skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one reason I'd rather just move to funding through a normal tax. The license-fee is a bit of an anachronism from when only better-off people had televisions, so it was to exempt the poorer people who couldn't afford one.

In Denmark it's more or less moved that way, except it's still annoyingly collected separately: you have to pay it if you have: 1) a television; or 2) an internet-accessible screen of any sort, including ownership of a laptop or smartphone. Since that includes just about everyone, it's basically historical baggage that it's not a regular tax. They're not at all aggressive in collecting, though—perhaps because Danes tend to follow the rules without much trouble, so there's not much need to be aggressive. I didn't realize I was supposed to pay it until I'd lived here for a year, and eventually signed up online after getting a friendly letter explaining what DR is, what they do, and what I should do.
This project is still a baby, it is even not born baby. Yes, iPad and iOS will be there, as noticed on http://pi-dev.com/, we just must find a way to fundraise this project and start porting the engine
Great looking product, can't wait for the invite.

I see you guys are associated with Intridea; any chance we can claim this as another DC startup? DC needs all the buzz we can get =)
That would have had to been one hell of a kickstarter ;)
> Walking streets in north american cities is soul-killing compared to cities in other continents.

It's even more soul-killing to walk the sidewalks of the suburbs. Try to imagine growing up in one.
Why is there such a strong focus on "responsive" CSS? It has never made much sense to me, because my desktop will never turn into a tablet, and my tablet will never turn into a smartphone. It seems as though creating a better server-side abstraction that lets me produce different markup that shares much, but not all, of the CSS would be more effective from a development time perspective.

If you use responsive CSS, what am I missing?
Hoping to try it out, I'm mocking up a website with Bootstrap and changing themes a bit and doing it visually sounds interesting.
Download contains the easy to use end-packages for users. I guess this is because it's more aimed at end-users which usually look for exactly that package first. Developers can certainly also browse code online - you just have to go into the "develop" or "code" sections of a project (you can find the code from both).
Just so people know, this is not talking about the pricing for windows rt and windows x86, which is what most of us care about.
Yes, more please! When plumbing gets uninteresting, it does my heart good to see there are still ideas like this I have yet to wrap my brain around. Besides HN and LtU, are there any venues that tend to attract it?
Current cars (BMW, Mercedes-Benz) already have that. There's a camera that recognizes signs and warns you if you're above the limit. See http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/sedan/2011/sho...
50 Best Websites 2012
Ads like this are typically bid on on a CPC basis. Shaky grandpas who click ads on accident and don't convert drive down the cost of the clicks. If you assume shaky grandpas account for 50% of the clicks, and 0 convert, then they'll make the CPC worth half what it would have been without shaky grandpas. As a result advertisers will bid half as much and pay half as much as CPCs. Just like click fraud, unless it's an orchestrated attack on one specific company, it comes out in the wash.

In the end, the advertisers don't really care (at least if they understand the math, which many don't). They care only about their ROI. If they pay 20 cents a click and make 40 they're happy, if not they aren't. Sure you could perhaps get rid of all the shaky grandpas, pay 40 cents a click, and make 80, but it's the same ROI.

What you really end up with is a cottage industry of people making websites that can convert shaky grandpas better than real advertisers because just like spam, some non-zero percentage do convert. That's why you see some stupid ID fraud ad there. Shaky grandpas are terrified of the evil hacker who wants to steal their identity.
"Privacy" means more than one thing in this context.

Mann did not have (and shouldn't have expected) a right to privacy over his employer, the university. If they wanted to read his emails then they could.

But he might have had (and expected) a right to privacy over the general public, or more specifically organizations like the American Tradition Institute.

You can only get from "the university were entitled to read his email" to "the ATI were entitled to read his mail" by assuming that the ATI had that right over the university -- and that's pretty much exactly what the court case was about, which has just been decided in favour of Mann and the University.

So, yeah, support of FOIA laws is doubtless a valid business purpose, but support of FOIA laws did not require the university to hand over Mann's emails. And this has nothing to do with the question of the university's right to read Mann's email.
Okamoto: It's the end of an era for Japan console devs
Previous good discussions on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283
Actually we got started at Startup Weekend Kansas City and now we're out in LA, though Intridea's been awesome with their support :)
Apple has demonstrated that providing a premium product at a higher price point does not equal failure.

