, so they can't use the same thing for just nasa.gov (and manually inserting A records would get out of date and not distribute load properly). Google has the same setup (www is a CNAME), but because they control all of the hosts that the CNAME resolves to, they can put those same host records as google.com.
Nuclear weapons don't stop attacks in general, but they do stop existential threats. It's unlikely that France will ever be invaded and occupied again for as long as they have a nuclear deterrent, for example. France (or other such countries) may well be attacked, but not conquered. This is at least an improvement over the previous state of things. Warfare without the existential threat leaves room to be considerably more gentle.
Help me become a web developer, 10,000 ft. in the air
I graduated with an electrical engineering degree and am familiar with programming (C/C++, VHDL, Assembly, etc). But now, I want to start developing web apps.

I am a Management Consultant and spend 15 to 20 hours a week on a plane. So as a personal challenge, if I spend 60 hours a month for 6 months learning and implementing, I should be able to have my ideas turn into funcitoning apps.

Since I don't have an internet connetion, online resources and communities to help me learn are impossible to leverage until I make it to a hotel. At this point, I don't know where to begin in terms of both language and resources.

I've come here to Hacker News to request your advice in helping me complete my personal challenge. I'd love to have a web app up and running this year.
I've long thought we'd see a web browser appear soon with a menu option to see how the user got to that tab's location. I'd use that at least once a week.
Show HN: Amazon's new homepage
"romanian satellite", "polish satellite" or "hungarian satellite" would often (usually) be understood as a major piece fully designed and built by the country in question. CubeSats are academic projects (literally), and technically they're all from AMSAT so they're american :)
I really think Firefox should have nailed down addon compatibility and silent updates before embarking of this FF4+ versioning adventure. It's good to see that they are both on the roadmap, but I fear it's too little too late.
> but thanks for the nitpicking!

> Your only other comment on this story is an "It works for me!" So thanks for contributing nothing but fanboi garbage.

Are you done?
A very good article. I have to disagree with the part about the DRM though:

>Untrue. The argument here is that Secure Boot can be used to restrict the software that a machine can run, and so can limit a system to running code that implements effective copy protection mechanisms.

An operating system is software, too. Secure boot, if it's impossible to disable (which isn't mandatory, but possible) can be used to restrict what software you can run (boot) on your computer. That's pretty much the textbook definition of Digital Restrictions Mismanagement.
As I said, I have people in my family who have built strawbale houses to code (California code including earthquake provisions, no less). The stylized aspect is distinct from the strawbale and inset-in-land aspect.

Regarding logs, I'm currently sitting in a house with wood framing in the suburbs, and every house around me as far as I can see is also framed with wood.
Interview With Growl Developer Christopher Forsythe
My first distro was openSuSE 10.1, before KDE4, in 2006. The system has been upgraded to a new machine, now headless, and now lives on openSuSE factory. Running through VNC KDE is still a decent interaction. It spoiled me to all other implementations of KDE. OpenSuSE has a lot of other tidbits going for it too. YAST2 being huge!
The replays are also absolutely brilliant.
Thanks! That's the idea. There are so many new apps and treatments coming out it's hard to keep up with them all individually.
Agile Succeeds Three Times More Often
If it's a core question, it's not "bike shedding." If the problem is really bike shedding, a good leader will get both sides to realize they're being ridiculous and wasting everyone's time over something trivial.
Alex, Thanks for launching a newsletter like this. Great idea!

Robert Petrusz
Bull City Coworking
Durham, NC
Might be a good game underneath all that but the article made me say "yuck". As a general rule, thin young guys don't look better when they comment on "big girls".
This should go without saying, but never use such a thing on user-supplied data.
It's an option which can be enabled or disabled to taste. It's no more egregious than empty strings being null in Oracle, though I've no doubt there are more persuasive arguments for why Oracle is a better RDBMS.
Manhattan is very expensive, but the parking example is a bad one. Manhattan is a different point in the design space of cities than say Houston. You don't have a car on Manhattan, because the city is configured so you don't need one. There are lots of people who make $1m/year in Manhattan that take the subway, bus, or commuter rail to work (or walk!).

Food is also, on the whole, cheaper than in many large cities. You pay somewhat more for groceries, but can often get away paying a lot less for eating lunch/dinner out, because of the prevalence of cheap ethnic food options.

