skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago I spent a Summer in Copenhagen, so I know a tiny bit of Denmark. I remember talking to Danish friends on how ridiculously high the taxes were. Yes, I was amazed that you guys pay 180% tax on cars.

On the necessity of wealth creation, I fully agree with you. I think the Germans, Danes, Swedes (etc) will soon find out that they will have to work a whole lot more than their parents to enjoy the same standard of living their parents could enjoy. It's not a pleasant thought, but then, the prosperity that Old Europe has enjoyed over the last few decades is pretty much an historical anomaly.

I could not agree more that prosperity is a continuous effort. I suppose the old Europeans are just a bit blasé and refuse to look at the facts. The world has changed.
That's definitely the biggest one I was thinking of. QWERTY v. Dvorak has gone in many strange directions, but if you look for the actual science, it is at best quite split, and at worst, all the relevant studies were done by people with very strong preexisting opinions, leaving us with not much to go on. (I include Dvorak's own studies here, for the sake of argument.)

But the claims that Dvorak has no advantages over QWERTY really don't pass the smell test. It's almost certainly more a matter of whether it's worth it for someone to switch, on which I'm very ambivalent.

There's also the interesting question of whether it would be better to start on Dvorak, which I'll have to ponder here in the future now that I have a baby. Personal experience would suggest that someone raised on Dvorak is much more likely to learn actual touch typing.

(I was on QWERTY for over a decade and still doing the same wandering-hands thing everybody else does, because QWERTY doesn't reward touch typing. Touch typing on QWERTY is like the official way to swing a baseball bat; everybody has to learn it, but hardly anybody does it and even at the pro level everybody does their own thing. Dvorak and most of the other alternate layouts reward it very strongly. You don't even have to teach it, it just happens.)
If you're in a startup, check out Microsoft's BizSpark program for startups: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark

Basically it's the full MSDN for 3 years. It also includes hosting deals for the server products. At the _end_ of the 3 years you have to pay $100. Overall pretty sweet if you're using the MSFT stack or need the OS's for testing.

If you're a Stirr member they can connect you - there are also other partners you can find on the bizspark site.
Something similar to this has been available for a while on http://www.govtrack.us

The entire website is open source, including the data files(and some of the tools used to gather/create the data files) so if you require something more powerful than the api provides you can create it yourself.
This is essentially like the story a while back about the plumber who got his own business off the ground by actually pounding the pavement and talking to people.

Personally, I'm glad I have better (= pre-qualified customers rather than looky-loos, scaling efficiently rather than 1:1 scaling with number of hours I invest) options.
Ms. Trunk is a professional blogger. I wish I had known this before reading the article. I would rather not waste my time reading anything these people write.
Nice site! I dig the simplicity and usefulness of the design.
The part that grabbed me most was him giving out referrals for people who need work outside his expertise. I bet he'll see some good reciprocating referrals from that some time in the near future.

Not only is he getting his name out there and getting good PR, he's finding a way to keep feeding his network, too. Clever.
“Physical labor has become a shameful act."
> It's almost certainly more a matter of whether it's worth it for someone to switch[.]

Agreed. For programmers, I would say the odds are good - you'll be doing a lot of typing, and RSI is a real concern. For people who do a lot of typing on other peoples' computers, planning around what's widely available (qwerty & vi on Unix, for example) is probably a better choice.

> QWERTY doesn't reward touch typing.

Good observation! Dvorak seems more clearly designed with touch-typing in mind, I think.

(As a data point: I type "wandering-hands" on Qwerty at 95-105 wpm, and about same on Dvorak. The typing isn't the bottleneck.)
She does guest posts on yahoo finance and the comments are never very nice.
Do something heartless, and then kill your heart.
The bigger question is "Does your business have a way to translate a customer from the street into money in your pocket?"

The architect does. That guy who sells potato peelers does. The plumber who banged on doors just to give out coupons and say "Hey, I'm a plumber you can trust next time you need something plumbed" does.

Twitter doesn't.

Relatedly, architects, potato peeler salesmen, and plumbers have a value proposition which can be explained to absolutely anyone. You want your living space improved, you want your time spent peeling potatoes decreased, you want your excrement to not come gushing out of the kitchen sink. I personally would struggle with explaining to regular people how they really, really want to be tied to a machine all day sending 180 character messages. Apparently Twitter does, too, or they'd have convinced people that this activity is worth paying money to do.
Yup, Zara is incredible company.

I usually don't care about apparel brands, but I have a soft spot for Zara. They consistently create nice stuff for very reasonable prices. They make clothes that make you look good, as opposed to having attractive models looking good in whatever.