There's been a hundred low price and low quality tablets pumped out of asia that we never hear about after launch.

Why is that the strategy that should be followed?
They're using multicolour LEDs. That's weird. Most people don't want blue or green lights. That's a niche market for accent lighting. Most people want a nice bright light for lamps and spotlights.

Spending money on getting that nice warm colour would be money well spent.

Also, the video mentions photographers. I'm not sure, but I'd have thought that multiplexed LEDs would be a horrible idea for some photography.
That's actually a really important change that they need to make. If you are trying to raise $5,000 to make 200 widgets by hand, and suddenly your project takes off and you get $500,000 in pledges, then as much as everyone would like to say "that's a great problem to have!", well, it's not.

This point is counterintuitive but here it is: Assuming that there are relatively rigid time constraints, you might be able to make a profit at 200 units, and a profit at 200,000 units, but not at 20,000 units. This is because there are thresholds where you suddenly have to invest in infrastructure, and setting up infrastructure fast is particularly expensive.

If you're raising capital to produce your widgets, you can lay out a business plan and predict with reasonable certainty that you need to sell X widgets before you can break even. You present that to investors and they decide if they think you can sell X widgets.

On Kickstarter, you are implying a fantasy claim of arbitrary linear production scaling that says "I need $25/widget and I will make however many everyone wants!" And hell, that doesn't even work for selling commodities.

So what the model should be for people starting a business selling a tech product is that they say "We're developing a prototype, and if you pledge $X you can get a prototype". Then limit that to a small production run and raise enough money so everyone can involved can quit their job. Now they have time to look for investors, and a great proof of concept that the idea is marketable.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

I'm not a big supporter of Windows 8, but writing them off based merely on price and specs seems a bit shortsighted.
looking at competitors or parent product (in my case "Instagram") is definitely effective. However, i have to take the copycat name...

Designer is very expensive for sure. Which country are your designers from? Mine is india, so relatively cheap.
Good to hear. I signed up a few days ago and expect to start tomorrow.
And Then There Was One … ISC2 Petitioner
I wish I had an answer to that.

I think the best weapon you have is mudslinging. Start a blog and explain how and why this works and why it's wrong. Try to get it read by the unethical practitioner's customers: they're your targets. Hopefully, you can have an effect and force-feed ethics into the price mechanism... but honestly, I don't think you'll get very far or see much of an ROI.

That's my best guess, and I'm not terribly happy with it.
100% agree. I'd love to be a part of this solution.

A centralized point where people can store different versions of resumes, cover letters, and application information. This point also can parse and pre-fill out any application of your choice for any company. It presents the user only with questions it can't answer from the information it has on file. A summary is given to the user for review before submission.

I've applied to several different positions where one resume or one set of application answers didn't fit all. It would have been nice to have a service to keep a record of my various resumes & application information. Additionally, perhaps you have a varied background you might want to provide a resume or application answers that better highlighted the relevant part of your background. It would be nice if the service could be told to utilize one set of application answers over another.

Anyway, just bouncing around the idea. But I like it.
I've started a blog where I post an idea a day, both to help me remember, but also to help train myself to think more creatively. A number of the ideas could function as startups.

http://blog.shopsimply.me/category/ideas/

A lot of the ideas skew towards tech and software, but some of them are actual products that could be built, and some are just half-baked ideas that might incrementally useful for an existing product.
The ad is well placed to ensure most users will see it - check out the average horizontal attention graph below to understand the necessity of that placement in the UI vs further right or lower on the page:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your-horiz...

That ad unit is available only through Yahoo's CPM program - not self serve and I know for a fact that ad unit sells out months in advance with huge CPM volume commitments.

Modern ad platforms optimize media with backend ROI tracking via pixel-fires / cookies and Yahoo optimizes their inventory to that metric with their advertisers

Pain for users in this units placement? Maybe yes. Could do better? Always.

But pressing first priority problem for a business that can't afford to screw with their profit centers, no.
STEM Heroes: Grow the Culture of Science, Tech, Engineering & Math
Wow. I remember when my older brother introduced me to /. when I was a teenage nerd just starting to run Linux in 1998. There weren't even user accounts.

Now I feel like reading a Jon Katz article for nostalgia.
You just have to first convince Dice that they spent to much on it! ;)
I'm amazed that you can look at the wreck Yahoo has become by blind optimization and say they know what they're doing.

