skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on the finishing touches for the next phase of my "A Startup A Day" project. The goal is to bring together experienced entrepreneurs, high-potential hackers/designers, and (eventually) investors in a step-by-step process to build new companies.

First, users can collaborate to identify major market opportunities (aka 10x problems that desparately need a 10x solution). Members can then brainstorm potential solutions and the corresponding business model. After getting feedback from the community, members who want to tackle the idea can get paired up with a compatible co-founder and kick out a prototype. Members provide feedback on the prototypes and work with the team to help promote the app once it's ready for prime time.

Right now I'm keeping it invite-only for the alpha, but if you're a killer hacker with a keen sense of the big problems that everyday internet users are facing, drop me a line at kleneway@hotmail.com and I may be able to hook you up.
If you use vim, vim-full is better than vim-tiny which comes installed.

A nice panel applet can be found in the repos under the package name "timer-applet", which I find comes in very handy at times.
Weird. I was routinely buying glass lenses in India at $10. Now I am in Canada and I pay $150 or more for similar lenses.
Art of assembly. A google search should bring it up.
Yeah, it is good for that. Especially when you tell them that it predates Vista by several years.
Same here. Thought it was pretty neat at first, but it doesn't do a good job of balancing functionality and bling.
couchdb is really good.. and made for the web, but how does it perform in production environment
Well, here's exactly what I install on a fresh Ubuntu desktop machine (it's my script, copy/pasted).

sudo apt-get install subversion git imagemagick oprofile ssh manpages-dev g++ gcc libtool autoconf automake emacs vim compizconfig-settings-manager valgrind inkscape

Might be something interesting in there for you with a little googling.
I turn it off most of the time. The medium setting is OK, but I generally prefer fast, and plain to fancy.
It seems the tooling/tech required to make cheap glasses has been around for a while (see link below), however
is the ability for the end user to adjust his prescription really advantageous in the long run?

Will they evaporate easily in warmer climates, etc..

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/eyeglasses-1218.html
(also has a TED talk as well IIRC)
Simple web platforms make amazing things happen
If the image in the article is the actual prototype, the glasses looks pretty big and the lens seems really thick, therefore:

I think this is simply great because it will help mainstream the "nerds with big glasses" stereotype.

Also, when you are outside and in the sun and you need a pair of shades, just pour some coffee into your glasses.
Just edit the original.
Answer My Health Question
* To install: These should be in the repository; use synaptic for keyword search.

GNOME Do: http://do.davebsd.com/ It's like Quicksilver for OS X, only more so.

Glipper: Clipboard history manager. A pale imitation of the old Klipper for KDE 3.5.

Banshee: Arguably a better music player than the default. Honestly, I was a big fan of the old Amarok, but KDE 4.0 in general has too many problems and lost functionality for me to use yet.

* To UNinstall:

Totem video player, or at least the Totem plugin for Firefox: It tends to be very crashy, at least for me. Replace the plugin with mplayerplug-in.

* New repositories to add:

Medibuntu: http://www.medibuntu.org/ has restricted and non-free software. Easiest way to get DVD playback, and I would recommend installing mplayer and win64codecs/win32codecs from here. Also, tools like Acrobat.

Wine: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb These are usually much more up-to-date than Ubuntu's repository, if you need Wine.
This was news at least 5 years ago. Since my optometrist travels to Nicaragua every year to help people with their eye problems, I asked him about these glasses. He wasn't so interested because there are plenty of free glasses available here that people donate and which they take with them.

Here's the "news" from 2002: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E0DF163AF...
errr.. Wine? J/K =P
There is no country in the world where a dollar is not affordable. From the countries I know:

1$ in China = 2 Packs of Cigarettes or 3 bowls of noodles

1$ in Africa = 2 Meals of Rice or 2 trips on a motorcycle

Why subsidize something that is so cheap? It's pointless and counterproductive. Treat other countries not like aid recipients, but like real people who can be traded with, and are happy to get cheap stuff just like you are.
I would introduce the horse collar. It existed in Europe as early as the 10th century but was not widespread until around 1200. It enabled horses to pull plows and was much more efficient. In order to use my much increased grain production, I would introduce distillation and whiskey. Ah the riches.
How to fail big at your dream
How should I detect and handle cheating in "Read My Tweets"?
Cheating is pretty easy, but how many people would bother?

http://www.readmytweets.com

Any ideas on how to detect and handle cheating? I don't want to make the reading comprehension check more difficult.

I suppose I could add a traditional CAPTCHA in addition to the reading check question, but that would be really annoying.
Exaile is my media player of choice.
Commercial corn is a sterile hybrid. Potatoes are heavy, but you can carry lots of beet and turnip seeds, good for high volume food production.
We need to think carefully here about the difference between a freshman in a design class who thinks up "a water bottle that can be filled with sand and stacked into a house", and a graduate student's wireless biomedical monitor that required thousands of hours of lab time and clinical trials to develop.

