skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they're making progress, but they still don't get it. They don't understand how to make or market great consumer products.

For the Pre, their marketing materials are all screwy and confusing. The device and UI are just complete ripoffs of the iPhone. With the (R) and (C) and TM icons everywhere, and by selling something called the "Palm(R) Touchstone(TM) PreTM Backplate Adapter," they are making themselves out to be a distant corporation.
Reliving the Uncanny Valley
I'll send you an invite to private beta in a few days.

Right now the discussion system is independent of websites -- it's not something you'll "implement" on your website until it's widely adopted enough to make sense.

With Disqus, I believe this won't ever occur... only some websites are in the business of having comments on their pages, and of those, only some will use Disqus. As a user of Disqus you can track my comments across all Disqus-enabled websites, which is nice but is not ever going to encompass all the sites I wish to discuss.

With my product, all websites are up for discussion... and once I have enough users discussing enough sites, it'll make sense to offer publishers to embed these discussions right onto their site.
It's only on YC News that business plans are so black and white. The is no international standard on what sections, how many pages, or how many years into the future a business plan must be.
oh, Quality. I thought he meant Quantity.
I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by.

I find this strongly depends. I agree with the article, but this sentence seems to generalize it a bit too much. As a developer, I'm bottlenecked by ideas, not by coding. And I don't mean "make a site kinda like eBay" ideas, but ideas like:

"How do I optimally distribute quality across a video frame to best approximate the human visual system?"

"How do I measure video quality in a manner that takes into account the human brain's dislike for certain types of artifacts?"

"How do I reorder the operations in this 2D frequency transform to avoid having to transpose the data?"

The answers to these are certainly "ideas"--but they're ideas that are far harder to come up with than their implementations. While "make a site like eBay" takes a few minutes to come up with and a few months of development to implement, something like the above might take an hour or even as little as 15 minutes to implement, but the ideas are few and far between.

Here's the anecdote for the third of the above:

Developer1: I found a way to make this frequency transform a whole lot faster, but I'm not allowed to say yet because my university won't let me.

Developer2: Wait, that can be done faster? I didn't think it could be done much faster. If it can, it must mean there's a faster way to...

30 minutes pass

Developer2: Here's a patch, it makes the transform 60% faster.

No speed advancement had been made in that extremely important and often-called function for over 6 months--and it took only about 30 minutes to make it that much better merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better.
Yellowstone has seen a lot of quake activity lately, btw.:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2009/01/05/yell...
Bojangles
What is this?
Two red flag phrases: "advisory board," "hire better developers."
Whining and Dining: Love, Mosquito Style
But assuming I figured out a way to make it hard to game
Fair enough. I guess it was just the "hint: he only works one hour a day" that ticked me off...
Ask HN: Is this a DMCA takedown?
IANAL, but I just found a site that has identical content as a recent blog post of mine.

Exhibit A: (the thief)
http://www.vevz.com/the-year-that-was-2008-a-rundown-of-the-major-financial-events-that-rocked-the-nation

Exhibit B: (my site)
http://www.mybanktracker.com/articles/2009/01/08/the-year-that-was-2008-a-rundown-of-the-major-financial-events-that-rocked-the-nation/

He even forgot to remove my links at the bottom of his page.

I already sent an email to abuse@bluehost.com (his DNS points there), but should I be throwing around the DMCA word yet? How do you file a DMCA complaint?

Completely new territory for me...
Adding Exchange integration to the above is really what makes this platform a contender IMO. It's the perfect finishing move.
NIMble: $300 Android Desktop Phone Designed by Former iPhone Engineer
What? You mean all of your config files aren't s-expressions?

I hope I'm not perpetuating a meme ;-)
for a contrary look: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=412355
link: http://infopractical.livejournal.com/77298.html
The Difference Between Building a Business and Building a Brand
Why are INI files deprecated in favor of the registry? - http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907...
Yeah I expected it to do something, have the photos interact with the mouse in some way, or some cool effect.

But then I shouldn't be looking at a nice map made up of pictures, wondering what the website is all about. I think a tagline/elevator pitch is needed somewhere obvious.
I fail to see what is so bad about saying that I have already posted pretty much exactly the same thing in exactly the same context. Scroll down and you will see my post. I think that originality matters and that it is better to merge duplicate concepts rather than reproducing them. As a matter of courtesy I will always read through the existing posts to ensure I don't post the same thing as somebody else.
Thanks, I have put quite a lot of work into it since January 2008. The site has been very profitable since launching in April! Here's hoping that continues in 2009...

Suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are all welcome =)
I'm being prompted for a twitter account and password when loading that page. Anyone else?

Looks like it is this script:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/venturehacks.json?...

Seems a little rude. I don't like a generic dialog box popping up asking for my credentials to an unrelated site...
A guide to GNU Screen
HP Announces Flexible Computer Screens On the Horizon
I have dealt with these type of folks before and DMCA threats mean very little to them. What hurts them is getting de-listed/penalized in search engines, particularly Google. I would suggest reporting to Google's web spam team. You can access the Google web spam form through Google webmaster tools.
I was concerned I'd need to elaborate on this a bit more.

I don't deny that any of the above traits can be barriers to success. The underlying problem I see requiring attention is different, though, than the problem you and thras suggest we need to solve. When someone encounters barriers due to their appearance and/or image, the best solution I see does not always involve individual behavioral modification. I also go looking for systemic causes. In this case, I think there is a halo effect that is not being addressed and compensated for, or is being assumed as static and unmovable. It results in people being judged on things that do matter to the end product based on things that do not matter. A Porsche is not a faster car than a Honda because the engineers dressed nicer to the factory, nor the opposite; it is tangential. This halo effect is the thing we need to be addressing, rather than attempting to rely on patching ourselves due to errors in the system. I hope my point is a little clearer now.
Where in Europe did you live?
Making a song and a dance of this isn't necessarily a bad thing if it shines a light into some of the dark places of bad practice.

Frankly I can put up with a week of posts about some rudimentary security if it means some of my favorite services are more secure. Not that I'm silly enough to use a dictionary based password.
Ah, that's what you meant. You just have to click on the original page to shift it back. It was intuitive to me, but I can definitely see people not realizing it. You're right, they should definitely indicate how to get back in some way.
IANAL, this is simply a case of copy write infringement, not a violation of the DMCA - which prevents the dissemination of information with circumvents an owner's copyright. They stole your content, plain and simple.
Who cares? That's your agenda, not his. To each his own.
Isn't that post about how he tried to prohibit people with the alexa toolbar etc. to enter his site? This would actually decrease the number of pageviews these services would show for pof. I wouldn't consider this an argument not to believe his own numbers by now.
Almost forgot: There's also a reading guide for the Lua source (http://www.reddit.com/comments/63hth/ask_reddit_which_oss_co...) by Mike Pall, the author of LuaJIT (http://luajit.org/). The source for that is almost certainly a goldmine too (it's a cutting-edge JIT compiler, after all), but I haven't really looked at its internals yet.

(Also, should be "simple-but-efficient garbage collection" above.)
> I think the most cogent (and only) argument for nationalistic job protectionism is the fact that others are doing the same thing.

Still the argument fails. One country benefits from its own free markets even when others close up or try Merkantilism on you.
"Somewhat", as in it has some mild nudity and sexually suggestive poses, rather than showing any genitalia or actual sexual acts. There's hardcore porn, and there's softcore porn, and then there's this.
> American conservatives have followed a deliberate strategy of destroying, undermining, and sabotaging the Federal government.

That's not libertarianism.

> They even conveniently forget the arguments when advancing business interests in ways which contradict every last iota of Libertarian political theory.

Sounds like they're doing it wrong.

> Frank quotes one of their policy wonks freely confessing that he constructs his reasoning with no concern for intellectual integrity or even internal consistency. The arguments are only a means to an end.

This is true of both sides, Republican and Democrat. Again, not Libertarianism.

> If you think it through, this should be enough to destroy Libertarianism for you.

Not at all. You've indicted current and past administrations. That in no way reflects on libertarianism or its principles.

> This means that if you want to achieve a Libertarian transformation of the United States, your only possible winning strategy is to get as much money from business as possible. But that means that the only way to get government out of business is to get business into government.

Whoa! Slow down there, chief. Nice straw man, there (not really). Business will be naturally attracted to libertarianism.

> In order to affect this revolutionary change, you would need to leverage a great deal of political momentum from campaign contributions originating with business interests. Then, once you had achieved a Libertarian transformation, you would need all the people with strong ties to business interests, who would owe their political careers to these strong ties, to turn their backs on their business allies.

The idea is not to lure constituents in by political favors. That is antithetical to libertarianism.

> It just doesn't work that way.

Yes, finally! Libertarianism is about principles, none of which have been addressed. All of the bad behavior -- real and hypothetical -- pointed out here in no way indicts libertarianism or its principles.

