skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too wasn't sure what it was all about, but (and most sites should take a hint here) you made it very easy to figure it out. I clicked the button and off it went.

I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then you go to the voting blocks on the left of the picture.
Why the change?
It would maybe be better to go with the more familiar (Hot or Not) style of selections below the picture.
Boy, I don't know. Probably the most important factor for a news site is interesting people commenting. I would be curious about a ranking method based somehow on how long of a thread a comment spawns. Kind of like pagerank or citations ranking in journals. If someone's comment spawns a lot of discussion (minus the spam), it is rated as valuable.

But I've concluded that I really don't understand people that well, so I don't have a good intuition as to what would actually work.
When can I start speaking with potential customers?
so what great ideas did POF have that noone else was doing? Seems to me that the guy is completely discounting luck, when in reality his site would be nowhere without it. Luck plays a huge part...and almost every single successful person accounts their success to some degree of luck
Many thanks for the comments. The conversation was short and sweet, I heard them out, we didnt say too much, and they said to call them back if we want to pursue it further.
Now I know it wouldn't occur to most of the people on here but when I tried to take the quiz with IE7 the site hung as soon as I answered the first question. So 80% of your visitors will never know what it's all about.
keynes created the fetish of full employment.
I liked it a lot.

But I did stop at entering my email address.

Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup.
I'd make giving one's email optional.

Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has.
The easier you make it the more people will do it.

Especially if someone is just playing around and has not created dozens of rooms, the worst that could happen is they take the test again.

And I must say the test is fast, short and fun, perfect.

P.S.

Browsed around some more and came back to add to my comment.

If I'm going to be buying furniture over the internet I am going to need A LOT of technical information.

And A LOT of pictures, not just different angles of nicely made bed, but the assembly process as well.

P.P.S.

Bug?: http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-w...
The first sentence doesn't address differences in measurement, but I appreciate the snark.

I've read that Europe measures more than those that are seeking, meaning they overestimate (or the US underestimates) unemployment.

Scrolling down, the EU measure looks like the US measure, so maybe things changed since I heavily head econ blogs. Perhaps you can read more than the first line of some other resources and report back on the change?
Are you suggesting that government should try to pick winners for which industries are likely to grow? How do you expect bureaucrats to do that? Industrial policy has a terrible track record in most countries.
There are parts of this article that I find terrifying:

"...which promises to change mainstream sport diving the way Microsoft Windows changed computing"

"... told me to expect some alarms due to some software revisions they’re working on. This allowed me to see the warning icons, feel the mouthpiece vibration, and switch to open-circuit bailout. No issues here."

No issues? Your life support system failed. You had to abort. Somehow this is a good thing with no issues?

(On a tangent: I haven't read Spectrum in a decade or two, but a subhead of "The world's leading designer of scuba gear brings closed-circuit rebreathers to the masses" feels a bit like press release regurgitation. Maybe Spectrum is that way now.)
Good implementation!

I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me), she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place and a bit contradictory.

I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many more questions there were - I didn't really understand the potential/eliminated stuff.

I agree with run4yourlives, the objects in the room were really mish-mashed. Having it as a simple 2D representation of the furniture isn't very satisfying - the most jarring example being that the rug is just an upright rectangle...

I'm not part of the target audience, but I think you have something pretty interesting.
Agreed. They are going for the 'hobby/early/novice hacker' market, which seems to be quite large as well.
CocoaFusion: a new podcast about Cocoa
I liked how I could immediately start using the StyleEngine. The navigation was great and I had no trouble using it. I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress. Definitely a slick site though. Best of luck!
There will always be a large corporate market for desktops. They'll always be cheaper and harder to walk off with.
For those of you that have published a paid app, how long did it take to get through the Apple application process and then the app approval process?
A Pandora equivalent for pr0n. Enter/grade a few images you like or dislike, build a profile and "stations" to group similar kinds of content. Maybe these profiles could be condensed into some short-length string--say a Meyer-Briggs type of string (INTP, etc)--that you can then carry with you without having to actually give out personal info, but that says hey, according to this standard, these are my likes/dislikes when it comes to erotic imagery, now gimme the goods.

Just sayin'
How are we supposed to advertise to the social-media addicted?
If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that.

Right to the top of my bulletin board.

Kinda goes without saying around here, but still nice to hear every once in a while.
I wouldn't call that an article, it is a badly written press release.

A good lesson for us all is stay away from metaphors in subject we don't understand.

Microsoft Windows indeed!
I think he's off here. Rather than 10 users being worth one whopper. I think it should be 10 connections are equal to one whopper. This would make FB worth a lot more than Kottke's $1.8 billion.
I love my iPhone. But giving developers the option to cook up apps in HTML/JS is a very slick move.

