skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trivial problems are easy to solve - real problems are hard. Speaking as a veteran of health care and education, the challenges in these fields are primarily bureaucratic and political, not technical. You would be crazy to jump into either field without an understanding of the domain or preexisting relationships with potential customers. In my experience, startup-minded folks rarely have the experience beyond software itself necessary to build a business in another field.
Dreamers and Doers - 'teaching' entrepreneurship at University
New Zealand , First Nation to see in 2009. AP Cashes in
Naan Kadavul movie trailer first on Galatta.com
Watch Arya's upcoming movie "Naan Kadavul" trailer exclusivley here on Galatta.com
That is just not my style on that blog. I started posting links and keep doing it that way.
IPhone, MySpace, Facebook Race To Micropayments In 2009
is this whole thing a B2B proposition (someone hosts data, someone else pays for the delivery of the part of this data they need - which is great, don't get me wrong) or could this also become a "consumer" B2C thing? (i.e. I sell digital crap, and charge users via Amazon).
And that is why I have an old school cell phone...
There are DOZENS of apps exactly like this one already on Facebook. What does Facebook Connect buy them over being a normal app? And what suggests this one will succeed where all the others failed to achieve critical mass?
"Xrange(), which generates numbers on demand, is more efficient and generally what’s needed."

They capitalized a case-sensitive identifier because it was at the beginning of the sentence? I'm so conflicted!
Programming and the law
then you are consenting to a relationship with whoever you match first. if you later say "oh, i didn't really mean to put you on my list!", its kinda like asking someone out and then saying "oh, i didnt really mean to ask you out!"
nope. you're 100% wrong. there are tons of cheesy matching apps on facebook, but none do exactly what this one does.
nearly all of the sites out there that you trust with your username/password are susceptible to this. you just have to trust that all of them will protect your privacy, as they indicate in their policies. facebook and google harvest much more personal info on you than this site, btw.
Sign me up baby!
There is a tough competition for these civil servant jobs

Because they are massively, massively corrupt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co...

"For nine consecutive years the EU court of auditors has refused to sign off the budget. The numbers are huge. The annual EC budget is around ¤100 billion (£65 billion). The auditors cannot clear 95 per cent of that. We simply cannot tell what is happening to that money"
I presume Google Reader only fetches a feed once for its many users. So how did you control access? (IFrames?)
Neat post!
I realize it was an experiment, but some of the examples are sort of silly.

$20 for some corporate meeting's catered buffet? Why not just buy a nice lunch with the $20?
I'd agree with pretty much all except the below quote.

"... So, even though I think Spolsky's posts have gone further and further off the rails ..."

From the article ...

"... But for startups, everything about your resume has to scream getting your own hands dirty... the only thing we REALLY need is code to be written, and customers to be called on the telephone ..."

reads to me, on-track. One thing I have noticed is JOS has always been skewed towards JOS type businesses (privately owned, bootstrapped software development companies) rather than Startups (fast revenue based technology companies that in the end are either sold or IPO'd). So the stories seem misaligned.
JPG’s dead. Why your advertising-funded business could be next…
It is not tho' - those taxes pay for a lot of other things, such as perfectly capable people not working. We have the same problem in the UK.

Solution: NO welfare AT ALL to anyone who doesn't complete their education. And backdate it to the 70s.
It was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I am serious here.

Please allow me to explain:

I think it's great that parents care about their children's education, but a cramming school is potentially a soul-crushing experience. Instead of delegating their children's education to an obsolete "educational" system, parents should take a more active role.

Maybe I am overreacting, but since I was brought up by hippie parents, I lived a childhood in which I could pursue my interests (be them LEGO, electronics, programming, or drawing) in absolute freedom. There was no pressure to get in the "big" schools, nor to take exams. The goal was learning and intellectual pursuit per se.

Of course you are free to disagree, but I think cramming schools might be good for average kids with average drive and average creativity. I was a rather curious child, and my curiosity survived the "educational" system partly because I always had the freedom to pursue my intellectual interests free of interference.
You can in your preferences tweak FB to prioritize status updates in your newsfeed and de-prioritize everything else.
Speaking as someone who went to bronx science (another nyc magnet hs), the level of awesomeness of my friends from hs is matched by only a few people in the ivy league et al level schools.

