skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2-3% isn't a dead weight loss, it's paying for very valuable things, especially fraud protection. You can't just magic it away.

Also, as I said, if facebook wants to step into the payments middle man role (which they could) they could maybe make as much as Visa does. If they completely reinvented themselves and turned into a global merchant bank AND managed to convince at least a tenth of all merchant account holders on Earth to switch to them THEN they could make some serious money. But the likelihood of that is precisely zero plus or minus a teeny, tiny margin of error.

In answer to your last question: no, no they are not.
Or dilution will take place because there are no filters to keep the quality high.
Sorry, no problem. Getting two different things confused!
I don't buy that identities were previously generated from within. I think that pre-internet, the average person assumed a stronger piece of their identity from family, job, nationality, gang etc. than from their inner convictions. The internet boosts the number of identity groups you can join to a size so great that you need a different outlook to grapple with the madness. Maybe it's a good thing because it's kicked us out of a local maximum where we could arbitrarily settle on who we are. Now, the clouds have cleared and there are vast mountains everywhere.
I think the problem here is that you're conflating the absence of evidence with the evidence of absence. There's definitely no definitive evidence for the existence of black holes, but (as far as I know) we have no evidence that contradicts current models.

Science works by coming up with a nullifiable hypothesis, then seeing how it holds up as evidence is gathered. When you see contradictions, you adapt your model. I think you're missing the middle step, where you see contradictions.
I just finished building a widget, for beta testing, that startups can grab from my website that has a built in screen recording tool. So once they embed this on their own website they can entice users to record their interactions and it will even pick up on audio feedback as well.

You can see the widget on my site http://betapunch.com. The widget is the little punch icon in the right corner of the page. It's not great as far as design goes, but that's why I am working on the 2nd variation of the widget I will be launching in a couple days.

Here's what it will look like: http://i.imgur.com/iBS7C.png.

I am trying to get as many people to grab the code and put it on their startup websites so I can make sure display and functionality are all in order in various different browsers.

So if you have a moment and want to give it a shot for your site that would be great! You can remove it whenever you'd like, I just want to make sure it does what it's supposed to. :-)
I'm building an online workspace for uni students to collaborate on assignments and includes a calendar, contacts management with chat across platforms and an email client with document editor built in for pdf & doc.
Instead of having users train the software, why not download and feed it a corpus of open source software? Writing a script that clones random Github/Bitbucket/Google Code projects and feeds the code to the trainer (using the file extension to get the language) should be easy enough.
Building HTML5 mobile app designer tools. Launched in late February, now ramen profitable, several YC rejections under our belt...we are going to bootstrap the damn thing!

http://codiqa.com/
Not to belittle your point (since I agree with you), but didn't AT&T get owned simply because the MaBell monopoly no longer existed and thus couldn't simply acquire the up-and-coming wireless carriers? Perhaps that's not the best example.
Indeed. The iPod was just a worse Nomad. (I already posted CmdrTaco's iconic summary in another comment in this article, so I will avoid it here.)

But nobody bought Nomad, and everyone bought an iPod. Why? Because Apple told people to buy an iPod, and people tend to do what they're told.
Ask HN: What contracting paperwork do you use?
I recently started doing freelance and contracting out work for small companies in my area. I know that several HN members are freelancers and/or have contracted out work.

My question to you - what templates, documents, and other legal documentation (whatnot) have you found useful for your work?

Thanks!
BUG: It's not properly aligned in Safari 5.2 (beta), OS X Lion 10.7.3:

http://d.pr/i/ZDZM

http://d.pr/i/Gj25

Is perfect on Chrome though.
"By detecting very little energy from these black hole candidates, we have new proof that event horizons exist," said Michael Garcia of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA. "It's a bit odd to say we've discovered something by seeing almost nothing, but, in essence, this is what we have done."

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/as...
I always assumed that when given the option to hear the CAPTCHA it was going to just read me the muddled words I see. Using just 58 different spoken words doesn't seem anywhere near as secure as the text images... which I guess is why it was cracked.
I'm making a clone of the game ataxx [1] for iOS. (It's my excuse to learn core graphics, and some AI design)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataxx
Interesting reading that and after reading: http://icelab.com.au/articles/money-stress-and-the-cloud/ (tl;dr: Credit card processing was breaking because of the 30 second limit).

Sounds like it would make sense for heroku to have a configurable timeout.
Not sure you would find it interesting, but since GrubHub/Seamless are not in my area (Suburbs of South Florida) - http://munchables.me/
I'm working on http://asterank.com, a database that catalogs and computes the economic attributes of nearly 600,000 asteroids.