I don't know how it'll play out, but any average web developer will be able to immediately pump out an app without breaking open a iPhone SDK tome.

I don't know if it's possible to advance against the AppStore line of offense, but it's a seriously smart move.

I think their next coup should be to create an "open framework" so that other phone designers can latch on to whatever OS-specific hooks Palm plans on using.

I feel like this is critical. It can't be a closed framework.
Microsoft postpones Windows 7 public beta
How many hooks do you really need to get a developer up-and-running? File system access? Ability to play sounds?

AIR has a very limited set of extra javascript commands, but it is enough to give the developer the feeling they are definitely delivering a client-side app.
Nice implementation, good concept. My only suggestion you should not force people to take the quiz to get to the point of what is that the app does.

One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for interior designers. Really good to know : - )
http://pyml.sourceforge.net/
Obama includes broadband, smart grid in stimulus package
Amazon releases point-and-click console for EC2
RIM works by syncing all your email with their servers and then pushing it out to your blackberry with their own protocols. They do this because they were pushing email long before such capabilities came built into MS Exchange.
That's not usually how it works. Most covered calls are sold by investors who already own the stock and want to juice it for some extra return. They're not going out and buying more, so the unlimited downside simply doesn't exist.

I still fail to see the problem with discouraging short sellers from making stupid unhedged speculative bets.
I'd be interested in hearing the definition of pornography which covered Basecamp, CrazyEgg, that WoW guild hosting app I heard about earlier, or for that matter Bingo Card Creator.

"But Patrick, that's not fair. You're talking about real companies that have paying customers. I'm talking about 'web properties' that aim for userbases the size of nation states, and accordingly have to aim for the broadest possible reach and the poorest possible customers."

But why are we talking of those? The model demonstrably fails when you can afford to throw hundreds of millions at it. The "We provide value to customers and all our employees keep their clothes on, thank you very much" model has worked for thousands of sales in a year, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, etc...
Chrome 2.0 Preview Means Mac, Linux Versions Coming Soon
Patent Suit Targets 22 Software Companies
No new tools will emerge that make capital creation possible by small players?

That's a very hubris-tic thinking. I can already think of at least one that emerged recently - unprecedented parallel computation power. "Recently" here meaning after google IPO: virtualization, out of the box distributed computing, out of the box data mining/data analysis tools, on-demand datacenter capacity, cheap multi-core CPUs.

This "tool" just needs a "killer app" that would make this attractive to consumers (all these technologies are already attractive to businesses and are being adopted at enormous rate): I can already think of big players providing desktop virtualization, one YC funded start-up providing a virtualization based "Windows app store".

Here's another "tool" related to this theme: kernels and networking stacks are able to handle increasingly higher and higher number of simultaneous connections (here's a thought: read up on the epoll Linux system call and try and see if Meebo would have been able to start without a significant up-front hardware investment if such a facility was not available).

The only reason I mentioned those "tools" is that it's my specific interest: distributed computing. I see no reason to think there aren't other such tools. For the 2005-2008 "Web 2.0" boom, for example these tools were AJAX, Flash and broadband connections -- allow web applications to not only feel and act like desktop applications, but also do what only desktop applications once could, e.g. edit and play video or edit/mark-up photos in full size and colour. Would youtube or Flickr (both of which brought money to their investors) have taken off if there wasn't wide-spread adoption of cable and DSL?

Also I fail to see how "cleantech" (as much as great deal of it is buzzwords) can't create any new such tools: what about low power, low cost CPUs powering smart-phones and netbooks? Now any one can build rich applications that have almost persistent power and Internet connection (an Internet-connected computer independent of the power or land-line phone/cable grid that's hundreds of times faster than the computers provided computing power to entire universities).
Looks nice. I'm into this sort of music, so I'll use it for a few days and tell you if I have any problems/changes/ideas

:-)
While I don't disagree that there is something nifty about HTML/CSS/JS apps, I think we've all seen that this is not enough. Remember, first iPhone was in the same position - no SDK, just "widgets" and that didn't exactly fly with the developers. As somebody who's developed some widgets, I can say that there just isn't enough to go on in JavaScript to create full-powered apps, such as the ones available on iPhone now.

More importantly, in regards to this:

"any average web developer will be able to immediately pump out an app without breaking open a iPhone SDK tome."

Any average web developer can pump out a widget for iPhone, afaik, so I would disagree that this is an advantage that the Palm Pre has.
Suzy Orman gives her book away free online through Oprah.com
But that's their normal business risk.
Is it just me, or does this remind anybody else of Windows? Perhaps a ploy to steal more marketshare away from MS Office and IE users?
Does make referential transparency a functional language?
I liked it - fun! Tweeted it

Is there a way to tell my friends my results? Not via email, I want a direct link to tweet/IM etc
In the style engine I would move the options (love it, like it, etc.) over to the right of the picture, or underneath it. And make it look more like clickable buttons.

