skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite, from an MIT administrator:

"Other imperatives might be the need for, say, a good bassoon player for MIT's prized symphony orchestra, or people more likely to be interested in, say, energy studies, as opposed to yet more computer science majors."

So you founded your own startup at age 15 and sold it to Google? Impressive, but we're more interested in your bassoon skills.
That's what I thought too at first but the journal instructions have it covered:

"At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author's userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion)."
Things you should know before you register a domain name with anyone
Apple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the Apple II:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

From the article:Wozniak's open design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine.

The true engineer ethos. Let people add on, build, and convert the system to their needs.

Now it's just shove shiny expensive stuff at them and don't trust the user or developer to change anything. What a way to treat users, like children.
Fare Well, Free Trade
It depends whether non-humans have a sense of creativity and then the ability to recognize a good idea from the randomness. I don't think they do. We humans are, putting it mildly, ridiculously good pattern matchers..

If I were to pull some buzzwords from a single niche (let's say social networking) from a hat, say.. Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting. I could pull a lot of random ideas from joining some of them together:

- a site that lets you specify the music artists you like, then it finds Twitter users who have mentioned all of those artists.. instant music buddies!

- social profiles oriented around people's e-mail addresses

- random MP3 sent to your e-mail each day as voted for by people on a Web site

- voting on Twitter in elections

- use song mentions on Twitter to establish the most popular songs for certain artists

I won't go on..! These are not really great ideas, but they're not nonsensical either.

You might argue that earlier I mentioned "unconnected" ideas, whereas "Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting" are from a niche of sorts. True, but when I said "unconnected" I guess I meant more that the ideas are not connected in any practical way, rather than sharing a common element. Random words would probably not cut it :)
Some critiques:
Either explain how s3mer is pronounced, or change your name. If people don't know how to pronounce a word when they read it, its very, very easy to forget. Many people's brains work out words by sounding out the different syllables. Mine saw yours, didn't figure it out in a split second, and moved on. Your name was never implanted in my brain as a sound, only an image. That's not good.

There's no sound on the tutorial, is that correct?

"s3mer is a complete dynamic digital signage solution designed to be easy to use, cross platform and feature rich." So what does it do again? That doesn't tell me anything, its marketing speak. Does it run a giant digital billboard? Does it run computer screens across my store? Can it can turn my neon sign, OPEN sign, and store signs off when I want it to?

Honestly, there's no harm in telling us exactly what it does in the first sentence. Rather than click further into your site, people will leave because you haven't told them.

Actually, because there is no text on the homepage that explains what it does, (and gives an example of what someone would do with it) and no sound on the tutorial, even after looking around your site for a bit I still can't find out what it does. What do you do? Answer in two sentences, and then replace your homepage text with those two sentences.
What's an out of home media network? I'm a pretty geeky guy, and I don't understand that term. A small business will understand it even less.
"continued lack of consumer credit for the American car buyer" says the company. My message to them it should honestly read "lack of easy credit means people who are sensible won't buy our sub standard product".
You could twist it round though.. people wouldn't use as much credit if it were not for the tactics used in retail ;-)
Show me the Windows app that Microsoft said "You can't sell that" to the app developer.

I mean, sure, they've played games ("DOS ain't done 'till Lotus doesn't run"), but flat-out blocking something on Windows?

(If you want to cite Microsoft for something like this, you might be able to find an XBox Arcade related example.)
Note to others: if you're asking people to check out your site, please make the title a link or at the very least post a link so we don't have to do it ourselves.

Link: http://gifty.co.nz/
Why does this say 200K and the page say 100K?
http://signalfire.com/ is free, as far as I can make out. It looks well designed. I believe I tried it briefly a few months ago when it launched, but can't remember much else about it.
What does "without doubling up" mean? Is this like a wedding registry where you can all chip in?
There's a difference between "yet more" and "the most impressive"....

As far as I know, MIT has always been good about admitting people who have done things that, by definition, not a lot of people can do (such as place highly in a competition).

But, would a bassoonist or energy-studies focused person be better for the institution than compsci major #201? Probably.
Hi, I have a working prototype that aims to solve this problem, and a good partner with a good b-plan, and an initial system design. I would like to hook up with a few other talented individuals to get this done on the cheap. We've been told by many potential investors / VCs that the idea is fantastic, but they want a working beta first with customers. It is a chicken/egg problem right now. If you want to discuss ping me at davisford at gmail.
Good and if you haven't read Hugh Gallagher's college admission essay:

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm
okay, how about netscape. microsoft went to them in the early days of the web, and said, effectively: "you can't sell netscape navigator on windows. you can put your browsers on all the other platforms, but windows is for us. otherwise, we'll crush you." everybody knows what happened after that.
This is actually an old idea from early in Wikipedia's history:

"It was hoped that scientists would sometimes drop by wikipedia, and start a stub or short article on something they had researched, prior to it being accepted in a peer reviewed journal. This would allowed a scientist to prove that they discovered something first."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kim_Bruning/Lost_functiona...