According to the data, there are 74 asteroids worth over $10 trillion.
I'm a bit surprised that they don't consider this a violation of their requirement that apps not change the native user interface.
It's broken in IE7, IE9 (not IE8) and Firefox 12. The logo's button element on the left doesn't align with the one on the right.

Is there a specific reason you chose to add a button element in your links? Why not style the a tags and display them inline-block?
That is totally fine. We are not judges your idea / path.

In fact, inherent in our system is that their is no one person or group of people who can say yeah or neigh on all startups.

What our system does is we document your progress, so we try to answer the question, can this team execute on an idea.

Then the quality of the idea / traction / investor interest takes over from there.

The question is if when I launch an investor sees my progress, what will it say about my team?

Also, some people are joining just to be a part of the community and not really for the demo day. Our goal is to help startups, so we welcome all types.
When Google changes its icons for special occasions is that more beneficial to "society" than other things they could be working. Is ANYTHING people do really the best they could do for society.

I just don't understand why you are holding Facebook to some arbitrary standard.
Try setting up a forum, and create a support section that is only available to paid users above a threshold. When your pathological customers try to email you can nicely point towards your forum and say sorry, you are not the support team but they are welcome to ask questions on the proper forum. If they want to upgrade to access support, then you'll at least be making some money for your time. Use a private support email or token system if you can for your paid users. I've seen a company use Twilio and OpenVBX with a custom module, where paid customers get a number to access phone support, otherwise they get a voicemail saying 'buy support to call us'.
Really? I've found companies usually prefer it over quitting. Financially it may not be an option though, that I can understand.
People don't "follow" images on Instagram by actors - the google glasses example is proposing a twitter-like system where users follow an actor's view live.

Imagine a system where Napster had a musician bugged and could stream what they were playing in the studio - think there might be right's issues ?
Not being in the Middle East (or ever having been, ever), I have to question that narrative, though it's a common one.

We know the Egyptian government eventually shut down internet access (leading to ingenious hacks, such as the Twitter-voice-recognition-bot Google wrote), but the protests continued unabated.

I'm sure social media had some role to play in the Arab Spring - but the extent of it I feel has been blown out of proportion by technocrats all too ready to self-congratulate.

After all, it feels nicer if you're not building that tool by which millions can breathlessly follow the every move of B-list celebrities. Indeed, wouldn't it be nice if all the hours we spend in air-conditioned offices was actually freedom fighting?
I think we are few teams shy of a boston group, do you know any more boston teams?
Do you have some contact info I can reach you with? This sounds interesting to me.
I'm typing up this reply...
What's a good example of a site that isn't a db frontend?
Non-programming wise, I'm finishing up my PhD thesis. And my current side project, which I'll start as soon as I'm done writing is a small location based iPhone app.
Calculating lots of stuff from GPS data + sensors from bike rides...

Batch processing a ton of old data and working out the kinks in some Ruby we rewrote in JS so we could share it between the client and server. Here are some details http://blog.ridewithgps.com/blog/2012/05/22/Metrics-Improvem...
Everyone's different, but I've been doing this particular startup for 2 1/2 years and don't resent anyone yet. I've had times where I felt like burnout was coming, and when that happens I just take a few days "off" from working on the startup.
Pay for performance SEO quoting system. You don't usually know what you're getting w/ SEO because it's billed per hour or in the typical standard, pro, enterprise packages that work well for web apps but not keywords w/ different competition levels.

And, it feels like the interests of firms aren't always tied to their clients. "Of course we have a guarantee...you're on the first page (of Ask.com)!"

So, I'm working on a quoting / billing structure where customer payments are dictated by the ranking improvements. Feedback so far is good, but of course, it's a challenge.

http://www.growtap.com
That's the "fun" version of functionality :) Fixed now
First and foremost you need to be able to execute on your idea.

If you feel like you can do that solo, please sign up!
Coming up with a better way is trivial, yes, but getting it past the entrenched interests of one of the largest sectors of the economy (Healthcare) is ridiculously hard.
thx for the feedback! I´m currently summing up the forks and your info to create a better update until tomorrow. A 100% cross-browser compatibility is a challenge and I have to admit that I used Chrome ;)
s/Special relativity/General relativity

Special relativity ignores gravity altogether, whereas general relativity sneaks gravity into the relativistic framework by equating it with curvature.

Both theories are, to me, frustratingly intangible. Like you said, we don't really know where gravity comes from. Really, we don't even have any sort of good intuitions for how to describe what it is. Stuff resists being shoved around. Stuff also attracts other stuff to itself. Einstein tells us these are both symptoms of stuff being curvature. It's all a bit too abstract for my taste (that is, I hope a more tangible/intuitive model will eventually win out). Field equations are predictive but not really descriptive. Is there a mechanism in there somewhere?
This month I've been Working through a book to teach myself iOS development. Only two chapters left!
That is a great idea, if you can get it to work.

