skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
considering my surroundings are 99% web-savvy hipsters (i'd call myself a hickster), i'd suggest "bars, bands and blogs" or "bars, bands, and bookmarks"
1) New York Magazine

2) Details
U.S. Job Losses in Dec. Could Be Worst in 60 Years
Ballmer reveals unseen features of Windows 7 at CES 2009
And laziness is really helpful in constructing fast data structures while maintaining purity. Purely Functional Data Structures is a great read to see how this fits together.
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We combine our creative design know-how with our technical expertise, so that Flash applications are intuitive to use and more functionally advanced than your average Flash site
I've coded a product.. now what?
Hello, HN.

I've had tons of start-up ideas in the past and just never executed them, because, well, I had to pay the bills. But after saving money from my prior job I was able to quit and work my own things.

Despite getting off to a slow start, meaning, I went skydiving and pursued hobbies, and little interesting technical problems, I've finally managed to have a lot to show for myself. I've been working an unhealthy 12 hours a day for 2 months straight. I'm nearly ready for a Beta release of something that will definitely make waves. No point going into how hyped I am, because, well, that's part of the deal being in this business... EVERYONE's got the greatest idea.

Up to now, I provided my own seed money and essentially all of the ideas and technology are home-brewed. Now that I have something to show, I do not know who to show it to, or really what steps to take.

There's the entire other side of the business besides technical. How do I market it? How do I keep this afloat if/when it gets too large for me to handle myself? How can I get funding, very soon, so that I can have a team of people churning away at the larger scale ideas behind this?

I'm hoping you all can offer some guidance.

A few things about my product:
- It's a discussion system compatible with all websites.
- It's not a browser plug-in (eg: no barrier to entry).
- It does everything most discussions systems do (this one, reddit, etc), except better. You can follow people and see what comments they're posting on what websites, get notified when people reply to your comments, watch specific posts for replies... all of this across the entire web.
- Super slick and fast-loading UI
- It will destroy Disqus, not only because it is better, but because of point #1.
- And, soon, it will connect with facebook so that what you post goes to your news feed, and you can invite and follow your friends.

So, I ask:
- What should I do next?
- Do I even need funding?
- How do I market this?
- Do you see this product as being valuable, based on its description?

Thanks.
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The Polaroid camera is back, in digital
True in my little slice of Japan, too. I work in Nagoya, The Town Toyota Built. People don't always understand when I say this, but I don't work for Toyota to the extent that anyone in Nagoya can be said not to work for Toyota.

Here's an example of how that works:

1) American car industry goes nearly bankrupt

2) Company supporting American car industry downsizes a plant.

3) A company supplying Toyota seizes the opportunity to expand to a new location and begins plans to integrate it into the Toyota borg

4) This includes them needing logistical support so a different company in the Toyota borg needs to open a new office in a middle American state

5) The new office needs software services and would prefer to get them locally but with people their managers can work with

6) My employers start making plans for our third American office

I appreciate your discretion in not asking me to name names.

When assets are available at fire sale prices, and you're holding a lot of cash, life is pretty sweet. (I've been plowing all the yen I can spare into investments, too. Of course I'm not a market timer so I'm always doing that but this appears to be one of the seasons which proves why the strategy works.)
XP-Dev.com - (disclaimer: I develop and manage xp-dev.com). I'm using it at the moment for a couple of side projects (they're not startups, but more webapps) with others.

Bunch of features: http://xp-dev.com/features/

Having said that, if you really want something standalone - Trac http://trac.edgewall.org/ and Redmine http://www.redmine.org/ come to mind. There is always Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/) if you want to go old school.

Of course, you could always just use a spreadsheet to track it all (please don't laugh at this - I've seen it used oh-so-many-times in the past).
Windows 7 beta available worldwide on Friday
Madoff and Ponzi sure are the new buzzwords :)
I was a subscriber for a 6-month trial period. It was a great magazine, had a bit of everything and a lot of code.

Now I feel kind of guilty for not renewing!
Ad. Girard and Catholicism - one interesting fact about that is that he started as an atheist (I cannot verify that right now by googling - but I remember it from somewhere) - only later he returned to religion.
Thanks brother :)
Ask YC: Do you guys think a think tank startup would work?
By think tank I mean a startup which generally does research and possibly sells or markets the ideas. You have a group of people implementing the ideas and the same group also thinks up new ideas to implement.
>> I do not know who to show it to, or really what steps to take.

Post your product here. We are not that bad a bunch. You can also submit an exclusive beta launch to TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb.

>> How do I keep this afloat if/when it gets too large for me to handle myself?