In the particular case of Yahoo Mail, their crappiness has driven off large numbers of high-end users. They also lost a lot of great staff who were tired of working on crappy things for managers who didn't give a shit about the users or the workers as long as the numbers were good and their political power increased.

Yahoo's a classic example of what happens when you know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Looks great. Hopefully invites will be rolling out soon.
It's simple, really. Most of the time, when I click through to a user, I'm looking to see who they are. This is likely due to a retweet in my timeline and I'm looking to see how I might be associated with this person. Far less frequently do I click through to see their other tweets.
A yelp type app for long trips. When Im on the interstate for a 6 hour drive. I prefer a starbucks 10 miles away right off the the exit than a starbucks 3 miles away but 2.5 miles from the interstate.
Don’t Overemphasize Social on Your Website
I suspect being able to send a message to a friend without having to remember/maintain phone numbers or e-mail addresses is also a key feature for social networks. It provides a reliable way of finding someone, and it means people can maintain their own real-life contact details in one place and have everyone else's records update automatically and accurately.

But yes, sharing photos is surely one of the most important applications for such a platform. People like to keep in touch, and in the age of cameraphones and high speed Internet connections, a picture often is worth 1,000 words.
You mean like HalfBakery and friends (http://www.halfbakery.com/ , see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfbakery)
I run a little "waywt" site and we were thinking of doing this. Maybe there's more of an audience than I first thought!
According to TechCrunch, they are on track to do $5 MM in EBITDA, so they have about $15 MM in annual operating costs (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization). This means that Dice paid about 4x operating profits.

Here's the link: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/dice-holdings-buys-slashdot...
The Classic Discussion System is still available and works fine. I wouldn't go to /. if it wasn't for that, though.
Are You Aware of Your Link History?
It sounds like you haven't ever used CoffeeScript?

Don't you find it a little odd that you have such strong opinions on something you've never even tried?
Interesting thanks. I'm the only previous owner, I let it lapse carelessly. As my the domain is my name, and a pretty unique one, it doesn't have much resale value.

My guess is that when I was blogging regularly it got enough traffic to get on some watchlist and when it became available was snapped up. But don't think it will see any traffic without me pushing it.

But I suspect you're right they don't make it easy to contact them so I don't imagine it's up for sale.
I agree - Digg is a good example of how creators can kill a community, and Reddit is a good example of how overall community quality is inversely related to size.
Wow, that was unintuitive, but thanks for the tip. There's three inches of empty space available and I have to figure out to hold an icon to switch accounts. Not to mention I can no longer see the status of those other accounts (I await the push notification that I can't find because it's in another account somewhere).
Meh. I haven't had any major fails with the Kickstarters I've supported, though outside of the Ouya I don't think I've supported any hardware ones.

Some of the hardware ones I thought were the neat and obviously producible (like weird light fixtures/shades) in a short a time frame also either had stupid reward tiers, or, I guess, just weren't interesting to anyone else.

All that said, I don't really get the people who expect stuff in 6 months for hardware-based Kickstarters. Do you have any ideas about the product development lifecycle? Going from prototype to manufacturing can take quite a while, especially if you need to visit factories in China or some such.

When I back something that's more complex than 'I'll draw a picture' or 'I'll sing a song' I assume it might take a couple years, and that's been borne out at least once, though that level of expectation has also allowed me to be pleasantly surprised.

Despite the above, I'm not saying I think these LED lights are on the level - it seems like a very very poor idea to start a new project without finishing the first. But I also don't think they're as impossible to make as everyone is saying, though offhand I'd also think it'd make more sense to control the lamps with Bluetooth than with wifi.

But if I have this right, and they get the bulbs from someone else in bulk and just pop on a really cheap controller/wireless interface, it seems like the price works out, especially if they aren't worrying about making them 'secure.'

As for 'certifications' and such, I really don't expect they'll even get them, let alone know that they might need them or that they exist.
I recently purchased a diamond engagement ring for my fiance. That shopping experience perfectly encapsulated everything there is that I could possibly hate about making a consumer purchase:

1)Product is monopolistic, with supply artificially constrained in order to generate prices that reflect that. Actual value of say, a one carat diamond, is probably a few hundred bucks max.