Housing of course blows all of those advantages away in terms of its impact on your budget.
New technology platform for molecule-based electronics
Has anyone read anything on Zach Klein's cabin in NY? Very curious how he went about designing and building it. http://beaverbrook.com/
Top Alternative of Google Adsense
The Firefox button has also moved to the right of the address bar, or at least I think that's what that button is. If anything, that's an even more glaring similarity than curvy tabs. Personally, I don't mind curvy tabs, they're pretty.
If you're looking for more doc / research on GAs, be sure to include 'evolutionary computation' in your searches.

The tough parts to using EC/GA on your problem (which this article doesn't discuss at all, unfortunately) are going to be:

a) figuring out a string representation for your candidate solutions (i.e. because strings are easy to 'mate', 'mutate', etc.)

b) writing a fitness function to evaluate one or more candidates

[a] and [b] are intimately related, of course.

One of the nice things about EC/GA is that it's typically very easy to scale up to take advantage of more hardware. If you have an expensive fitness function, e.g. 'fighting' two chess-board evaluators against one another over an extended series of games, you can just farm those simulations out to as many procs/machines as you have available.
Ask HN: manual or automated web scraping?
hi all, I've got something like 18000 websites I need to visit and extract some info from but every single one has a different organisation, there is no way I can make up rules unless I make 18000 of them or I spent weeks coming up with some sort of AI stuff.

At the same time I'm not an expert in the fields hence my question: would you got for manual scraping or you are aware of very sophisticated tools that I could try out? I'm aware of the well-known OSS ones (Weka, Scrapy, Beautiful Soup) but unless I'm missing something they fall into the "write as many rules as different websites you've got" category.

TA!
It seems your issue is with the concept of single family homes and urban sprawl, not this particular method of building. That's a bit of a different issue -- many people don't want to live in the middle of a city (such as myself: I'm on a rather large lot in a 4 bedroom home)

It's true that high density housing is efficient, but if you are going to build a single family home, strawbale is a great way to do it.
Shell Usability: What TCL is missing
Sorry, realized I never answered your question.

The difference: We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything).

If there isn't anything new that meets our threshold, we won't send you anything.
If you often run out of tab space, reduce the minimal width of tabs. I don't quite remember the exact variable in about:config but I was always able to find it (search for width probably). One of the first things I had to set when I was using Firefox as my secondary browser. It was 3.x but I don't think they would remove the little configuration they offered.
> Super Meat Boy has the "ungodly hard" thing down

SMB is very playable and does a lot to mitigate its difficulty. You can find much harder platformers out there. An example is IWBTG (http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/) whose creator also designed some of the bonus levels for SMB.
Mind sharing which template did you use?
Loving this! Looks great!
Top 5 Visual Studio Extensions for Better Productivity
You think you want a better tool for managing e-mail, but you don't
Honestly, this is completely absurd.

The majority of startups fail, period. If you analyze the people who execute successful startups, the amount of money or wealth they have is a non-negative factor -- in most cases having money helps. This is why people who are super successful with startups have many repeats.
Future of Storytelling Survey: $50 to 20 people with the best responses
Unieke Valentijnsdag Tips
The pattern used in Rails would be something like api.test.com/teacher/1234/students
Improving health searches, because your health matters
For anyone interested, the book "Dreaming in Code" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code) had this sort of idea as a central thread--one of the main failures of the Chandler project seemed to be that, armed with adequate funding, development lost track of reality and sprawled into some degree of failure.

Contrast with, say, "Masters of Doom" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom) where the early id software team was so pressed for cash that they would "borrow" their employer's workstations during evenings to write their code. That's what I would consider "scrappy".
Using Hadoop to take an incremental approach to analytics
I wish Happy Birthday to people I haven't spoken to in 25 years (apologies for being old). I wish it to people I don't really know (members of a creative collective I belong to). I wish it to any of my friendsters that have birthdays on the day that I happen to visit FB. It's not so random as it sounds, either, I have fewer than 200 FB friendsters.

Most people think it's nice to receive birthday wishes, and if you're simply not getting them from the people you want to get them from, that's not their fault.