That's just pre-mature stress. Don't worry about breathing problems standing at the base of the mountain. Start by taking small steps, grow organically, and think about "scaling" later.

>> How can I get funding, very soon, so that I can have a team of people churning away at the larger scale ideas behind this?

I'd say, wait, till you have a stable product. Hence, release early.

>> What should I do next?

Share your product with potential users/testers. Write about it, as often, and where-ever you can.

Good luck!
Maybe if government were run more like a company... where salaries were dependent on change-in-per-capita-GDP under one's tenure (plus a smaller piece of long-term deltas).

On a tangent point- I am less & less confident in this sort of pay-by-incentive executive engineering.

On the first point. I don't think you can blame them really. There is no push to get these machines into kids' hands in the US or Switzerland where all the kids have Windows. Why should they do it. It's not like there is a huge chunk of evidence that XOs are a better educational tool.

I think it's worrying that every review you here that someone got their hands on one, thought it was neat, couldn't figure out what to do with it & gave it to a school.
Sure. That's how Idealab, for example, started: http://www.idealab.com/
I support OLPC and I wish them the best of luck.
Could you imagine coming to interview at a company that had these "core values" on a brass plate on the wall?

* Accept everything just the way it is.
* Be detached from desire your whole life long.
* In all things have no preferences.
* You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.

I would say I forgot something in my car, then 15 seconds later they would hear screeching tires. No thank you.
Sony Ericsson T700 
The Sony Ericsson T700 is a real reason to celebrate. Imagine this: a phone that feels equally comfortable in an office as it does at a party. Now imagine that, the same cell phone is in your possession. Now nothing can stop you. This slim phone is made with a premium metal finish that will draw attention in equal amounts, no matter the situation.
Chiropractor sues patient for posting criticism on Yelp
Great interview with George Lucas
This Charlie Rose <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl2zoEEOUCg>interview</a> of George Lucas has some really interesting parts about how art is technology. That is, technology is simply a way to realize a vision - an artistic vision in George Lucas' case. I think the particularly interesting stuff is around 23:30 and 27:00. Lots of parallels with Hackers and Painters.
They have a lot of support staff (they respond almost instantly to problems) and also do a lot of Ruby development and make a lot of open source contributions, etc.
This Charlie Rose of George Lucas has some really interesting parts about how art is technology. That is, technology as a way to realize a vision - an artistic vision in George Lucas' case. I think the particularly interesting stuff is around 23:30 and 27:00. Reminded me of Hackers and Painters.
Make Magazine
I'm disgusted that they would use a term like "interbreeding" as though they were referring to animals. The correct word is "miscegenation."
They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news.

People love getting personal messages delivered to them, but that couldn't save the telegram. I mean, come on, TV news has been around for sixty years and we're still acting like the news still belongs to newspapers?
Suicide Fails the Test of Taking Responsibility: Michael Lewis
as though they were referring to animals

Are humans not animals?
* Black and White Photography
* Runner's World
* England Rugby
* Sport Diver
Yes, the image would work just as well. Now try generating that image on the fly for 1000 product pages, for instance. sIFR draws content from HTML, making it far more flexible. I very easily implemented Trajan Pro product titles for an artist's website for around 400 products, and this would have been prohibitively tedious if I were using images.

As for your resizing concern, sIFR should only be used for headlines. Typically, everyone can read text in that size (body copy may require resizing, but only a fool would run blocks of text through sIFR).
That's called "over-selling" - its a pretty common model amongst any resource intensive businesses, which reminded me of a blog entry on the Dreamhost blog where Josh Jones makes a connection between the recent finance market debacle and over-selling: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/10/22/how-to-make-money/

Edit: the blog post is meant for light reading
This sounds pretty cool, but it seems like this is a waste of money. I can't remember there ever being an attack on a president while he was in an enclosed limo (but I'm going from memory, haven't looked it up), and the previous one seems to have been enough of a deterrent. Washington, D.C. isn't exactly a warzone that requires a tank.
Why would the CPU architecture matter?
Which has racist overtones
The vocab is really obscure and even if you know a lot more words than the average person, you still get bitten. The only answer is to study very hard on a nearly completely useless subject.
Since when does "miscegenation" have racist overtones? It's a very common term in history and sociology and is the accepted term to refer to the mixing of races. It's certainly better than "interbreeding."
Not defending the newspaper, but there is a certain image of African Americans created by a) Hollywood, b) history, I guess. 95% of Russians haven't seen any black people ever.

