skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gah, that line always bugs me. Some things work well without sign-ups, some things wouldn't work as well with them.

I dunno about this one, but I'd understand any designer who wants people to get accounts. There's some rationale there.
Ask HN: Educational Software Opportunity
I am currently in high school (gr 12) in Canada. I am extremely frustrated by the software we have to use at school to communicate with teachers. I think I have come up with a better approach and have a lot of ideas around building a better software package. The only problem I have right now is whether or not it's worth investing my time in this. Education seems to be really hard to break into, and I'm only 16 and I won't have any funding or anything. Anyone have any tips on what I should do? Is it worth it?
The real problem is that the whole concept of "release windows" is confusing and frustrating. Better explanations won't fix it.
Edible plants for the most part rely on being eaten to spread their seeds, so if animals did, it wouldn't matter. Humans gathering wild berries on the other hand eat them and then "spread" their seeds into some chemical filled RV toilet.
The vast majority of patents are just novel applications of existing ideas to a specific domain.

Apple didn't patent the LCD screen, or the touch screen, or even multi-touch. They (presumably) did, however, patent a multi-touch lcd screen used for controlling a cell phone. (This may be a bad example since i don't know what they patented, but you get the idea).

Assuming there's no prior art (which is a big assumption), No-one has implemented an auto-trimming database column before, therefore it's a new process.

Personally I think the patent is ridiculous (there are big problems with the definition of 'novel' with respect to software), but there's a specific reasoning that leads to this.
500 Million iPhone apps downloaded
I suggest using predator birds and (directable) loud noise, either high-pitched or predator birdcalls.
"Is there conclusive evidence that in general, it is better to eat the whole plant rather than just a controlled dose of the active chemical?"

It's different for every problem. If you want to take aspirin then it's better just to take aspirin because the compound alone causes less stomach irritation. However if you want to take resveretrol then it's (probably) better to take the pill with a glass of red wine. The problem is that allopathic doctors are will NEVER prescribe taking the whole plant, even if peer reviewed research has shown it to be clearly better than a synthetic alternative.

"The naturopathic shaman doesn't know what he gave you."

Yes, they do. They look up what could be causing your health problems in peer reviewed journals and then try different things. With the depression example, there are five or six different underlying things that can cause a serotonin imbalance that creates depression. With allopathic medicine they just give you SSRIs, which fix the serotonin problem without ever fixing what's causing it. With naturopathic doctors they will actually do blood tests and thyroid tests to see if you have too much or too little of something. Even though thyroid problems are extremely common, allopathic doctors will almost never do a thyroid test unless you explicitly ask for one.

"And that's why it is unscientific. All you know is how you felt before, and how you feel now. You can't know the cause of your change in feeling, except in a randomized trial."

Except they are starting with drugs that have been clinically proven in randomized trials. They are just going back and adjusting the dosage afterward, unlike allopathic doctors who will just keep you on the dose that has been shown to be most effective for the "average" person. In many ways this is even better than the process used by allopathic medicine.
Yeah. I don't think Hulu is the end-all be-all of online TV. It's just the best we've seen to date.

Them giving dates (on The Daily Show it says "This will only be here for 5 more days") seems to work pretty well, though.
The US and Israelis are working on lasers to take out mortars. They are radar based, which would make hitting birds harder. But a vision system tied to the lasers could probably drop a bird before it gets sucked into the turbines.
(1) if you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it less?

Because you don't want to get sick of it? Because there are other things you want to do?

(2) If you don't love what you're doing, why not do something else?

Because it lets you do what you love? In the real world there are no single objective problems.
I'm a bit confused. Who's lacking clothes in your analogy?
They even got two episodes added back that weren't there before (The Gang Gets Whacked, pts. 1 & 2). Sweet.
Agreed. He was my vote for the CEO Crunchies Award. Just because someone has a good product is one factor, but I think this guy handles himself like CEOs should.
I think you have to ask yourself whether you can spend the time that would have otherwise went into creating this system in a better way. Consider the following three scenarios:

(1) You do take on the project and fails completely. Was that experience worth the time spent? Did you maximize how much you can learn/take away from it? Are you worse off than if you didn't start it at all?

(2) You complete it and achieve moderate success.

(3) You complete it and it surpasses what you originally thought it would achieve.