Then again, I turn off email notifications for this stuff so I don't get that kind of inundation that I saw in years past. The only email I get from FB is, coincidentally, the one that tells me whose birthday it is this coming week.
You work at a place where the word fuck on a website means it is not safe for work?
Seconds add up fast when I'm researching a topic and need to run several queries. DDG has to compete on the things people care about or no one will care about DDG.
This Week in Location Based Marketing #64: Boingo, Bango and BP + Syzzle.me
Top Domains: ViSalus Dishes Out $825K To Buy “Challenge.com” & “Vi.com”
I think it's hard to view that way because of the way the work and pressures come.

I have two kids a couple of years apart. The youngest one is still at an age where sleeping at night is an on-off business but the oldest one is now fine.

With twins you wouldn't get that as they're both at the bad sleeping stage at the same period and that's something which re-enforces - two non-sleeping children at the same time is way worse than two non-sleeping children sequentially as there will be a period where you'll almost never get a good night.

Similarly my older child can now feed herself which means that meal times with the two of them are easier than they would be if both needed feeding.

Over all time, it might average out to close to the same amount of work per child (in later life they might entertain each other a bit more being the same age), but there are two or three years at the beginning where you're going to be severely punished.

Also financially there's no hand me downs with twins - they both want / need stuff at the same time.
"So the Governor proposes cuts to those things that cause maximum pain to the public: state parks, libraries, etc."

You're bringing me back here. I was a selectman once in a small town in massachusetts, we had budget problems, put the option to a town in a vote: raise taxes or we lay off teachers.

Know what we got from the taxpayers? "How DARE you threaten to lay off teachers unless we let you raise taxes".

It's as if there's some giant line-item labeled WASTE somewhere, and Brown is stubbornly refusing to cut it and insisting on cutting useful things instead, in order to fulfill his liberal dream of taxing people.

I'll admit that I don't know the ins and the outs of the california budget. But I'd imagine he's cutting everything except for the things he's legally not allowed to cut, and attempting to save "must-haves" like emergency response at the expense of luxuries like parks and libraries.
Nice to see that the growth (beyond the initial rush from HN) is remaining consistent and not tailing off. I've not bought any domains found with this tool but have been impressed with some of the tests I've done so far.
SaaSternatives: Alternative Business Models for SaaS
For those stuck in Java hell: http://akka.io/

It expands upon Scala actors—supposedly will replace them—and provides a native API for Java.
I confused about why he thinks it ironic that Nabakov is banned... I mean, it got grandfathered in when child porn laws were written, somehow, but it is certainly fiction about a paedophile, right? Anything that bans other kiddie-fiddler fiction while allowing _Lolita_ is quite obviously inconsistent, and those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_.
The key thing that I've found drives me and makes me finish coding projects is if I'm building something that I use a lot, preferably everyday.

Don't waste another minute on choosing the tools - just pick one of Ruby on Rails or Python+Django based on whatever you've heard about them already. The docs are downloadable so you can use them offline.

Could you build something that you would use for your work? You probably use Excel a lot. Is there some manual copy-pasting you spend a lot of time doing in Excel? You could probably automate that.

Edit: As soon as you start working on it, put it on here - http://swym.me. I will make sure you get it done.
I'm working on my taxes right now with TurboTax and I freakin love that I've been using Mint all year. It could automatically pull in quite a bit of stuff.

Mint does get a lot wrong for transactions (especially when you pay by check), but I've liked it just for the notifications on budgets and large transactions that my credit union doesn't provide.
Facebook News Feed Word Cloud
Unofficial Guide to Migrating Off of Google App Engine
I think playing the 'endless game of whack-a-mole' really is their only option in the short term. Yes, it can get expensive. But if they want to continue on their current insane traffic trajectory and gain a wider audience, they need to be on top of the human moderation process.

This traffic report isn't accurate, but the trend is right (from what I've heard): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/
> Merging the search box and urlbar is a logical step.

Hmm, I hope there's an about:config setting or an add-on to undo this change. I have the urlbar and the search box assigned to different search providers. The first is accessed by Ctrl+L, keywords, Enter. The second is accessed by Ctrl+K, keywords, Enter. If there was only one search bar, I'd have to click around a bit more.