Racism is a difficult thing to discuss. Not only it's sad that racism still has a part in world-wide culture, it's also sad that crazy political correctness becomes a part of the culture. (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None)
Students, law prof want RIAA trial live and online
Ok, you're right. There's no need to worry about scaling or maintenance for now, and I should be looking forward to those problems.

One problem with submitting here, at least without funding and any sort of assurance of future growth, is that I feel a bit vulnerable. The product contains some new browser-based technologies that I'd rather not share just yet, at least until I'm sure that I'll be the one implementing them to their fullest.
By "animals," I mean that one would only use the term "interbreeding" when referring to wild or domesticated animals mating. It's an inherently zoologic term, much like the word "mating."
There's a huge type on the front. It should read:

Function Programming: Has Its Ship Come In?

Yikes. That's a bit awkward.
i would highly recommend the beautiful mushahi-miyamoto samurai trilogy by hiroshi-inagaki. very, very nice indeed. it has the feel of 'siddhartha' by herman-hesse, but with samurai scenes.
interbreeding" [is] an inherently zoologic term

From where did you get that idea?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22racial+interbreeding%22

1,750 hits.

.

It's an inherently zoologic term, much like the word "mating."

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22human+matings%22

1390 hits.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22humans+mate%22

3,370 hits.
Ask HN: A Riddle for an emacs User
Is it possible to set up a key shortcut to do the following:

1) set focus on my browser (Firefox)
2) refresh the page
3) set focus back on my my emacs buffer
Yes, if the ThinkTank mostly outsources its efforts. Meaning build a network of domain expertize that it could bring to bear on the problem.
This probably should include an initial assessment of the problem itself by experts in various aspects of the problem as defined. Problem definition is often the weak link in the chain toward creating something new.

That service alone might be valuable.
Why blank will blank in 2009.
The blank of 2008.

Great time of year - when you can make absurd statements that no one remembers. So, I guess I'll join in on the fun.

1. Facebook continues to loose money at a rate that makes the government (really any government) look good. They quickly burn through their cash and raise more cash and then raise some more. Their growth is phenomenal, but it becomes apparent that they aren't quite able to monetize.

2. Facebook tries a bold new strategy of invasive advertising. Lots of analysis of all sorts of things that piss off users.

3. Alternative services create an interoperable system that doesn't suck. Users are able to create friend relationships across domains. All of a sudden, social-network lock-in crumbles.

I think that last one is the coolest thought. There are things stopping an open network from working:

1. Logins. OpenID is poorly implemented - it should work like email. Put in your email address, get the format of the OpenID url by checking the domain part and then put the username together in the format specified by the site for login. Profit! Most banks already have a two screen authentication (first just username, then just password) so it's not so outrageous to think users won't accept that.

2. Friends. There needs to be a cross-service friend system. This isn't so hard to implement. We already have a unique ID (the OpenID/Email). So, now we can say, bill@microsoft.com is friends with steve@apple.com even if only steve has signed up for the service because we import the bill email address as an ID to the service when we sign-up/sync. Now, that's a SPAM haven. So, why not hash the first part. So, bill becomes xc78901@microsoft.com as the ID and when bill@microsoft.com signs up, we hash it to see the ID and realise that he's already friends with others using the service. Cool! That way, we can take our friend network with us to whatever service and have it sync up easily.
If Toyota can avoid layoffs by halting production, why can't startups?
Il,

thanks for the kind words. We are a small team trying out best to create a great product. your comment is much appreciated.

Regarding the multiple site search feature, we are working on it. As you know, we'll need to scale the platform among publishers before it makes sense to release that feature to advertisers.

Its interesting that you had the same idea. We are actively looking for partners (active and advisory). If you are interested, send me your email at "niyi-at-trafficspaces-dot-com.

Cheers
And the first result for the second search has the title, "Can humans mate with other animals?" I rest my case.

Edit: Also, Google result tallies for individual search terms is crap evidence, just so you know. If you're going to gather evidence from the interwebs, at least try somewhat. Here's what I came up with:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding (redirects to the "Hybrid (biology)" article!)
First, the article is not subjective. While the article does not have a table of figures and hypothesis tests, the author presents a credible explanation for his experience. So, you can't necessarily critique his evidence, but you can critique and discuss his rational.

Second, the article you posted is not a counter argument. If anything, it bolsters the original article's claim. Your article says that when Christianity is mixed with the local animistic religions, the result is bad, especially when money is added. This is not the same as saying African's don't need God. Instead, it implies they need the Christian understanding of God.
You seem to be overlooking the fact that most of the times the academic credentials of a candidate tend to be directly proportional to his/her performance. In places like South Korea or India (my place), it is damn hard to find qualified people for the posts of professors even in 'Institutes of Excellence' like the IITs. There's an astronomical amount of gap between the amount of funding a normal university receives and the grants that IITs receive. It should be then very easy for a prospective employer to decide between a candidate from IIT and one from a normal university. The candidate from IIT most probably (99.99%) outperforms the other guy.