Are you already spending your free time in a better way? Here, I use "better" completely subjectively. You are only a senior in high school once and it very well might be the case that this time is better spent in company of friends, partying and enjoying your life.
OK, then we don't know if you're really a loser trying to appear successful so we'll listen to you on PHP.
Big money there, definitely. They're a common pest in every area I've been in Canada.
You're not fooling anyone, mate!! This stuff is crap!
100,000th Google Knol published
anachronism: starting any patent with "a computer implemented method..."
Star hopping : Goto Scope: vi : IDE
There is no need to redefine the word "smart" in order to make your point. We already have a word for that: "good". Good at talking to girls, changing tires, etc.
That doesn't negate my argument though. Hulu is a creation of major content owners getting together and agreeing to put their content in one place and to run advertisements against it. The problem is that the same content owners who agree to put their content up for a limited time are also not getting the full picture of how things have changed in the last few years. The methods for distribution have changed. The content creators no longer have sole control over the distribution medium, like original tv and radio broadcasting stations.

The first major break in that decades old paradigm was the wide-spread growth of cable networks. This opened up more viewing opportunities and made room for new networks. Comedy Central itself is an example of this. The major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS fought against cable pretty heavily in the beginning. Then they finally caught on and that has been their primary broadcast medium for the last 20-30 years. Now its happened again, and this time not only are the old networks being reactionary, so are the same cable networks that sprouted up as cable tv spread around. This time distribution is online and essentially worldwide. The content owners are now treating their own websites and services like channels and tv stations. They want to make the audience come to them in order to get access to content. They have yet to catch on that this will fail too.

The audience, us, will get content wherever we want it. A lot of us download via filesharing and p2p sites. Some of us buy via services like Amazon and iTunes. Most of us still watch TV, but more and more of us have DVRs and choose to skip over commercials. We will watch content how and where we want.
The rules of the new paradigm basically mean that content is no longer packageable. You can't wrap it up in a tape or disk, lock it into a channel, or lock it down to a website. The audience is no longer vertical, but has instead gotten much wider and deeper. If you want to make money from the content you produce, you have to spread it out to every distribution method where you can get some kind of incremental revenue from it. Instead of having your content on your one station or website, keep it there and also push it out to Hulu, TV.com, iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, and wherever else you can push it to. Don't remove your content from certain services as an artificial mechanism to try to direct where your audience goes to get it. All you end up doing is alienating your fans and turning them off.
It seems "ClownCo" isn't quite turning out like we expected. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972
how did you use mechancial turk with your product? would you recommend i test a consumer web app with it?
# while [ 1 ]; do echo "All your drives are belong to us!"; sleep 30; done

Hee, things I didn't think I'd ever see on ibm.com, #12234 in a series.

People with company songbooks and nice ties must be spinning in their graves
Right, because hippies totally invented consumerism.
Zuckerberg winning that award was a partial contribution to the incredibly laughable nature of that entire production.
How about TV, where the release window is "while it airs"?
Ask YC: Good resources to learn about lead generation?
To keep it simple... building an app, don't want to rely on advertising and think lead generation may be a viable way for it to make money.

Don't know much about the mechanics of lead gen and the whole field seems to filled with snake oil salesmen and seos and is generally sleazy. Looking for a good resource(s) that lays out the ins and outs, the pitfalls, overviews the networks etc...

Anyone have any suggestions?
Also, consider finding partners: people who are already working on something similar. www.soshiku.com comes to mind immediately.
Making Work, Destroying Wealth
Why is this linked through 37signals? Why not just link through to the original message?

I understand people respect 37s here for whatever reason, but sometimes the linking is just ridiculous. This has nothing to do with 37s...
You need to hit return twice to start a new paragraph.
What if biological viruses were made by the same folks who make computer viruses?
also, here is a podcast by stephen blank that a friend just recommended http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2048
Hypothesize two airlines, one flying current airliners and the other flying airliners that are 0.5% safer and whose tickets are 5-10% more expensive.

Who do you think gets all the business on competing routes? Filling even 5% more seats on average dramatically improves airlines P&L statements.

I'm not saying it's rational, but big businesses have been built on the inability of the average person to do math. (Airport insurance kiosks, lotteries, pachinko parlors, or Las Vegas/Macao.)

(I'm also not suggesting that there's an easy way to get that 1 in 200 improvement in safety, even at a 10% cost penalty, but if your airline gets a reputation for bad safety, you're all but done, even if you come up on the top of Expedia/Travelocity/ITA searches when sorted by price...)
You're killing us here :)
I think I can explain the problem. I taught PHP for a semester at the college level to Web designers. I had 3 months (1 class a week) to get them from no programming experience at all to having a small web application (a contact list). Mostly they all managed to accomplish the task but obviously there's only time to cover the minimum functionality necessary. In that sense, PHP is easy.