I think your nomenclature's wrong, though. If you are comparing via the AST, it's lexical version control.

However, on your second paragraph:

> That is, if you move a function, I can see that as a single action even if you modify the function a little bit when moving it

That already seems a bit more semantic than lexical.
Naive question:

The author says image views are a subset of page views. Is this accurate when the photos are shown in a light box capable of cycling through thousands of photos without leaving the initial page?
Yak shaving & then once I'm done, implementing redundant yaks.
Start-up America?! I love the concept!
Be careful not to conflate special (SR) and general relativity (GR). SR has nothing to say about gravity, and, as you point out, has already been successfully merged with Quantum mechanics to form relativistic quantum field theory (Dirac's early versions of which led to the proposal of antimatter). It is GR that describes "what gravity does", and which is difficult to enmesh with quantum mechanics.
grep '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]\{12,\}$' /usr/share/dict/words

"stewardesses" seems to be tied with:

aftereffects
desegregated
desegregates
reverberated
reverberates
Hacker news api+scraper in node.js
I'm slowly putting together a PC game called Moonman, inspired by Knytt Stories, Terraria, The Incredible Machine, and Dwarf Fortress .. when I'm not distracted reading HN of course. ;)

site: http://moonman.io
latest vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL2r3rRnvD0&feature=youtu...
Not very exciting, but I'm experimenting with a site to list sales tax rates by city: http://www.sale-tax.com. It's been fun to play with scraping government forms, SEO, and adsense. Maybe next year around tax time it will even be useful to people :)
exactly this is what I´m working on right now. I´ll release it tomorrow. As mentioned above, creating cross browser compatible buttons is really like opening a can of worms sometimes, especially downwards compatible solutions. Surely Firefox problems are a no-go.
Building iOS apps. Working on a realtime location based sharing app as well as a few other more minor projects.
I disagree. I now mentally associate the word "infographic" with "poorly-thought-out blog post that the author wrote in Photoshop in order to familiarize himself with all of its features." As for a graphic that conveys information, well, those don't exist anymore.
No article in simple.wikipedia.org, could someone please explain this in a bit simpler terms?
I'm working on it. I sent the info to another interested party, but I may know others. I can send it to the Start-up Weekend group, too. How many teams shy?
Apple Paints Itself Into A Corner in Answer to eBook Class Action
Healthcare falls under entitlements.
He may have been right not to get caught in the bubble hype, but the internet has been revolutionary - sometimes literally.
I'm sorry, but the notion that we're going to draw wide-reaching conclusions and reference "marketing" based on... basically absolutely nothing is just silliness.
Working on the next version of http://ligues.ca (sports leagues manager). Also working on http://playffs.com (NHL playoffs pool) until the end of NHL playoffs.
A 50% divorce rate is not a 'failure' rate. People change and move on - in some cases a divorce is an overall win-win situation, not a failure. Slavishly staying together because of obligation is a failure.
I think the augmented reality aspect is going to be awesome, I just don't imagine wanting to watch the video someone else is seeing in real time -- though after some editing it could be very fun to watch.
I've been disturbed by this situation ever since the iBookstore launched and all my eBook prices went up. I've used the Kindle since day one and I understood and appreciated the eBook discount. Now, I find many books with prices on the iBookstore that are higher than the equivalent printed book at the local bookstore. I understand the need to keep Amazon from getting/maintaining a monopoly, but man, I just can't agree that the solution is to raise prices 30-50%.
You could use this as an opportunity to develop some good tutorials or similar. Also, people like that tend to be emotionally needy more than anything else. Emotionally needy people tend to want attention. If you can email back a link to a tutorial instead of doing personal handholding, they will start going elsewhere for their addictive little emotional crap. The trick is to be genuinely helpful with the technical issue (so they don't have a new excuse to be wrapped around the axle about you) while not feeding their sick need for attention.

(This was me at one time: Desperate housewife with chronic health problems -- and often heavily medicated to boot!, so lots of trouble focusing on the task at hand. Customer support hated me and often lacked the savvy to discourage my long tangents they did not want to hear.)
MiniDates Schedules Real-Life (Legitimately) Blind Dates For You
I'm building an interpreter inspired by interactive fictions (IF) by infocom. The goal is to be able to generate your css/less (including a generated styleguide) and HTML page skeleton just by writing plain english.
Here is an example :
"btn can be a button element"
"btn can be a anchor element"
"large-button is a kind of btn"
"large-button color is black"
"large-button background-color is lighten(black, 10%)"

I'm still figuring out the language but i'm feeling that it can be really promising.
It's a very different thing to be an angel investor and a venture investor. Different opportunities, responsibilities, etc. If I were a venture investor, I'd be competing against all Sand Hill, because it's pretty much an either/or proposition: if you're in, someone else is out. Whereas, angels happily deal with an investor pile-on; the more the merrier.
Sean Parker: Apple tried to keep Spotify out of the US
Yeah, and none of those VMs have any bugs in them.