As that page also notes, the very strict interpretation of "No original research" of the modern Wikipedia community makes this very difficult.

Even pages in userspace pushing what is deemed OR are liable to get deleted, though not nearly as much as in articlespace.
Ask HN: What are your goals for 2009?
Ask HN: What are your goals for 2009?
Oh yes, that isn't the clearest, is it? I mean "without buying doubles of things for the wedding couple." Like three toasters.

I'm thinking about the multiple-people-chipping-in thing, but I haven't implemented that yet.
A Journeyman's Pair Programming Tour
Really? I'm very interested to know how the UI prevented you from starting a list. Do you mean a bug or a useability issue? Please explain, and if there's an issue there, I'll fix it.

The problem with pastebins / Google spreadsheets / etc for wedding lists is that 1) they look icky and not at all wedding-ish, and 2) they're quite techie instead of being tailored for wedding guests.
I would implement product feeds from retailers (available from the big affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare, Share-a-Sale, etc). You would earn a commission on sales generated through these products. Since the model is about generating purchases, it seems to make perfect since to get a piece of that transaction. I am not sure, as a user, that I would pay to maintain a list because there are similar free options available on the web (thinking mainly about wedding registries like weddingchannel.com).

Get the .com if you want to have universal acceptance of the brand. A large percentage of the population assumes that every website is a .com, so if you stick with the .co.nz you will essentially be delivering free traffic to the gifty.com domain owner (since many people will just use the .com out of habit).

Its likely that the domain squatter will want more than you are willing to pay for the domain. You are best off just spending a few hours on the domain registrar of your choice trying to find an alternative name that is descriptive and available.
That's pretty awesome. i added the command that grabs your wireless router's MAC address, adds it into a skyhook URL, and returns your gps coords.
Real-Life “Grand Theft”: Inside Traders Made $250,000 Off of Electronic Arts’ Take-Two Bid
I'd say that my overarching goal for '09 is to be a part of the solution rather than wasting time complaining about the problem.
Must Ignore vs. Microformats
Loss leaders and brand builders.
Windows was not a closed environment like the app store. I was comparing the comment to how the developer community during the launch of Windows saying Unix would win in the long run.

They said Windows was too restrictive and your letting a for-profit business control the platform is too risky, so users would naturally move to the open platform. But the average, mainstream user, was content with Windows because they were satisfied as long they had their Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel.
Although it may work well once I'm signed up, personally I am about 10 times more reluctant to sign up for a monthly subscription in the first place. I don't like that the price might change for month to month and I don't like that if something goes wrong with billing that it might cause the service to stop working (and if they have my data and it might get deleted while I'm on holiday then that's particularly bad). And finally unless I plan to only use it for a short time, it is nearly always very expensive compared to a one off purchase.

So - if you want me to actually buy your software - make the pricing as simple and transparent as possible and make it either annual or one time purchase.
I'm 'squatting' on about two dozen app names right now
It might work on a large scale in conjunction with shopping malls. Or better yet, in conjunction with many specialty retailers.

Typically, in the U.S. people use wedding registries from stores. They go to a store and are given a scanner and scan the things they want. Then they tell people what stores they are registered at, and people sign in and get a list. they then pick something and when they purchase it (either online or at the store) they just hand the teller the barcode and the gift is automatically removed from the list. No chance of four toasters.

Naturally, this mans people register at large, well known stores, so their friends across the country will have somewhere to go to get them a gift. It makes no sense to register at a tiny store if many of your friends from back home or college can never get there to purchase a gift because it is far away.

So, in the U.S., breaking into the wedding/babyshower market might be hard, unless you can come up with a unique way to compete.
Since there have been several comments about what it should look like or possible errors, I note the original source is from 2004.

http://www.eigenfactor.org/map/maps.htm

Have there been major changes in four years? Don't ask me - my Journalism degree didn't even warrant its own dot on the social sciences map.
Jon was a friend of a friend when I was in college. Very sharp guy. He was working in Washington for another senator a couple years ago. That is where he met Obama.