The placement and design makes it look like a menu.
Interesting piece of promotion from Suzy here.
I'd be interested to know Cory Doctorow's thoughts.
Suzy has not gone Creative Commons on the copyright and is forbidding forwarding and copying and is stopping the free distribution on Jan 15th (hilarious less than a week after Apple remove DRM and the file is a standard PDF).
But given her wide exposure I suppose that she wouldn't need an IdeaVirus (Seth Godin) type effect to get it into wide distribution.
I've downloaded it myself. So maybe I can forward the link to someone else.
I would love to know what her publishers think of this - either (a) they can't stand it but Suzy is so powerful that they had to go with it or (b) it was their idea, in which case it is significant news.
Thanks for the link to Whistle, just set it up for us here at Decorati and it's working out great.
This is clever, and I think it gets a pretty good read on me, but my real style (as judged by actual purchases) is cheap and/or used--so I'm probably not a target consumer here.

In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plains porcelain table lamp, and a throw pillow dwarfed a sofa. Giving some better sense of scale is the only definite improvement I can think of. That and don't let pictures almost completely overlap, as some candle holders do on a leaf bowl the second time I loaded the page.

ETA: Clicking to buy a "Deep River Rectangle Cocktail" table went through the affiliate program link and to the retailer, but it dropped me on the front page.
You don't think that's just because people have moved on to something else? Seasons change, feelings change.
hint: Hinduism has a taboo on eating beef.
Same problem here. Works in Firefox, but not IE7. After you answer the first question on the quiz I get a javascript error on the next page.
Interesting that Suzy Orman has just decided to distribute her latest book free online in standard PDF form.
See my post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427164 for more info.
I'd like to know what Cory thinks!
Yep - I also had to refresh once to grab the stylesheet.
They don't need to "dethrone the iPhone" to succeed, in the same way Apple didn't need to "dethrone Windows" to succeed. There's no reason why multiple manufacturers can't all have viable businesses in the same market space.
I agree that it has a bunch of novel ideas, but I wouldn't list the register-based VM and table optimizations among them; register-based VMs go back to the 1950s, depending on how you want to count, and using different representations for tables used as arrays and tables used as hashes (that's what you mean by "table optimizations", right?) is pretty unsurprising. I'm not saying it isn't a great engineering achievement; I never would have predicted that those things would have been worth the cost in Lua's context, and they were, brilliantly so.

I would instead list their one-pass-compiler implementation of flat closures and their approach to continuations, and especially integrating continuations with C code calling back into Lua.

I second the recommendation of the paper. I also think their paper on LPEG is worth reading for anyone who is considering using regular expressions or yacc or ANTLR for anything: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/peg.pdf
Already done: http://cotradeco.com/products/560-sunx-sunscreen-single-use-...
PinkSlipParty Boston: Come to Betahouse tonight if you're hiring or looking for a job
ha.

a) nothing prevents you from re-adding those friends
b) let's see you offer $12 for someone to stay off facebook forever.
If you do not use Macros. And spreadsheets are a cumbersome form of computation.
"Unless you have hooks for deeper functionality"

Functionality like what? Will it let you import physics libraries written in C? Give you access to OpenGL in javascript? What about networking stacks? What if I need OpenSSL? At a certain point you end up reinventing an awful lot of wheels even if the hooks are all there.
There are numerous Android devices planned for the near future. I own a G1 and I see it as a development platform. The hardware leaves something to be desired, but Android is actually quite nice.
IPhone with Quad-Core Processors Coming in June 2009?
"So 80% of your visitors"

Early adopters != browser share, right? But obviously you're right and this is an issue.
Stop Being an Automaton and Be a Programmer
Dirty Secrets of College Admissions
The lameness of this article is that he's making all of his conclusions on 3 big companies. That's an enormous generalization.

He's missing the whole lean, mean segment by looking only at the top.

Try comparing the sheer number of companies during 2.0 and 1.0, and you'll start to see the difference.
That is how he's calculating it. 1 user = 100 connections (on average), divide by 2 because the connections are two-sided, 50 connections, 5 whoppers per user.
Did you read the article? He establishes that on average, FB users have 100 connections, and derives 5 whoppers per user from there.
SOA is Dead; Long Live Services
Metaphor is also employed because it makes good writing. There's a clear difference between using metaphor to communicate, and outright deception.
I love this.

A couple of things.

1.1 The invite a friend form is broken.
1.2 Could I invite multiple friends using the same form?

2.1 Why are you searching for music like this at Amazon.com? I think you would have much better luck using beatport.com.

I just started using this right now; I'll keep you posted when I have more comments.