Now, here's the problem, absolutely nothing they learned is useful for building a reasonable-sized long-lasting web application. They didn't use any classes. They didn't use a template engine. They didn't use a database abstraction. They learned PHP but they didn't learn to use PHP to build real applications. So all that easiness of PHP is all wrong. If you want to do it right, it's not easy.
Motion to keep Jobs's health off Hacker News?
I think that sort of geometry would encourage the air to flow around the engine, reducing pressure & density of the air actually propelling the aircraft. This would seriously impact the efficiency of the engines, and I suspect this is what the article is referring to. A flat grille would be crazy as it would just collect the birds, held in place by the extreme pressure conditions.
We've had a lot of people tell us that they're using Git on Windows with msysgit. It provides everything you need to be productive with Git and the install procedure is pretty slick. There's always room for improvement and a TortoiseGit [1] is in the works too, though still quite alpha.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
They're pretty much all faulty assumptions since they're predicated on the notion that an animal outside of the food chain can do something to avoid affecting it. From farming wildlife to completely eliminating countless species on a daily basis... what the hell do people expect? Everything to magically work out?

We are a part of the global ecosystem only insofar as we are physically in it; we don't interact with the biological community the way any other creature does. Of course we're going to fuck it over. Hopefully I'll be dead before we've completely eliminated it.
Are we playing 20 questions or something? Just come out with it; the name you are looking for is cow catcher.
We were turned on to Sphinx by smock over at Octopart. It enabled us to do our awesome drill down screens at Dawdle that set us apart from our online marketplace competitors: http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Nintendo_DS/Vi... (No one else lets you screen by seller rating or price from the get go; only from the product pages themselves.)

It would be really neat to have a favored list of packages like this used by HN denizens. We used to use SWISH-E. Ugh.
Talk about misplacing your fears.. Airplanes typically cruise at around 33,000 feet; there are no birds that high. All bird-related accidents happen upon take-off and landing, but even then they are barely a threat. The numbers I heard, in the last twenty years or so, there have been about two hundred deaths world-wide due to birds colliding with airplanes and I'm not sure what percentage of that is for commercial airliners versus general aviation. Birds hitting airplanes is probably the least-likely way you can perish.

I'll even bet $5,000 of my own money that neither you, nor anyone you personally know will be killed by a bird colliding with an aircraft, ever.
China Pads Its Global Internet Lead (298 M)
How is performance with msysgit? The Cygwin port leaves a lot to be desired on larger projects.
There is an old saying: "bored people are themselves, boring"
Soshiku comes to mind, especially because Andrew Schaper is only 18, I believe.

I'm a Canadian citizen (living in the Bay Area) working on an education startup, and believe me, this is a very good time to be "breaking into" education. There are several startups doing very interesting things in this space.

I'd be happy to share ideas and make introductions if you need them. my email is in my profile.

good luck!
That means 5% are paid. That's a pretty good conversion rate.
Here's my longer reply.

First of all Daniel, college won't solve your problem. In fact, don't rely on any external factor to solve your problem (such as transferring to a "more interesting" school). It's all you.

I used to (and still do sometimes) have the same problem as yours, which is thinking that a lot of people are not interesting. This is simply not true, because if I end up spending more time with that person, I would usually change my mind.

What we are experiencing is a typical out-group mentality. It's a human instinct to be on the defensive when we first meet someone not in our tribe, because he can potentially be a spy from another tribe who plans to destroy our tribe.

This simply doesn't apply in the modern days, but we still have that emotion leftover from evolution. Being an emotion means you really have no control over it, you might even make up reasons for your behavior such as "oh this person is just not interesting." It's a known fact, that emotion is felt first and then re-interpreted by your brain. (Check out books on neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, if you want to learn more.)

However your brain can be retrained, just like how you can re-train someone who stutters. Believe me, the latter one is a lot harder to do.

This is what you can do to re-train yourself:

1. Get out of your house (exercise if you don't already)

2. Meet five strangers everyday (any age group is fine)

3. You goal is not to make friends. You goal is to make them laugh five times in twenty minutes

4. Keep a log of the people you meet and write down one thing interesting about each one. (Don't write "not interesting". There's always something interesting.)

5. Keep doing this for at least a month

Making friends is about giving, not taking. I can be the most boring person in the world if I don't want to be friends with you. So give me a reason to be interesting. Make me laugh and I will be interesting. If I'm still not interesting by then, you are having a good time, so what does it matter.