On the other hand, the folks who needed to do more than maybe spend an afternoon reading a testprep booklet to test into a magnet school are not the people who stand to benefit from such an environment. Magnet schools are amazing places for the right people, but fudging that determination doesn't end well for other people
"... Anyway, the amimarginalized.com site uses “advanced” algorithms to determine how marginalized your career is. ..."

Mildly readable & more an advert for their company. Interesting bug I found on the site though. By entering a term & repeatedly hitting the enter key using the same term, multiple images are rendered by the server to the client ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3162006025/

This article is a better read, "Artificial artificial intelligence - our experience with Mechanical Turk" ~ http://shout.setfive.com/2008/11/20/artificial-artificial-in...
The solution to this problem is federalism, but we've drifted a ways from the balance of state and federal power that used to exist. Constituents don't care about where the things they want are coming from, and they will vote for the people who give them those things. The end result is a federal government that is ever increasing in size. It would take a massive civic education effort to fix this problem.
Both the article and you have inspired me to ban digg and reddit from my reading list. There are grander things in life than reading about yet more war atrocities and political boondoggles.
Neither of those is an effective counter-argument:

1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.

2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!

Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.
"I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures)."

That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.
What a crock o'shite.
They don't make $1000 on a $1090 laptop. The hardware also costs money.
Ooh, I just wanted to add to this that my last paragraph is not directed at JPG Magazine. Their content sourcing was pretty innovative.
1 - Mac users may like the difference, but windows users are not familiar with the difference, making it difficult for them to switch initially. It does not matter what is superior - if Mac were to minimize the small differences, it would be way easier for the users to switch. I'm not talking about what mac users are used to, I'm talking about making a switch completely painless. Windows users I've observed who switch to macs don't use this drag/drop thing like you think they do - they continue to use the osx like it were windows.

2 - Hardware costs money, software is free. This is why I say, if they allow Vaio produce hardware that is very similar to the Mac OS X hardware, they can quickly expand their market, while maintaining a high end brand. It's up to Sony then to make sure their hardware always fits.

3 - It's not problem free till I can click and icon on my mac select what I want and click buy.

4 - People will indeed make such a purchasing decision based off 1 feature. All other things balance themselves out, so one snazzy thing makes the world of difference.
ACAP - Web Development and Software Development
ACAP offers complete business software solutions to small and large businesses worldwide. They are an integrated team of user interface designers, software architects, graphic designers, writers, programmers and marketing professionals that know how to get results on the web. Located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they offer a pragmatic, business value driven approach, deep Microsoft .NET, Java, PHP and Flash knowledge, expert usability design and extensive enterprise systems architecture experience.
Facebook | TheEargasm.com a online music magazine for indie bands
ShrinkSafe - compress your JS code
Some guy in comments on the site wrote this:

"Brilliant. Here's a better idea: Why download anything at all, why not just let the files be wehere they are? Then you will get an infinite download speed, in fact you dont even need an ISP! "

Hahaahah
If I owned JournalSpace and only had a schema left, I'd want to give it another go, done properly. You still have the name, pagerank, domain name etc. Sure, your name is (rightly) dirt for a while but I'd still want to give it a go...
Congrats man. Best of luck.
I found this pretty hard to believe, but I've checked out
the physics as best I can, and it seems to be true. I'm
going to have build one of these to test if for myself.

The claim is that taking a solar oven and pointing at the
empty night sky makes the device a refrigerator.

Bizarre.
Unfortunately my favourite one missed the '08 deadline:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417782
Mars rovers roll on to five years
(a) It's not really the fact that they talk about code, imho, it's what they say about code. Anyone who's clearly a passionate geek and writes weird and wonderful programs in their spare time is likely to be good.

(b) I don't know how to answer that question, but I could easily look it up if I was doing some work that required this sort of optimisation. Despite that lack of knowledge, I've built two start-ups now.
I think a much bigger player (for example PayPal, Google or Amazon) will step up and do micropayments - simply because they have millions of users, money and connections. I think it's pretty hard for a startup to succeed in this market. [Amazon for example has already FPS (http://aws.amazon.com/fps/)].

Another thing is tipjoy's design, I think it's really bad for a money related site. The design needs more authority (blue colors for example) and not look like something from a cartoon.
Every single piece of Philip Greenspun's writing I've ever read has seemed (to me) to be a massive collection of assertions with absolutely no logic backing up any of them.