Their way of doing business is very hackerish (in the best sense), beautifully optimized.

No external marketing, they just put their shops in premium locations, letting their wares "sell themselves".

Instead of paying expensive prima donna fashion designers, they employ an army of young talented people. They constantly monitor fashion trends and consumer demands in their stores, able to rapidly innovate designs and change their production.

Their retail stock is completely rotated every two weeks, which creates an extra incentive for customers to come back to check what's new, and it also encourages Woot-type impulse buying, as the stock is limited.

Using state-of-the-art logistics they manage to keep their operations costs down. Thanks to their efficient procedures they can create better products for cheaper prices than competition.
I'm calling bullsh^H^H on the one hour a day of work... Markus is the king of obfuscating his business practices with strategic misinformation.
Thanks.

I offered the first 15 sites free on a first-come, first-serve basis, which was while I was in beta yet. In a few cases, a few people had come to my own guild's site asking where it was hosted, and I redirected them to the hosting site. Otherwise, I've pretty much always just done Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN ads.

There wasn't a whole lot of convincing. I offered a 30-day money back guarantee and people just started signing up and paying even before I was advertising - those first few I have no idea how they found the site (I even had someone sign up and pay even though my Auth.net account was still in test mode so I just let them have the site free). Aside from that initial 15 guilds, I've never offered a free version. Every guild I've hosted has paid for it (with the exception of friends of mine that were starting their own guilds, of course).

I had (have) a "Featured Guilds" section which showed off what other guilds had done with the system, an online demo for people to tinker with the system before signing up, and offered more features than any other guild hosting site (or any open source package offered as far as I can tell). The only major guild hosting site out there that did this was stagnating from lack of competition.

That's what was so surprising about it...I wasn't expecting the degree of growth I had gotten at all.

It made a lot of promise to make easy what was otherwise a tedious thing.

Looking back, it just seems like it was "right place at the right time", and everything just...sort of...happened.

But like I said, the platform was in development for a year and a half before it launched, since it was my own guild's site, and I was completely serious that I wanted my own guild's site to be one of the best out there feature-wise.
That's a nicely designed site. Kind of a relief from the standard "Rate my Startup" submissions we've been seeing here lately. Makes me want to hand you money and try it out, even though I don't actually need the product!

On topic though, I'm also a big fan of releasing the "Meat" first and filling in the rest later. S3stat went live with a completely blank "Features" page and no way to charge CC's. Like you say, a 30 day Free Trial means that you don't have to actually be capable of processing payments the day you launch. It's a good motivator to ship that code though!
I'm with Halo, I haven't bought an iPhone because of the lack of keyboard, didn't buy a blackberry because the apps blew and the UI was annoying, and was waiting for Android v2 phones before taking Android seriously. The Pre is near ideal - keyboard, touch, beautiful layout, time tested base apps, and a great size for the pocket. And frankly the marketing is pretty slick - perhaps not geek slick, but it has total business appeal and a well trusted name. Now if only they'd ship sooner.
> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm ... eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base

A bit alarmist, as patents are time-limited (20 years), and much of our software technology is older than that. For example, everything in the Dragon compiler book (1986). Of course, that wasn't true when Abrash wrote the above (1996).
Also, collective action problems. I haven't yet seen a libertarian who can convincingly address them. Either they simply haven't taken them into account (which is the danger of relying too heavily on old texts like Smith, or even more recent stuff like Rand and Nozick), or they take a hard line stance on negative rights that suggests they care more about protecting their ideological commitments than addressing the problem.
If it had arms, I could hire a housekeeper from anywhere in the world to sign in and tidy up my place.
Save Money By Deleting Your Cookies--A Case Study
"the room at bally's started at 69 bucks.. then it was 59 bucks.. i just rebooked it again at 50 bucks! i figure if i keep going they're going to pay me to stay there. meanwhile, i also think i figured something else out.. that rate came up after i had been doing some housecleaning on my laptop.. and deleted all the cookies and the web browser history. i wonder if that made me appear on the bally's web site to be a totally new customer?"
Sorry: http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9654/colligan-no-new-palm...
How to Get Your Windows 7 Beta 1 on Friday
I remember talking to Danish friends on how ridiculously high the taxes were. Yes, I was amazed that you guys pay 180% tax on cars.

http://www.skovgaard.org/europe/denmark.htm

The Danes believe Denmark is the best country in the world, that Danish beer is the best in the world, and that anything they do is better than anywhere else in the world. But however contradictory it may seem, between them, they don't like to see others being successful. Thus, they do everything they can to bring down the brightest amongst them. The communist tax system that has brought the highest overall taxation level in the world is an effective way of doing so.
I thought that the "process" per tab architecture of the current release already allowed this? But then, I'm not (yet?) a seasoned Chrome user.
Maybe this one:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3504180/Sample-DMCA-Takedown-Notic...