Jon also worked on the Deval Patrick campaign for governor in Massachusetts, too. Jon wrote his speeches, too.
I was on COBRA two years ago, and if I recall correctly I was paying $500-$600 per month for me and my wife. So it is definitely not cheap. Accenture had pretty good benefits but they weren't extravagant. Remember, there are time limits on COBRA, if you plan on quiting, you're only eligible for 18 months of COBRA coverage. If you are in good health, I'd recommend finding your own coverage.
Wow great comments, no one has pointed out this issues before.

s3mer is pronounced "streamer"

To follow on your advice here are the two sentences (long sentences):

s3mer is a pice of software that helps people and businesses create and maintain digital signs using flat screens, computer monitors, TVs, projectors or even giant digital billboards as a display surface. Your digital signs can have still images, animations, video and even live data from the web.
Removing the last 8 bits or, by the way, the whole IP address from the user log data DOESN'T make it anonymous.

http://tinyurl.com/l8rfm

"Yahoo will also hide cookie data related to each search log and strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number, from the query itself."

There's much more personal information in a few month of search logs than that.
Call me crazy, but I think that a solid business plan doesn't depend on the whims of a single party.
Yep. The iPhone is a console.
Congratulations on the mashable write up. Seems like a cool app. What wasn't clear to me is if there is some sort of email based alert system to proactively let me know if I was not getting my moneys worth (i.e. an email reminder that I should watch one of my outstanding movies tonight becase tomorrow I cross into the the above average cot per movie bucket). I may have just missed that, but if it doesn't exist it s definitely a feature that would make this type of service a lot more useful for me.

One note about building a business on top of the online DVD category- Netflix is the whole ball of wax. Blockbuster is a very distant second and the rest are all tied for last. This means that you will have limited opportunities to monetize your audience by offering up cost saving alternatives the way sites like mint.com and billshrink.com do in other categories (credit cards, mobile plans, etc).

All that being said- nice work!
all i see here is idle speculation.

the tech press doesn't understand apple, because the company doesn't operate by the same rules as everybody else. jobs could have opted out of doing the macworld keynote because there's nothing interesting to announce, because he got into a fight with one of the conference organizers, because he's afraid he'd get booed for having announced that apple won't be at macworld next year, etc.

one part i'll agree with is that apple's fortunes are unhealthily tied to steve jobs. once he's gone, the company will be in for a world of hurt.
MIT perceives an ongoing need for basic biological science researchers and would definitely take biology major #30 over computer science major #200. What it's really happy about is the would-be biology researcher who wants to be in an interdisciplinary environment and is willing to learn math and computer science, the better to understand biology.
I thought that was Google Code.
Spore Sculptor - Have Your Game Character Printed In 3d For $50
While this is a LONG time and definitely Apple needs to improve their support of developers with at least a status message of some kind, it could be that the app is complex enough that it's taking a long time due to that complexity. Apple does review all the code and test it out, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Either way, Apple needs to start communicating! It must be awful for these guys to wait like this not knowing one way or the other, and with that much riding on it. Wow.
You should post this one their feedback page. I'm not behind this site :)
We're working on it ;)
Thanks for the useful comments.

The main difference between Gifty and traditional gift registries is that with gift registries you're tied to a particular store, say "Bed, Bath & Beyond". With Gifty you can add gifts to your list from whatever store. I'm biased, but I think this is a fairly big advantage.

Actually, I'm probably more keen to capture the NZ market at this stage, but you're probably right about .com's for universal appeal.
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Anyone who traveled to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in 1982, as I did, speaking Mandarin (and a little Cantonese and Taiwanese) and interacting with ordinary people, turns into a lifelong fan of free trade. It helped me that I read an abridged version of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations after finishing that trip. I agree with the article cited in the opening post that the idea of free trade is in political danger at the moment. Too bad.
Just like skillwho. They get around 70K unique visitors a month so I would say that sounds like a good idea. I'm not a big fan of their design, mind you, so maybe that's something you could improve on.
Dell’s Mystery ‘Adamo’ Could Be Thinner Than Air
First sentence: right on. Second: won't happen.
Bump for supporting surfrider! Oh, and some nice apps!
Google supplied the wood.
My pleasure. The only follow up point I would make is that if you decide to expand beyond NZ and have built the brand about the localized extension, then you may have some headaches to deal with down the road. Best of luck!
This title is annoying - who thinks the amount you spent on development should have any bearing at all on whether Apple approve your app?