Any system that treats both of these the same way is going to generate copious amounts of absurdity.
If I asked that question in an interview, and that's the answer you gave, I'd probably not hire you (assuming the position was CS-intensive).

There are a number of special-purpose trees which are important in some domains (tries, B-tree, splay tree, ...)

Simple hash implementations also tend to assume that it's cheap to compute a hash on the given key type (not always true) and that you have a rough idea on the bound of items in storage. Hashes far below that level are often also less memory efficient since the hash-table is pre-allocated.
I should point out to you that for myself and probably for a few others at least, we don't much care about the rankings.

We care about the tips!
I would add a good ski parka, extra boots, tooth brushes, and as much penicillin as I could scrounge up.
I'm willing to bet Facebook doesn't directly care at all about breast feeding. I'm sure it is some advertisers who care that Facebook strictly enforce their appropriate use policies.

Facebook is simply protecting their revenue stream. If the recent story about Ning shutting down adult networks was any indication, this is a common thread among ad-powered sites.

It is unfortunate that this is the way the world (or mainly America) works, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. If you don't draw that line, you wind up with crime dens like Ning dealt with. Facebook, very reasonably, drew the line where the TV networks draw it. Advertisers have proven to accept that standard.
This is a pretty tough new reality for online companies. Dating was one of the few services that consumers were willing to pay for. Does this mean that ads are the only revenue source for consumer-based sites?
I have a soft spot for match.com. I met my GF there 6 years ago. She was certainly worth the $25.
Don't install things until you're ready to use them; otherwise, you'll find yourself spending too long browsing packages.
One problem with outsourcing is that people tend to have a lot of context to their tasks that whoever they hire to handle it for them won't have. There can be miscommunications about what needs to be done, the other person might not understand what the requester likes/dislikes, they might have to ask for extra details etc. and often it may be just faster to do it yourself.
I honestly don't see it that way. Could you please give me an example?
I'd suggest looking at xmonad for the other windowing system. You never need to use your mouse again (though you can if you want to).

It's also written in Haskell, so it has enhanced coolness as well. No ubuntu package as far as I know, but it isn't hard to build from source.
Ok this thread is confusing. Actually, your second algorithm wasn't the point of my argument. You're right that according to your second formulation, the probability is 1/2, of course.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with Jeff's question, and I believed that you made a distinction with the Monty Hall version. But your second algorithm isn't the same as Jeff's question, my mistake.

It is very clear that my argument specifically adresses the question the way Jeff has formulated it, so you can even forget the part about "your second formulation", what I meant was the question of Jeff and why there is nothing wrong with it.

In statistics, it is commonly accepted that we don't know what we don't state (for an obvious practical purpose). Therefore, when we say : "One of them is a girl", it is implied that we don't know wich one because we didn't specify it.

Therefore there is nothing wrong with Jeff's question (and the probability is 2/3), at least for anyone familiar with basic statistics and probabilities conventions (and I suspect you are), anything else is just quibble. I assumed your argument wasn't about nitpicking this kind of convention, but it turns out I was wrong. I guess nobody wins this one :)
Entrepreneur's Guide to Email Delivery
No accountant can be awesome enough to write off much more than what is truly a business expense. The ultimate rule is that everything written off must have business purpose.

Now, you'll only get in trouble if you get audited, but writing off things that shouldn't be written off will stand out.

The best way to shelter yourself from taxes is to invest the money and then pay taxes on a long term capital gain (which have historically been lower than ordinary tax rates).
While I really love Python as the language I really hate its primitive implementation. 20% is nothing compared to what would be gained if Python ran on a virtual machine that was JIT'ed.

Java for example got a 10 to 20 times performance gain from moving to HotSpot (their JIT'ed VM). And similar gain's have been seen in Chrome's V8 JavaScript VM or Strongtalk.

Anyway, it's kind of sad that such a great language has such a braindead implementation :-(

And unfortunately, the same thing can be said about Ruby as well.
How many people making web services and tools actually care about their community or their contributions, long-term? I'd bet, in all honesty, very few. For instance, if you're building to be bought, why would you give a shit?
This hinges on whether we decided ahead of time that we would only consider cases in which there is a girl, something which I didn't see earlier. :)

As mentioned in another thread started by Eliezer, it's the difference between "What is the sex of one of your children?" and "Is (at least) one of your children a girl?". For the second question, the results skew to 1/3 and 2/3 because we're discarding the cases where the answer is 'no'.