I guess I should have my own template, since this may not be the last time I use it.
Agile: When is a story done?
I guess not. Bummer.
I don't think I'd have any friends left, if I deleted ten. Good thing I'm a vegetarian.
It seems that it's a scraper site with all content stolen from around the web. If you go to the vevz site, there are a ton of blog posts copied verbatim (links intact on most of them).

Also, I just realized... Who uses a four letter domain name for this type of stuff?
I switch between "desert" and "vibrantink" depending on how much contrast my eyes can handle at the moment :)
Twitter "protects" API user status call, but doesn’t
This is great, got to email the teachers about this.
So if I add 10 friends, do I get something from Whole Foods?
wrong. this isn't a problem of distribution, or readership. the problem is that there's more advertising options with the internet. e-book readers won't bring that back.
How to Install OpenOffice on a Mac | eHow.com
That simply suggests that there ARE plans for a Mac (and Linux) version of Chrome.
This is actually a good article on AA: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive...

It reminds me (as your comment did) of my basic premise on journalism over the last 20 years - which is that the business section is full of complete hosebags who've demolished the entire industry in the name of PR and capitalism.
The Plague: Our recent unknown intruder penetrated using the superuser account, giving him access to our whole system.

Margo: Precisely what you're paid to prevent.

The Plague: Someone didn't bother reading my carefully prepared memo on commonly-used passwords. Now, then, as I so meticulously pointed out, the four most-used passwords are: love, sex, secret, and...

Margo: [glares at The Plague]

The Plague: God. So, would your holiness care to change her password?
Similar to your gun example, the first seven claims of Morse's telegraph patent were upheld, because they claimed his specific invention; but the eighth was struck out, because it tried to claim the general idea of transmitting information by wires.
No, it's a separate development effort.

The BeOS stuff became PalmOS 6, aka PalmOS Cobalt, which debuted in 2004 but never made it onto a shipping device. That IP is owned by http://www.access-company.com/, who purchased PalmSource (the OS company which Palm spun off five years ago).
I agree that we'll never be completely free of irrationality, or that rationality will be totally dominant. It takes self-restraint to keep our primitive substrate, as you put it, at bay, and that's impossible to do every time. But I nevertheless think there's considerable room for improvement, and it starts with efforts like, say, PG's essay on disagreement.

Someone suggested turning that hierarchy of disagreement into tags that people could assign to comments on a debate site, and filter accordingly. I built something of precisely this sort for my master's project, and believe the idea should be implemented for nearly all online communications. It's doable, and an effective way to impress a great many people with the value of rational discourse, to which they simply may not have had enough exposure to appreciate.

And there is, I think, potentially a tipping point or critical mass where a culture of charitable discourse enters a positive feedback loop and makes gains even faster than before.

Whatever the case, I think there are definitely plausible means for improvement. They deserve to be tested.
Smquiceno - Bzzster
Tell HN: It Looks Like HN Is Filtering out Duplicate Submissions
This must be a recent change. I saw something I liked, submitted it, and was hyperlink-jumped directly to the previous submission. That's the right way to implement this; kudos.
Hmm, I appear to have spread some confusion.

To be clear: dtach implements just one of screen's many features, the ability to detach and resume a session.

If you want all the other stuff that screen does, great! But if you don't then those other things can get in your way, and you might want to give dtach a try.

(E.G., my own personal style is to launch multiple terminals from within emacs, so I don't need screen's multiterminal ability or it's cut and paste, &c.)
Are you in the bay area? There's a few education startups around here you may want to know about.
Wow, thanks! I wondered what'd actually happened with that.
This is a genuine LOL.
A solution for Tab Zero?
This has been the case for as long as I remember, maybe even from the beginning.
That's been happening for a while, months at least. You submit a dupe, and what happens is you upvote the original article by 1.

It seems to just look for dupe URLs. If 8 lame blogs all report the same Apple pseudo-news, then you can end up with 8 people submitting links to 8 non-related sites that all have the same basic non-info.

Or, with all the "SEO" URLs lately, two links to the same story on Wired.com can have slightly different URLs going to the exact same content.
Hearing the wolves at the door does have a clarifying effect...
I took the tour and from what I saw it seems like an amazing service with loads of features. I also love the design (from what I saw in the thumbnails). Agreed that you should switch the logo and courtesy nav... logo on top left, nav on top right.

This is a no brainer: Make the whole continental thing, as well as the logo (only on the front page) link to the tour. I got to the site and didn't know what to do. As a travel site, guess what's the last thing you want your users to feel when using your site? Lost.