Some of those assertions turn out to be correct, of course. But in terms of quality of discourse, Greenspun is roughly even with your average internet troll.

I guess it's ironic that this post is itself completely unfounded. But it's like 2:00 and I'm really tired and it astonishes me that this blog post could get so much support here, so I'd just like to get this ball rolling and see if any of you agree with me.
What Is Niche Blueprint?
Clock Collectibles
Clock Collectibles ( www.Clock-Collectibles is a website specializing in the finest antique and vintage clock.The onsite store gives you access to the best deals online when searching for a new item to add into your collection.
73.4 Percent of All Wikipedia Edits Are Made By Roughly 1,400 People
> 1 - Mac users like the behavior differences

Then give OS X an optional behave-like-Win-XP feature (maybe they could call it OS XP :-))
PoF is ad supported right? as is nytimes. so this implies pof gets a higher ror from their advertisers than does nytimes?
Well written article.

The closing thoughts in the article

"With all of that said, I have to emphasize that little of this really matters. If you’re inclined to start a startup, nothing anyone says will stand in your way, nor, should it. If you have the bug to make something, it’s impossible to shake, and in my mind can be one of the best life experiences you can have.

Every month we get a some new users, a couple of excited emails, a few glimpses at just how neat our project could be. And more than that, we get to build something that we really love.

I wouldn’t trade that for anything."
Just had a thought: if the money thing fails, they could use their code to just create a karma network. Instead of money, pay with karma points. Might still be useful, even if working micropayments would be nicer.
Yeah. But, I just thought that the title was discouraging. A more appropriate title for this good article would have been better
? That looks like the same site.
How to run Linux from a USB drive
Putting The Band Back Together
Resume with horizontal timeline and map
>(legal question: how do you datamine medical records without violating privacy?)

You make it a condition of using the service.

23andme + Google Health
Of course, most edits are editing, not new content, and these 1400 people are mostly editors, not authors:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
I've thought about resume designs for a couple of years, and finally took a crack at it. Feedback is definitely welcome.

My description as posted on scribd:

How do we adapt the resume to the modern economy? I've made a "first attempt" to get discussion going, but I'm interested in feedback and new ideas. I expect the best solutions to be anticlimactic: simple designs that attract as little attention as possible.

To understand our problems and goals, let's ask: in what kind of environment did the standard resume develop, and how does that differ from modern needs?

1. The late 20th century assumed stable job patterns, but many of us won't have stable jobs for significant portions of our working lives. We will hop, skip, and jump among the most important projects and jobs of our lives, which will stop, start, and overlap frequently. How do we take make a coherent picture out of this convoluted mess? My answer: a horizontal timeline, with as many levels as you need (I used 3) to make sense of important activities visually.

2. The late 20th century assumed traditional education patterns, but these are now being called into question... so what do you do if your learning experiences don't fit inside the traditional box? In lieu of a formal degree, how can you succinctly explain how you've been educated? My answer: a special row on the timeline to highlight education, set apart from my other activities by a different background shade.

3. The late 20th century has seen the beginning of globalization affecting the work force. How do you communicate cross-cultural experience? My answer: a world map. This is probably the weakest part of my approach, because cross-cultural experience will impact fewer people, and the map has the lowest information density and is less necessary than other elements on the page. But in my case, international elements are crucial element of the whole, so I think the map 'pays for itself'.

None of this is really revolutionary, but considering that most creative resume's I've seen do more harm than good, I'd be satisfied with even a modest net gain in clarity.

Notes:

1. I deliberately avoided multimedia and all technological pizzaz because the design needs to work now, and at present nothing beats a concise one-pager that can be printed in black & white.

2. Re-working the way we judge and value education is a big problem which will ultimately require a more complex solution -- maybe some kind of "learning portfolio" which includes examples of work -- but I think this goes beyond what can reasonably fit on one page.
I typed in "Crush" to an Application search and found a whole bunch.

"Crush Tracker" says:

Here's how it works:
1. Add the Crush Tracker application.
2. Create your secret list of crushes. Don't worry, only you can see this list.
3. Invite your friends to use Crush Tracker. If one of your crushes adds you to their crush list, you'll both be notified.
4. Live happily ever after in a magical land filled with rainbows and unicorns.

"Crush List" is described as "Add your friends that you have a secret crush on. If they also add you to their crush list, both of you are notified!"