On the other hand, I completely agree with you about moving the Firefox menu. That orange button has been a distinguishing feature of Firefox for the last few releases. Moving that button to where Chrome puts its settings menu really makes Firefox look like it's losing its brand identity.
Thanks for that information. It's hard to get any understanding of what the whole Apple developer program is regarding the dock connector. Obviously the keynote dream of "look at all the things we'll be hooking up to iPhone/iPad!" is never gonna happen.
In my experience far too many avowed libertarians are simply dilettantes. They do not fully appreciate the seriousness of the courses of action they advocate. To the degree that in many cases the ultimate outcome of their ideas would be despotism, not libertarian utopia, and are ultimately just as clueless and dangerous as folks advocating marxism. Which, I think, substantially undermines the whole movement.
From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers
Executive summary:

A manager's job is to make the coffee so their secretary can prioritize their inbox.
What I'd like to understand is why is management professional training so oriented towards 'leadership' if you believe that facilitators and administrators are required.

Working for a large multinational tech firm, I recently saw them launch online training across all the various disciplines. Much of the management material is about leadership, whereas non-managers are considered 'individual contributors'. Doesn't this seem to run entirely counter to the philosophy espoused here?
What about utilizing the community to police this undesirable content? I'm sure that opens up other exploits but if the community wants to stay healthy, it has to take responsibility for itself and not just rely on the admins to come up with a magic algorithm that will solve the problem.
I recently made the same distinction on HN, but there's not much point to it because the Moral Majority has made real discussion of CP so toxic that pretty much everyone avoids it. The situation is so bad that your very question might get you branded as a "pedophile". I believe that what Reddit is doing represents a slippery slope, one made out of legal convenience, and that the above distinction, rather than issues of copyright, represents the real battlefield for online freedom of speech.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3560923
Wait what.. The problem is that women hackers might not feel welcome, because 'sex has been thrown into it'. Seriously? The author obviously intended it to be funny in a way, so if you don't like it (which of course is subjective), don't come up with over-emancipated crap like this :).

I for one think that people ought to take stuff less seriously, and this writing style seems befitting. Way to go!
Can you unpack that? At a glance, it looks okay, but I haven't actually done anything with the JS API yet.
I don't think minimalism favors rounded tabs.
> Based on the Verified Email standard, Firefox users will be able to log in to Firefox to enable Sync and user-centric site logins. Users will finally be able to say goodbye to remembering countless passwords.

This! It would be great if Firefox could automatically log you into websites you already are registered on and have associated with your FF login.
Off topic (somewhat)... I have also been using the latest Firefox Mobile nightlies on my tablet... wow. It's responsive, it's slick, it's fast... it's buggy... (it's a nightly). It's also a sign of brilliant things to come from Mozilla this year. I can't wait for the current Mobile nightlies to hit open release.
Even more to the point, and I should add this to the article, there are guys out there who have already spent 10, 20, 30K or more -- and can't even empirically demonstrate making something one person wants. (And I'm sticking to off-the-shelf, low-end products that most of the HN crowd might be tempted by. Let's not even start in on the custom, high-end marketing plans and such. Very painful.)

But they can tell you a lot of stories about how all the stuff they bought is going to help them bring in millions.
Oh. I was hoping it was going to be about Blaster Master.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Master
Doesn't every website that gets used by the unwashed masses eventually have to deal with this problem? How does facebook or youtube deal with it? How did AOL deal with it?

Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?
500 Startups’ Paul Singh: What not to do in a start-up pitch
It matters. Smart people get that feedback is necessary when you're making great stuff, and that feedback is useless if it's never negative. But smart people also get what a speaker's tone means. Communicating arbitrary message X politely shows you respect the person with whom you're talking. Communicating the same message X rudely shows the opposite.

If you have to tell me something I don't want to hear, I'll feel much better afterwords if you say it nicely. That's because I'll know you respect me enough to put in the tiny bit of effort required to say it with a smile. I won't think you're a manipulative, cynical jerk who underestimates my intellect and assumes I can be won over with cheap psychological tricks. I'll think you're a decent person with good social graces. Which is something from which people in the tech world are not exempt.

BTW, I speak from experience. Every boss I've ever had has understood the importance of how you say it when managing. Conversely, I've known others who have had bosses that didn't get it. Guess who was happier at work?
I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free.

I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.
In order for it to be any sort of copy protection mechanism it needs to be possible for the OS to guarantee that secure boot was used. It's not. That means the OS can't rely on the hardware being in any known-good state.
Show HN: Cheers, our "like" button for the real world