As per the tour (I have no need to sign up for this service right now), it looks incredible. All the thumbnails look beautiful and the site looks loaded with really awesome features. Unfortunately, the stupid slideshow kept moving forward even when I explicitly clicked on a number. Not a big deal because only a small percentage of people will care enough to view a picture in the slideshow anyway, but it wouldn't hurt to fix.

If you really want to impress users, there's no substitute for a live demo. Lead users to the tour, and on each page of the tour, link them to the demo account: "see it live in a demo" If you're worried about crap in the demo, just have the demo reset itself every hour.

If it were up to me, I'd keep the continental thing, but only as a background. I'd put a nice faded box on top of it with the following:

1 sentence telling me what you do: "[logo]zipalong[/logo] lets you organize and share your trips" and two buttons: "live demo" and "tour of features".
Snark Attack
Boyer-Moore string searching is a good example of a simple but non-obvious "idea" (search backwards; it's much faster).

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searc...
I would love something that aggregated all your karma points into an exchange of some kind. I would use it, but I would never build it.
Ooops, yeah, 10.6, but otherwise my point stands.
How to Be a Power Delicious User for Competitive Advantage
Could you make a crawler that crawled S3? Does it already exist?
We are aiming to handle academic lecture video, slide decks, handouts, class notes, etc. The professors aren't terribly worried about it, but they want to know. I really don't know what S3's security policies are. Any experience with this? Anyone?

On a related note: do use use one-time-use URLs to privatize S3 content? If so, how? Do you reach in and expire the links at the same time as the session cookie expires?
I was going to start a startup, but now I won't because I'm afraid I'll get some kind of horrible eye disease.
Interesting:

When searching for a prospective mate, one is inundated with pictures that are not cropped or properly resized. Instead, headshots are either comically squished or creepily elongated, a carnivalesque effect that makes it difficult to quickly size up potential mates.

Frind is aware of his site's flaws but isn't eager to fix them. "There's no point in making trivial adjustments," he says. Frind's approach -- and the reason he spends so little time actually working -- is to do no harm. This has two virtues: First, you can't waste money if you are not doing anything. And second, on a site this big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people's profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads. "The site works," he says. "Why should I change what works?"
thanks! i really got sick of trying to find books on amazon. i essentially removed everything that i didn't care about... so, really i made it in part because i had an itch to scratch.

- list of best sellers
- most helpful reviews
- books i also might like
More importantly, what does it say about Google Chrome's plans if it's working on v2.0 before releasing anything on a non-windows platform?
Something that takes blog posts from a related cluster of blogs and presents them as a threaded newsgroup.
Not that the actual research part has paid off, but companies like Anybots have been much more successful in their bipedal research efforts (see Dexter @ http://anybots.com/abouttherobots.html) than many academic labs, much less other companies.
Usenet was harder to use, forums work from any web browser. IRC, also hard to use for non computer people while IM's were easy, obvious reasons why those became popular.

The same is not true of twitter/facebook/myspace, email is just as simple to use and works in browsers as well. I'm not oblivious to the social aspects and the hooking up factor going on but that stuff only appeals to very young single folks.

Social networking has not won anything yet, it's too young to even be over the fad phase, it has it's place but it won't be replacing email anytime soon. I'm also a programmer in my early 30's so I'm hardly an old foggie that just doesn't get it. My mind's open but my eyes aren't shut.

Facebook can't keep burning VC money forever and it's not yet figured out a profitable way to monetize its eyeballs. In this economy, which still hasn't hit bottom, it's not looking very good for them.
What kind of 'karma exchange'?
Is it free forever, or free to try? When I need to diagram quickly, I use UMLet. But somehow I suspect that UMLet is the one he's complaining about.
Stop hating.

It's really quite an awesome way to show more content. A lightbox works too, but is not well suited for content with more vertical length then width.

IMO, it's unacceptable for a user to have to scroll horizontally in the first place. In fact, it's probably one of the most important usability constraints.
Yelp user faces lawsuit over review
A Simple Web App using Nitrogen
Growth of new brain cells requires 'epigenetic' switch
We could have done this 1,000 years ago. The laws of physics haven't changed.

This UI design is progress.
A full-on reputational economy.
Untrue. When stuck, users click. Takes 1 time to learn: "click for it to go away."
American Recovery and Reinvestment by Barack Obama
Hearing about screen back in ~2000 was one of my "holy shit" moments in computing.
Lua has been cited as one of the major influences on WebKit's JavaScript interpreter SquirrelFish, which has seen about a 10x performance boost in the past 18 months.
I love whoppers.