I only searched for "Crush" and even then only for about a minute. There are at least a dozen of these apps by various names.

Maybe you should check your facts before you declare someone is 100% wrong...
I wonder who he's talking about, and for what portfolio company.
Pictures of jett travolta
Apple Should Buy Yahoo: Why I'm Now Convinced
"get used to going to the—gasp—library and reading—cringe—books."

Which are edited by what? 3 people? 10 people?

All sources of information have varying degrees of unreliability. Personally, I trust well-cited Wikipedia articles more than I do most books, journals, and other more academically accepted sources.

This "don't trust Wikipedia" story pops up in various places a few times a year. It just reeks of a bunch of academics trying to justify their existence and shouting at kids to get off their lawns.
Wow. I don't know the cost of imaginary licensing of Mac OS X too, but you don't argue with ~$129?
Opera. Another reason why people shouldn't use Scribd: you have to register to download the pdf.
Nothing says good web design like your snow/rain falling through the text making it annoying as hell to read. Turn that crap off.
Watertight Texture Sampling
There's no "borders" on some windows. How'd you do this?
The penny gap makes that far less attractive than Adwords, which is already a poor option in most cases.
There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) ...

Wait, what? 2% of "millions" cannot be 1400. Ah, I think the quote by Jimmy Wales implies that this is 2% of registered users.
نرم افزار گزارش ساز وستا - سيستم توليد گزارش دايناميک تحت وب شرکت فناوران اطلاعات وستا
Yeah, I was baffled by that too. Maybe "in church" should be "in bed"? Maybe he didn't go to the church services, but found some time every Sunday morning when the church wasn't in use to sit there and read the Bible?

... Ahaha, bingo. Hao Wang's "Reflections on Kurt Goedel":

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wLLePwhDOMYC&pg=PA70&...

"In January 1978, G's wife told me that G read his Bible in bed on Sundays."

Time to go fix the Wikipedia article.
(The WP article actually references another of Wang's books for this. That's googleable too, and also says "bed" not "church".)
because it's so hard to send a message to the person you want to go out with?
what's next? help me drink my coffee?
The phrase you're looking for is "network effect", but I'm not convinced that this doesn't suffer from it. If, as someone else has (fairly convincingly) said elsewhere in this HN discussion, there are a bunch of other Facebook apps doing the same thing, do you really expect each user to maintain lists with all of them? If not, the value is greatly reduced.

(I suppose it's possible that different ones consistently appeal to different demographics or something, in which case the effective number of competitors for any given person would be less.)
Apple consolidating with Yahoo would create a formidable force, but it's likely not a relationship that is likely to work. The two companies have different styles, they have different markets, they have very little in common.

A merger makes sense when the two companies together will function better than if they were separate - Apple can bring little to Yahoo and Yahoo can bring little to Apple. These are public companies, if you want a piece of them, go buy shares in both of equal amount.

If you merge two car companies, a lot can be done - designers can be exchanged, common engine platforms can be developed and so on. There is a clear advantage to such a merger.

But Apple and Yahoo? What will an OS developer do with a bunch of YUI developers? How will Apples experience designing a music player help with Yahoo Mail?

Just because companies are known brands does not mean they should marry. Stop treating companies like they were Hollywood stars and speculating about who is in bed with whom, and who should finally hook up because they would soo fit with each other.
I can imagine a scenario where they sell Mac OS X as an extra CD along with the OS, in which case they could indeed sell it for $129 or more.
It reminds me somewhat of Perl, whose “there’s more than one way to do it” philosophy can make it difficult to understand but gives the Perl hacker a certain degree of artistic and stylistic freedom...

I though it was because both Perl and the law require lots of $'s and no one is ever sure quite why. :)
Very first non-content-free sentence on the site's front page: "Ever want to ask someone out, but are afraid of getting rejected? This site is your solution!"

The whole point is the "afraid of getting rejected" bit. (Well, I guess there are other reasons besides fear of rejection why you might want someone not to know you wanted to "hook up" with them unless it was mutual. For instance: consider someone who has a partner, wants to have an affair with someone else, but doesn't want anyone to know they're willing to be unfaithful unless they won't mind that. I make no comment on the ethics of this.)
Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS
nice tutorial on how a simple x86 OS works
5 Years Later, Mars Rovers Still Rolling On
Basically it seems the article is saying that starting a company involves risk. I agree.