One point of a filesystem is to have a consistent state that you can recover from after an errant process stomps on memory, or your machine suffers a kernel panic, or your memory becomes so fragmented that you can't even read a 100mb data source, or any other number of issues that can only be resolved by rebooting or reloading.

Once you've committed to non-volatile memory and ditched files, you're tightrope walking without a safety net, at the mercy of the next system level bug. I'd rather know that my data is safe and double-backed up at multiple physical locations, with recoverable history. Files give me that in a well supported, (mostly) system agnostic manner.
Are Facebook Pages Getting Less Traffic From Google & Bing?
SilkJS, a synchronous JavaScript shell using V8
http://silkjs.org/
Ghostly jets seen streaming from Milky Way's core
?!

Wrong thread, maybe?
Show HN: command-line git playback
Since good SEO is a personal relationship with the client, it might benefit you to personalize your About Page. Clearly the price is right, but to sell me, I want to know that there is a team behind the effort.
The business model of licensing designs reminds me of ARM and Android. Less capital intensive, and allows people with imagination to elbow into the game.
Wow, that's cool. Clearly a guy with a love for the art. I'd be interested to hear how this approach works out for him and the breakdown of his project offers once he's been at it a while.
I don't know what happened either way, but a choice quote:

> In the end, facts – not unfounded claims – will determine the outcome of the suit filed against us.

The devil's advocate could just as easily rephrase it this way:

"In the end, facts – not the findings of an "independent" investigator we hired – will determine the outcome of the suit filed against us."

I know it's a tough PR crisis to handle, but somehow I think an Apple-styled cone of silence about the issue might have been a better approach.
The idea behind reCAPTCHA is that it occasionally throws in a word (or street sign, or occasional fragment of total garbage) that it doesn't know. Hence, not really possible to just text-to-speech the visual part of the captcha to generate an audio one, as often the visual captcha contains an unknown.

However, if they're sampling radio programs to use as background noise, reCAPTCHA could become a learning tool for radio programs as well.

A reliable algorithm for splitting a source stream into high-probability individual-word portions would need to be devised - then, just like the visual version, combine one known word and one unknown word, combine with the background distortion, and this brand of attack is essentially defeated.

I suspect that spoken-word digitization is at least a potential future plan, although I also suspect the audio version of captchas are requested infrequently enough that learning new words might take a long time.
I don't see that to be the case. Physicists have been giving their utmost to try to crack open the standard model and prove it wrong for decades. And the same is true elsewhere as well. We thought we had a pretty good grasp on the nature of the expansion of the Universe, but it turned out that the expansion is accelerating. That was a huge reformulation of cosmology. We thought we knew about planetary formation, but once we started finding exoplanets we discovered many of our assumptions were wrong.

As far as black holes, we have not 100% direct evidence of them, but we do have many independent and very strong lines of indirect evidence. For example, we can see stars in orbit around an incredibly massive object at the center of our galaxy (Sgr A*) that is not luminous. There are no models that make sense for anything that could be so massive and so dark. Black holes are the only theory which fits all the evidence we have, that's how science works.
Since our move to multicore over faster processors, I'm sure we'll see a lot of this sort of thing, that is, people suddenly realizing that their code will be some multiple faster if they can find a way to do operations in parallel.

Reimplementation of things like compression algorithms seems very math/algorithm-heavy and thus amenable to functional programming. How about the Haskell/OCaml guys re-implement a bunch of Un^x style utilities for us?
Friends are certainly not expendable but the reality is, there's just not a lot of time for them during the week. But I don't think this is a "startup on the side" thing; most of my friends who are married with kids don't hang out much anyway. In my particular situation, Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons and evenings are usually when we'll hang out with other families. But again, I think that's more a function of having young kids than of doing a startup.
In all other sciences, if you find a model that predicts something as self-contradictory as a black hole or dark matter, you shrug, figure your assumptions are wrong, and start over. In physics you announce the splendiferous wonders of the universe.
Actually, Google Doodles educate the society at large about people that made a difference in this world. So yes, work on Google Doodles is beneficial to society.
Backbone does not have built in templates. Underscore templates are very basic for our needs.
Thanks. :-)

And I doubt we'll be digging deeper than 10 feet on the Moon anytime soon.
no, he refers to the did you know... part on the page :)
Quite interesting research approach. Maybe its time to contest the longest left hand written sentence.