The light went on for me when Paul pointed out in his update that getting a random answer for "What is the sex of one of your children?" eliminates (an unknown) one of BG and GB.
it seems like a lot of paid services are developing free alternatives.
Yeah but I don't know what the good stuff is, and knowing is half the battle.
Also, how about any equivalent to the os x desktop widgets? I like having time, weather and a calendar right there.
Seven Most Influential GNU/Linux Distributions
I'm sure Sterling, who has made his living writing SF, would never wish to suggest otherwise.
Eolas and Microsoft? Eolas was part owned by a University.
Unison - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Tellico - my favorite book manager

VLC Movie Player

VMWare(take your pick)

XChat

HPLIP Fax Utility

Azureus

IDEs(KDevelop, Netbeans, DrScheme, Quanta, IDLE)
Peldi, I've really enjoyed hearing about your journey and congratulations on your successes. I've learned a lot reading your entries.

In your 2009 outlook, you wrote some goals, one being: "I will have to go from 'mr. Do-it-all' to be Balsamiq’s CEO, which will mean having employees, delegating..." - one thing from personal experience. When you make your first hire, you're going be tempted to get a friend you know is good. My advice: Don't. Your first hires will always see you in the light they had before you were their boss, and since you're growing so rapidly in business and life, it's 95% likely to end poorly.

It won't be the end of the world, but I disregarded this advice myself a couple times. Staff will learn and grow with you to some extent, friends to a much less extent. And since you seem like a really nice guy with a soft spot for people, then being in the super difficult position of it not making sense to keep working with someone - but you're their livelihood - will suck more for you than it will for a more heartless person.

Your call of course, just have a think over it, and best wishes and much prosperity in 2009.
without paid dating sites what ads will plentyoffish show?
Well, so do I
so I am using xubuntu + WMII, plain and fast.
Nope. Selling your data & lead gen is a pretty solid source of revenue, although some people won't like that.
It's the same thing with most established businesses. Look at Proctor & Gamble, they have like 10 different brands of laundry detergents all targeted to different markets.
i have paid for match (and had a few dates via it) in the past. i have also used POF and one huge difference between them - people on match care to put up a bunch of pictures and actually fill out the damn profile. POF users rarely fill out profiles in my exp. What I'm trying to say is that if users are paying for the service they are very motivated to go ahead and actually use the service.
The text editor that comes pre-installed
I like gedit for this purpose, but I think its standard on ubuntu.
Fascinating to think about. I did some fencing in college, and some archery and horseback riding when I was younger. I think I'd try to survive and move over land until I got to a coastal trading city, and then convince the nearest Lord that I was shipwrecked from a distant, mystical land and try to enter into military or guard service. Then catch up on the local language and customs, do what I can to get land or a title, then try to figure out what modern process improvements I could invent to build a lot of wealth. If I was in a rigid caste system type place, I'd definitely recruit potential great men from non-aristocratic classes and get them working for me. Depending on which invention path I went down, take over in terms of commerce of have myself a mini-revolution displacing the aristocracy and becoming ruler and protector of the land. It probably wouldn't be a party, but it wouldn't be so bad either.
I put http://myholidayapp.com up right before t-day to give people a place to let others know about their apps.

This holiday break, I worked on a charitable giving site, hopefully will have an initial release out by the end of the month.
No doubt this is a market segmentation play (or maybe a lead generation strategy), not really a new business model. Match.com also created chemistry.com to compete with eharmony.
Three handy functions for your JS toolbox
I wonder if RPI had any legal standing at all. The students weren't employees and they probably hadn't signed any agreements assigning inventions to RPI. In the case of Page and Brin mentioned above, as graduate students, they probably were employees of Stanford.

My son, when he was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, go so ticked off at these policies that he always put copyright notices on his homework assignments.
Open mailto: links in Gmail
Its key to point out is that you would normally use nginx as a proxy to some other app server (nginx->mongrel) while with an erlang http server, it _is_ your app server and you may not need to add something like nginx in front.

Its good to see all three products do well, keeping in mind the benchmark scenario is highly artificial. The results show that in the case of these three products you should make your choice based on what kind of app you need to build and trust that they each perform well.
Generally, i'm less weary about installing a plugin because I know there are certain limits to things that plugins can do compared to what an application can do to my System.

On windows, things you install also puts crap into your registry and many leave a lasting trace on your computers and slows it down over time. This happens to a lesser extent with browser plugins.

Generally, with a plugin, when you turn off your browser , the application cease to exist and take up system resources. Many applications however, continue to run in the background.

I use the "Generally" to describe these scenarios because there are definitely exceptions to the norms, but its how I perceive plugins vs downloaded apps.
I believe it is called gedit, kate if you are kubuntu
Just got to it... Looks nice. Have yet to find one on OS X I really liked.
Louis CK on double edged swords http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8d_ry-u-Q#t=0m50s

I actually spend a lot of money (relatively) on RockBand.
Even if these numbers are supposed to sound surprisingly low, I'm guessing its far better than how the input was managed for the set of "Britannica's" we had sitting on a shelf when I was a kid. And that's not a bash against the old way, which had good content for its day.