Eventually you'd want to do what SwellJoe has suggested, start a band, start a club, be a leader. Leader gives tons of value to the group, that's why people follow him (and be friends with him).

So, stop thinking, Daniel. Turn off your computer, get out and meet someone right now.

P.S. If you are interested in these kinds of networking/entrepreneurial training, I'm writing a series of blog posts on this topic.
Which is one of the reasons the FAA exists. It's probably not the best idea to let airline safety get sorted out by market forces.
Reminds me of the DNS hack where the same thing happened with DNS and browsers stopped displaying unicode domains entirely after a few too many wachovia.com lookalikes.
That's the most Dilbert thing I've ever read.
Yeah - I think there is going to be a natural wariness as people get used to using cloud services. This kind of clause is only going to make people nervous.
git-svn still doesn't work in msysgit.
Yes, it would probably be too costly, require too much energy, and would not effectively neutralize flocks. I wonder if a small cannon wouldn't be acceptable.
The legitimacy of this patent aside - how does IBM think it will benefit from the protection this patent gives?

Just seems like patent cruft than patent misuse.
"So all that easiness of PHP is all wrong. If you want to do it right, it's not easy."

However, much of the time getting people to do it at all is harder than getting them to do it right after they're doing something. PHP makes it easy to start doing something and see results, and that immediate reward prompts those who wouldn't otherwise get that far. A coupla weeks ago, tptacek made this point, and I think it applies here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418157

[Edit: to be clear, tptacek may not have specifically been talking about PHP, but about the fact that writing lots of code is an indicator of total usefulness even if the code is currently bad or inappropriate.]
Yeah, clear documentation was _the_ reason I used php. In fact, it's the same reason jQuery has become my javascript lib of choice. When documentation is complete and centralized like that, the barrier to entry is vastly lower.

Rdoc tries to be that for ruby projects, but it still feels like a step backwards. Google lessens the pain somewhat, but it's still nice to just hit php.net/manual/en or api.jquery.com and find everything I need.
I couldn't find your email in your profile. I am looking at building a software package that is aimed at schools boards/schools as opposed to students. And that's why I was wondering if it's worth it.
Get your checkbook out - HeyAmigo.net is going on eBay
Working link:
http://www.scribd.com/full/10601416?access_key=key-mf4icwvtd...
Without revealing your identity, perhaps you can share what mistakes you made, what you learned etc...?
I've tried to look for partners but either they are bad coders, not committed, or are not "startup" people.
very clearly explained pitch, nicely done
That could be a perfect solution, but given the high relative speeds it's probably not possible. I take it must be pretty difficult to detect even a flock of birds at the the necessary distance.
The Two Types of Browser Zoom
not really. They were usually idiots, that were good at politiking. At least in my country, this was the case. If you came from a rural/villager family, you had a greater chance to move up, as long as you didn't step in the wrong toes, no regardless of your skills.
I hate it when people do this. It serves no purpose whatsoever. We know wars have collateral damage, and it's sad, but it doesn't make them any less necessary. When someone is repeatedly firing rockets at you, you put a stop to it.

When they do it from civilian areas, they're simply guaranteeing this sort of story when the reaction comes. By running it, the media is providing the terrorists some PR.
is it just me getting this feeling lately or 37 signals is trying to spam HN
It's OK to complain about language features that make it harder to maintain code. Most Programs I know would rather maintain old Pascal code than any other language, but they hate writing in it. PHP is the other end of the spectrum where it's easy to write and extend, but quickly hit's a wall where it's extremely difficult to maintain. You also have "full spectrum" languages like LISP where fixing minor bugs can be reasonably simple or mind bogglingly complex depending on who codded it an how it was maintained.
Hi sh1mmer,

Kongregate does a great job with concentrating on game developer tools and providing a deeper experience for its users. We don't plan to directly complete with that. We want to let other websites embed games to provide more content for there users.

So imagine if Youtube was massive as a destination website but didn't allow people to embed videos. The analogy is not perfect but fits well to describe the different.

Either way the world of casual gaming is a lot bigger than just what Kongregate does, I am sure we will find a space and hopefully when you want to install games on your websites you know where to come ;-),
Gladwell.com: Teachers and Quarterbacks
"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."

http://www.peertopatent.org/
Does this mean Knol is a success?
It's the modern-day equivalent of Tokyo Rose
Wait, I don't understand. Are you saying that Israel was in some way justified in their attacks, Matt?
While reading all the lengths he was considering going to to make the thing blink, I just assumed an animated .gif was not an option. Seems pretty darn obvious.
Report: Yahoo Chairman, Microsoft CEO meet in New York