We are all as disgusted with the bad behavior as you are.
Will Obama's Recovery Plan Really Work?
Not everyone can do something as interesting as selling tickets :)

Seriously though, what would you do after you finish your hard slog?
> it's like a drug

I think criticizing is enticing because it gives a feeling of superiority, without the hard work and risk of mistakes... and risk of criticism. Even more insidiously drug-like is that habitual criticizing makes one more reluctant to take those risks oneself, because one is more self-critical, and one expects criticism.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
You remind me when I figured out Libertarianism can't work (at least anywhere near as efficient as it should). Under Libertarianism, government must compensate for market failures/extranalities, example one being pollution.

So who decides what is pollution?

Once someone says CO2 is pollution, government now controls nearly all of your life.

(This isn't a failure of Libertarianism, it's a human failure -- greed.)
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
Very nice UI. Unfortunately very commonplace idea.
Should we come together as a community and give out hacker awards?

Would it be fun?

Someone like _why is a real inspiration to me personally.
It's bigger than an eee PC, the defining product of the "netbook" category

eee PC: 8.9 × 6.5

Vaio P: 11 x 7.9
That's not fair. I completely see his point. As I was reading this, I also realized that this guy's kind of an empty void. And that bugged me at first. But those same qualities probably helped him out a good bit.
Comedy site JibJab raises $7.5 million, no joke
I'm not judging his life; he's free to do whatever he wants. It has absolutely no affect on me whatsoever. I'm arguing the newsworthiness of the article chronicling his success with Plenty of Fish. To me, the story reads as "lazy guy who knows nothing about dating sites gets lucky and creates a dating site that makes gobs of money; proceeds to do nothing notable with life."

And hey, whatever, that's great. If the guy is happy with his life, there's not much more than that. My point was, "I'm not impressed." Given how many articles have been written on the PoF "success story", it seems like a lot of people think I should be.
Of interest to me because a) I very briefly worked on UO and b) we're about to shard off game statistics from the rest of the db at Kongregate. Also Raph's blog is worth checking out for those interested in game design and game economies.
We have the technology to rebuild ourselves
You just did the same thing.
It'd be cool, but there are a few things to worry about:

- Bugs in the system are dangerous; for instance, if I did my quiz in an hour but it got submitted as two, my job opportunity could be lost

- People will get around your anti-cheating methods

- People will practice or memorize solutions to your quiz
(while there's no problem with practicing, this allows people who are good at solving your quiz but bad at programming in general to get through)

- Code comparison may not be useful, especially since a lot of tasks will lend themselves to being expressed in just a few ways which most code will use

- Defining a useful metric for "how good your code is" is tricky, possibly impossible

It'd be especially good if your quizzes asked for things that needed to be implemented anyways. It'd be a nice, cheap way to build up an open-source code repository.

Honestly, I'd probably do the quizzes just for fun. Now that I think about it, something similar already exists which I do play for fun: http://projecteuler.net/

Altogether, it sounds like a good idea if you can get the details right.
I do switch between US Dvorak and German Quertz --- everytime I have to type an Umlaut. (It's just one keypress.)

Works good enough for me and I have been to lazy to get a German Dvorak or try the NEO layout that was designed for German.
I don't think that's quite correct. The US is very sexualized, strip clubs, pornography, it's everywhere. But it's repressed sexuality. It's like the "war on drugs" - repression means that there's more money to be made.
It happens that I used to interact with Palm marketing execs. I specifically recall the launch of the LifeDrive, a ridiculous $500 WiFi-enabled... electronic organizer. Even in 2005 it was pretty obvious that cell phones were going to replace PalmPilots. And yet a top Palm PR exec gleefully pointed a chart showing Palm's increasing dominance of the "PDA market."

The pitch was, literally, "It's got a card reader so you can grab the pictures off your digital camera without having to take your laptop on vacation!"

But the thing is... these people really believed in it. The Palm marketing folks -- at least the ones I met -- were all True Believers. They couldn't quite grasp why they got such bad press. They really REALLY believe in Palm.

Though, that said, I don't think ripping off Apple is necessarily a bad business strategy.
What Blogger Should Do
First, great work! You have a nice site, at least that is my impression from the tour. The sales pitch of keeping everything in one place and sharing it with friends who may be meeting us along the way is great.

My wife and I are planning a trip around the world. It's been pretty complicated so far. Just getting that amount of air travel figured out has been difficult (mainly because the Star Alliance RTW tool appears to have a recursion depth of 1...). We're just now working on booking places to stay, tours to take, shoehorning various experiences and adventures into the spaces between flights.