Some things really are getting better. You will always need to filter information. No news here.
And a lot of teachers. (Heh, I've even had some who hate you using Google instead of their paid database subscription)
Mousepad is a feature equivalent, but GEdit hs more functionality. Both are good to have, I think.
You wouldn't need this false comfort if you didn't take the view that the world in fact has no hope. One can be a thoughtful optimist rather than a mystical optimist.
"The [World] bank said there were 1.4 billion people — a quarter of the developing world — living in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 in the world’s developing countries. Last year, the bank said there were 1 billion people living under $1 a day."

From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/washington/27worldbank.htm...
Ask HN: Generating sales leads for hacking jobs
I have just taking steps to start my own company to sell the web development services of myself and my 12 friends, who are now my employees. I have a few long-time clients, but I am looking to get some new jobs coming in so I don't lose my hat.

Any tips for an individual used to just word of mouth that needs to feed 12 mouths now. FYI, I am thinking of hiring 4 dedicated sales people as well, if needed. Any input is appreciated!
Retained earnings (if that's what you mean by invest) are taxed as well.
Summary: Create value.

What a novel idea...
I would recommend TextWrangler or Smultron for basic text editing with some nice extra features thrown in.
I don't get it. Why would I want to use your site?

Not being harsh, just not sure what the ROI is on my time.
Atwood doesn't seem wrong or particularly unclear to me. If you "met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl", then presumably we should imagine this person saying: "I have two children and one of them is a girl," and not "I have two children, X and Y, and X is a girl." Obviously in the first case, we don't know if it's X or Y that's the girl, so the set of possible worlds is [(X-G & Y-G), (X-G & Y-B), (X-B & Y-G)], so we get the 2/3 answer. But maybe other people don't share my linguistic intuitions...
If you're interested in this highly unlikely scenario, I highly recommend the Dies the Fire books by S.M. Stirling. I actually got a good education in feudal economics and have a much better appreciation for the concept of food as wealth.
Basically you're right, and Paul is right too. This is just a matter of convention, it depends on what you want to hear in the question. If Jeff said "one of the children is a girl", but added "but we don't know wich one of the two is", this post would have never existed and we wouldn't have argued so much over nothing.

In the world of mathematical conventions you learn in school, the question is understood and you're right. In the "normal" world where you can quibble with language because there is no specific agreement, Paul is right and the question should be more precise. In both cases the conclusion remains the same : what a waste of time.
there is a very high chance you would die rather quickly from illnesses to which the local (temporally speaking) would have been building immunities too. the advice in kottke's blog to have a "recent smallpox vaccine" is silly, the strains now and in 1000 would be in no way similar.

by the same token the flu of 1918 would likely get you too, even if you got a flu shot in 2009
They phail at proper database security too

when trying to load the Digital Dailies from the Delgo site here

http://www.delgo.com/cgi-bin/dd/postlist.pl?Cat=&Board=f...

System Error: DBI connect('delgoDB:localhost','nobody',...) failed: Too many connections at modules/w3t.pm line 490

Nice way of giving away your db name and db username.
they would see the fillings in your teeth and have you put to death immediately as a witch

actually that you have teeth at all past age thirty would show you up as a witch
My wife and I met on match as well - I'd gladly do a commercial for it.
Signing up now. So far the interface is clean and easy to use. I have no clue if there are any hot girls on here yet though. Will report back with my initial findings.

I'm curious to see how this will stack up against OK Cupid, where I met little but cautious hipster emo girls whose photos came from webcams and off bathroom mirrors.

Match.com, on the other hand, is all blonde young professionals dressed in black. Their photos all have meat head guys cropped out of them, with just enough arm left in there to show you that they can get a guy like that.
Well, I have zero illusions about top dogs that got their positions by political means/connections.

My whole point was about low ranking civil servants that do the bulk of the nitty-gritty administration work and that all must pass through a highly selective competitive exams (1 in 29 applicants [1] cf. Harvard's 1 in 14 [2]).

And for these people, from my limited anecdotal evidence I got impression that they are indeed efficient, at least for bureaucracy standards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSO

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard#Admissions
absolutely. and quickly. your 21st century immune system has had a lifetime to protect you and adapt to our hazards...it would offer you zero protection against viruses and bacteria of 1000ad.
Ask HN: New Vista Desktop--what would you install?
The thread on what to install on a fresh Ubuntu install inspired me to create one for Vista. I just got a new desktop and have it dualbooted with Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 8.10. Up until now I've only used Ubuntu/XP.
Argh, I hate Cooliris, it turned OfTheWorld.tv (unmetered on my ISP), running quite well with Flash into a slow, motion-sickness-inducing wall of bright colours whenever I move the mouse :(