That's why admission to the IITs becomes the all-important thing not only for the students, but also to the parents whose only hope to get rich is through their wards. The offshoring / outsourcing phenomenon further catalyzes the sexiness of 'Brand IIT' as the students from IIT end up with offers from MNCs, which are far more lucrative than what the Indian Space Research Organization offers to its most senior scientist.

IITs get to chose their students from a vast pool of 500,000 students who cram day and night for more than 3 years during their high school. This further adds to their glamor. Hence it is not uncommon to find companies preferring a chemical engineering graduate from an IIT over a computer science graduate from other universities for the job of a programmer.

Thus third world citizens still live in the age where "Credentials Do Matter".
Paraschopra,

You are right. Our main competitors are OpenX and Google Ad Manager. However, there are some things our system does uniquely. For example, a) customising the system to match your site through a web interface. b) online payments and c) we do everything out of the box in a hosted environment

OpenX is still the big 800 pound gorilla in the room and we are the underdog but we reckon there are many weaknesses we can exploit to take them on.

Thanks for the feedback
We'll fix it now..

Thanks for pointing it out.
Fydor's Book on Nmap Scanning is #1 in Graphic Design  Scanning on Amazon
Well, if Christianity works, it may also provide a valid interpretation for why Africa has so many problems. Christians would say the occult practices of the Africans make them susceptible to evil spirits.

This interpretation works in the Amazon too. Read Spirit of the Rainforest. It is a first hand account of a shaman's induction into witchcraft and eventual conversion to Christianity. It is eye opening both for the account of the shaman's culture and the bad things Western anthropologists do over there.
From where did you get the idea that interbreeding is an inherently zoologic term? Dictionaries do not seem to mention any such zoological inherency.
My jaws dropped when I saw these: http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/07/04/palantir-screenshots...

I never realised that so much could be done with Swing.
The key phrase is "infinite squeeze" which is a condition where shorts are forced to buy at any price determined by owners,

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12523898&...

...this is the worst possible condition of a financial market, in which a class of investors can literally dictate prices without limit (IIRC, German authorities stepped in at some point to prevent catastrophe).
How sad -- I used to read it in the '70s. Seriously.

Later I worked with a guy whose dad is the 'ob' in Dr. Dobbs. Really. The name is a composite of a couple of names.

Maybe the biggest tragedy is that the magazine had devolved to the point where no editor was around to correct the improper punctuation of "it's ship" (should be "its ship"). Quel dommage.
I have never swapped a battery out of a laptop, ever. So... yes.
Here is one - http://modeltxt.trafficspaces.com/advertise/

You can see some more examples at http://demo.trafficspaces.com/setup/
There is a preinstalled account there.

The Facebook Ads analogy was just to illustrate that publishers can create a branded self-service ad system just like Facebook does for its advertisers. We didn't mean it functions exactly like Facebook. :)

Anyway, thanks for the feedback siong1987. Much appreciated.
I don't think that insight is original to Girard. Nietzsche reinterpretted morality along those lines, i.e. the slaves don't have anyone to vent their will to power on, so they vent it on themselves in the form of morality. Freud's development of the ego and id are also along these lines.
Here's what I came up with:

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

.

Wikipedia also has an article in inbreeding depression, which discusses inbreeding among humans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression#In_humans

In humans

Although severe inbreeding depression in humans seems to be highly uncommon and not widely known, there have been several cases of apparent forms of inbreeding depression in human populations. As with animals, this phenomenon tends to occur in isolated, rural populations that are cut off to some degree from other areas of civilization. Some notable examples include:

The Vadoma tribe of western Zimbabwe, many of whom carry the trait of having only two toes due to a small gene pool.

The Ulas family of southern Turkey have several members who walk on all fours, due to mental retardation caused by inbreeding.
The MMO Crash of 2008
And since (theoretically) there's no upper bound on the price of a stock, then (theoretically) there's no upper bound on the losses one can incur when engaging in short-selling practises either.

Porsche is an evil genius of Finance. Their predatory trading practises have become legendary. Some more links on this:

http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=12...

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/10/27/17465/the-disrepu...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aAe7...
Don't know about originality, but I think you're painting with way too broad a brush there.
Intervals. Nuff said.

http://myintervals.com
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Compared to Sweden, California's taxes are low ;-)