Thanks for creating this.
CVXOPT: A Python Package for Convex Optimization
Official post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/googles-new-favicon.h...
One thing that stood out for me was how they called Obama of 2007 "long-shot." It seems that we must always romanticize our next leader before inauguration, portray them as a valiant crusader who, against all odds, triumphed over obscurity and other obstacles, to arrive at a position where he could deliver us from the immoral and evil doings of the incumbent. Yes, even for Bush that happened: http://www.snopes.com/glurge/bushpray.asp

Now, let's all forget that Obama was relatively well-known even before his campaign (I saw an MSNBC article on him way back in 2006), and drown ourselves in optimism.
You bet I do. I'd much rather hire someone clever who finds the optimal solution rather than some career jobber who just hammers out any old solution to get his pay check.

Finding optimal solutions is good, whatever industry you're in.
Machine Learning is not a language-specific thing. Maybe Python makes it easy out-of-the box (I haven't used Python -- I don't know), but you do it in whatever language you want.

Many languages have modules you can just use. And of course you could just write your native implementation of an algorithm in you language of choice.

Actually, nowadays some of the databases come with data mining algorithms built-in -- I know Oracle and SQL Server have this functionality.

So basically, lots of options.
Good point, but 80% is a slight exaggeration. Especially if you're talking about slightly techie affluent people in the market for this sort of site. They'll be using chrome, safari, opera, or most likely firefox.
Facebook can be made profitable right now: Just display lots of ads on it and sell all its (user) data.

I guess the side would not last long with this approach, but it would make a few dollars in the next days.
Official Google Blog: Google's new favicon
The Django book, Second Edition.
Very nice. Thanks for sharing. Are you taking on new members? It sounds like a great model to share the common costs, and share the profits.
Very nice. Excellent design. The quiz was fun and easy to complete.

I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might like or dislike.

Like biohacker42, I stopped at the signup.
Marketing spurs every single American to buy hundreds or thousands of goods per year, and not once has anyone ever realized they bought one due to marketing. When asked, not a single one would ever cite a commercial.
> I thought people used "tl;dr" mostly because dismissing things is so much fun, not because they'd be willing to read a shortened version.

You might well be right! But I like to give the benefit of the doubt.
Best comment to the submitted article:

This is yet another fairly shallow treatment of the college admission process.
Facebook made ~$200mm in 2008. It's pretty clear they could profit on those revenues, and instead are choosing to invest in further growth (with outside capital). Why is the parent comment's belief so widespread here on hn?
The article is basically BS, referring to a few (unnamed) organizations that have been radically transformed by SOA. Basically she's saying SOA is still a great idea but people refuse to do it correctly and now their budget is gone.

I always equated SOA with Dependency Oriented Architecture. As it was usually implemented, it makes an "enterprise" into a set of highly interdependent systems, where problems spread quickly, every decision has to be negotiated, and no one can do anything on their own. People that just implemented services as Remote Procedure Calls (as opposed to asynchronous messaging based approaches) just get "CORBA with angle brackets".
Looks great, but... I can't seem to get any sound out of it? I click the Play button, and absolutely nothing happens.

It's disappointing, since I actually want to use it :p

Tried it in Chrome and Firefox 3 so far.

Small side note: log me in right after I register! Especially if you don't require email confirmation. It's a minor one-time irritation, but any friction you can remove, especially at the beginning of a user's experience, is worth it.
Comments, as well as discussions.
We recently released a new version of the quiz, and looks like we had an IE7 bug which we'll fix right away. BTW - 55% of Sproost visitors have been FF, only 25% have been IE7/6.
You are also picking the most expensive place to live. A big 2 bed 2 bath duplex with a porch is $2100 up in Harlem (near 125th). That's $525/month split 4 ways, also a very nice apartment (3 blocks from the 4/5/6 train).

If you work between lower manhattan and 33rd st, you can live in Jersey City and rent a huge 3 bedroom for $1500 ($500 split 3 ways). Commute time is 15-25 minutes.
What flash player do you have? You should have 9 or above
France has both difficult firing and minimum wage. In Germany it's not as bad: Firing is difficult, but there's no minimum wage for most jobs. Unfortunately minimum wage laws are all the rage, now.
What's broken about the invite form? Could you take a screenshot. I have noticed sometimes if you load the page and click on invite friends too soon it takes you to a white page with a blank form. This is because the JS hasn't finished loading. I'll have a fix for that soon.
I want to echo this as well, because I feel exactly the same - and because I left a comment on Matt's site saying i thought planbook could be MUCH more profitable, but I didn't go into elaborating on HOW it could be. gcheong nailed it.
Oops, he's bad at math, I'm bad at skimming.