Convince me to use your site. What significant advantage will it have over a spreadsheet full of travel plans? Over a blog with pictures and a google maps widget? What does "semantically meaningful" mean to me as a traveler? Do you mix in current data (travel warnings, visa requirements, etc.) with my plans so they are relevant at later dates?
I never had a problem switching between layouts I know. Perhaps because I do it often enough?
I'm getting this after a long wait:

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /proxy/FrontPage.page.

Reason: Error reading from remote server
It is interesting because of the context.

Yes, we already heard the story long time ago, when his AdSense checks were making rounds the web.

And at that time, you would think: that's it, guy was lucky/clever, his money problems are solved, let's move on.

But meanwhile, he still kept going on and up.

When I first read about PoF, it was somewhere among the top Canadian dating sites, though not even the most popular one. Now, only a couple of years later, it became no. 1 in US.

He successfully made transition from "internet famous" to being on the cover page of well-known business magazine. He uses publicity gained at one level to propel him onto another one.

That, and also, as inerte mentioned, it was really well done story. It showed Markus from another angle.

Sorry for the "hint...", it was their original title.
The story of my life would go something like, "For the first 24 years, Tom did nothing of particular note. Then he moved to Boston and co-founded a web start-up. We're still not sure if this is noteworthy either." Care to imagine why there haven't been dozens of articles written on me? ;)

What would I do? Travel a lot. Keep learning new things every day. Work on many Open Source projects. Maybe slow down long enough to go on a date for the first time in a couple years. Whatever it is, the story probably won't be worth a 5 page article in Inc. Sort of like this one.
A lot of people say they want to change the world, then do something that won't. I often hear excuses how a bug tracking application or a twitter app will change the world - come on, be realistic. Your simple webapp just won't change the world in any real way.

Very few things actually help or change the world - and those that really want to change the world are doing it already. If you want to change the world, go do it - you don't need money to make a difference. What are you wasting your time for?

Full props to the pof guy, he is obviously doing what pushes his buttons.
It sounds like a good idea, but it probably would only work well for junior programmers. I'm working on something similar in a couple ways, but not related to programming.
Then I think what you are looking for is very small government -- as in everyone is at least an acquaintance of their leader(s). When everyone knows everyone else in a system, they are able to provide for one another because they personally know what everyone needs and can react quickly without going through seven layers of bureaucracy. When the government's reach grows so large that they don't know their citizens, then they have to rely on formalized metrics and laws to determine how resources should be allocated, and it is that sort of overhead which causes the inefficiency that you speak of. This effect is similar to companies: When they first start out, they are agile and able to outpace their competitors in the market, but once they get too big, they cease to innovate and have a hard time meeting the demands of changes in the market.
Cool, I guess, but I'm not really sure what the market for this is.
Delete 10 Facebook friends, get a free Whopper
And, perhaps someone has pointed this out, but once gov't begins to regulate economic activity, the existing corporate players inevitably start to game the system. Who was it who said that truly free trade is great because it's the only ways to keep the capitalists in check?
What is Not Networking for the Cloud
Holy shit, I expected this to be a lot crappier and cost $3000
Nanoscale Levitation: Repulsive Casimir Force Verified
Good point, although I think G2C tech can substantially improve communications between citizens and government leaders. This is assuming there's a strong initiative to adopt such tech across the board, and that it's competently designed.

There are plenty of good people working in the civic media area, so there's a good talent pool to draw from.
ok, so _why did it again. from time to time, this guy comes from nowhere and drops a little something of awesomeness. _why makes me feel sad and be ashamed to even touch a computer keyboard :/
this guy rocks.
I didn't get said twitter box - and I generally have to login to twitter every time I browse there due to Twitterrific nuking the cookie.
I own a MacBook Air and I absolutely love it. I'd like 4gb of RAM but besides that I couldn't possibly be any happier. The battery issue never comes up for me.
What those fields in your profile mean
I found myself wondering what some of the fields in the profile actually mean, and found the explanations scattered throughout the news page here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

In particular:

"showdead" - "Anyone who does want to see the stuff killed by the editors can do it by setting showdead to yes in his profile."

"noprocrast", "maxvisit", "minaway" - "If you turn it on by setting it to "yes", you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between."

"delay" - "...lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them."
Penelope, that's gorgeous writing. I would be concerned about over-sharing during a sensitive time. I hope things work out for you and your company.