Not me, anyway. $500k shouldn't guarantee you an approval.
Couldn't the abstract dumbed down a little serve as the stub for wikipedia?
Thanks answerly.
Email alerts are Opt-In. You sign up and say 'send me an alert every $dayfoweek when I've kept movies for longer than $days'.
Your pro-active alert idea is good as well. I'll look into that too.
Video:caylee anthony crime scene photos
This looks really cool. Looking forward to trying it out...
This is going to happen. Not yet, because the benefits don't outweigh the dorkiness (and complexity).

Don't think of it as in the link you posted - the 320x200 camera as seen in "True Lies", think of it as in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End or Stross's Manfred Max-with-the-silly-spelling.

When it can look like an ordinary pair of glasses (or contacts), when it can process high resolution video on the fly and overlay onto it, when the supporting systems aren't a backpack full of hobbyist wire-tangle, when you can plug it into your iPhone and watch a film on it instead of using one of those portable DVD players, then they'll start turning up more and more. Like head-up on-windscreen displays are appearing in high end cars now.
Imagine that everyone had time to get education, have several generations of kids (& debug the process), maybe figure a few things out.

OTOH, we'll have to explore space, as we'll quickly run out of room.
Doing What I Love...Not Sure It Is Work...StockTwits
Clickpass (YC S07) is being acquired
My main one is to have my first web app launch
One big downside would be the continual sending of your current location to a central server asking for local data.

Location based services - only when I choose to switch them on for now, thanks.
Synthasite Buys Clickpass
There's a ton of alumni networks on Facebook that seem to be operating sort of successfully. Are you talking about reducing the feature set?

As for the ads service, I'm not sure if you're talkinga about something like addiply, which is a UK-based attempt at hyperlocal advertising that avoids the Adsense model.

http://www.twadservices.co.uk/cufc/taintro.php

The guy who started it was profiled in this piece in Britain's Guardian newspaper:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/dec/04/startups-adv...

I would think you would need some kind of background in advertising and be the kind of person who doesn't mind knocking on a lot of doors to attempt this kind of venture.

Here's their self-description. Sounds like what you're talking about (let me know if I misunderstood):

"We empower both the local/niche publisher and the local/niche advertiser to source and place perfectly-targetted, digital advertising themselves without third party intervention."

I don't see why this would not work even better in the US but it remains to be seen whether Addiply will have any success - it seems like an uphill battle to me.
probably because he thinks that "how didn't i get since i'm obviously so wonderful????? " has no mistakes
better yet, they should setup an affiliate link with them. 4% of $40,000/yr for a referral, is not that bad
Best CEOs of 2008: Round Three
make my first 1$ after 6 mos. development (1500 hours):)
Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (1932-2008)
You should worry more about what happens when cobra runs out..because If you or someone who is dependent on you has a history of -anything- the insurance company can ratchet it up to the maximum allowed by the insurance commission.

A few years back this meant ~2k/month for a family of 4. The only comfort is that they -have- to offer you something.
He probably means that we need banks to start lending again, to give car credits not a direct loan to GM.

In the past year their sales are down ~40%
for comparison Toyota's are down ~30%
To sneak some Haskell into production.
On The Go? Watch Your Net Worth Plummet Anywhere With Mint For iPhone
Do they still get t-shirts?
Yeah, this might make a nice tool for publishing any api docs (checkout a separate branch, generate, commit, and push your api docs), or code coverage reports, etc.

I don't know if it's really taken off, but a bug tracking tool like ditz could really benefit from this (it can generate an html report based on the bug "database" stored in your git repo).

http://ditz.rubyforge.org/
Affluence.org
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Time will tell. I'm pretty sure it will though. iPhone is 1 device on 1 network, Android will be dozens of devices across almost all networks. It's Mac vs. Windows all over again.
When floats don't float
Sounds like someone took pgs advice and bought early.
Apologies, I was suffering from email bloat and missed it. Dawdle is now listed - thanks! Some gamer is going to be quite pleased.
This sounds really cool. The only problem is that people like to congregate, but maybe virtual reality could help.
Except they can never allow you to do anything dynamic on the server or you'd be able to read the HttpOnly github session cookies of anyone logged into github.com itself.

Well, they could, but they'd have to move to www.github.com exclusively, wait for all those session cookies to expire or for folks to visit and get them reset...
grats! I use clickpass everyday (mostly because my startup supports clickpass and login to it via Clickpass). I've never heard of synthasite but if CP says they're cool I trust them.
You're assuming nobody learned their lesson.

Although, that's not necessarily a bad assumption, given Apple's attitude thus far. I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach on this one.
Economist Magazine's Take on India's Entrepreneurship Scene