2)Cultural demand was artificially crafted by a sustained (admittedly brilliant) marketing campaign by the monopolistic entity years ago. It is now ingrained into the core of our culture. Annoying to think that it didn't exist at the beginning of the previous century and that its arrival was not organic.

3)I cannot realistically educate myself on the product in any meaningful sense like I can with a TV or a car. Yes, I visited many jewelers. They all were quite happy to educate me on how diamonds are graded. I read up on my 'Four C's". I peered into the jewelers lens and nodded as I saw the slight imperfections of one stone vs another. But you know what? At the end of the day, there is NO WAY I could accurately grade them, even after all of my research and hands on 'training'. Is that diamond a VS3 or WS1? No idea, but one is far more expensive even though they look the same under the scope. It would probably take me years to be able to identify why.

4)Blood diamonds. People are being enslaved, murdered, and abused in order get these stones to me. Not to mention other horrible labor abuses, and the guns that those diamonds go to fund that wreak havoc in the origin communities. Honestly, there is no way to tell a stone's history, especially when you are dealing with a cartel. You can't exactly ask for proof, and anything they tell/show you...can you really trust the authenticity?

So. Anyway. Yeah. I mitigated the 4th point by buying a lab grown diamond. (Not much cheaper than mined diamonds btw if you are wondering).

Don't get me wrong, -I was happy to give my fiance something that made her so happy. One of the hilarious premises we all learned when we took our first Econ class was that in order to make those simple models work, we assumed consumers were rational. We all know how true this isn't. This purchase exemplifies that for me. I'm acutely aware of how irrational I personally find it, while being simultaneously aware that I have no problem setting that aside in this (somewhat rare for me) instance. I am infinitely more rational with purchases I make for myself than for those I love. That last sentence is where a lot of margin lies for a LOT of products.
I beg to differ: the characterization is well-deserved. I'm a habitual Slashdot reader, since 1998.

The topics on Slashdot are about the same quality as they were last 5-7 years--not great, but still nice and "relevant to my interests." The wording of the article summaries is still pro-Linux anti-Microsoft (and now) anti-Apple inflammatory, and still hilariously poorly edited or vetted. However, that was always a charm of the site, in a way.

The difference is that some 5 years ago, in the face of an anti-Microsoft post, for example, people would chime and say "You know, actually I have developed a great project with ASP.NET and here's why it's good and worked well for me." Or people would post detailed responses, like we see on Hackernews.

Now, I've come to a point where I see so little of those good comments and so much of the inflammatory or ignorant or terribly-humored comments, that it's just not worth my time anymore. I can get the headlines from anywhere else and in the tech world, it's the discussion behind the headlines that's the valuable thing.
Rotating from portrait to landscape.
People to Samsung: we want the iPhone 5
Of course, consumers would not be comparing Microsoft, Android and Apple tablets as Apples to Oranges. There are various factors which influence a 'buy decision' and price is just one of the factors.

For example, if Windows 8 tablet becomes a highly coveted or must-have gadget then the premium pricing might look rational or justified.
Products should really consider capping their number of backers, rather than just saying "as many as people want!" and possibly losing money on every one.
Not to diverge too much from the article (which should be about expectation of privacy rights) and get into politics and moral philosophy, but people in Bangladesh could just as well be like "quit using your lightbulbs to violate our property rights."

It's not a matter of whose "rights" are going to be violated, it's a matter of configuring property rights to improve human well-being.
Responsive times call for mesponsive measures
HDD vs SSD: Are SSDs finally worth the money?
Stewart and O'Reilly debate DRM-free + streaming (a la Louis CK)
Ops Ignorance Isn’t Dev Bliss
My designers are from Europe and South East Asia.
It really doesn't require massive infrastructure. What you've described is a high tech milkman.
Conversely, a lot of free software I use on both the desktop and on servers is hosted on GitHub. (I'm not sure how this argument is a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge)

Though, GitHub is in the collaboration business. They take the standard git model and remove 99% of the complexity of me trying to share my repo with my co-workers while I'm at a coffee shop and can't passthrough a NAT router, for example. Hosting software is kind of a by-product. SourceForge has always been about software, not collaboration between people. Buying SourceForge wouldn't solve anything since dead software will still be dead software without someone to take the reigns and become a manager of incoming patches and contributing him or herself, which all can be done without spending 20 million.
It appears that the diamond market has reached its peak, and is on its way out: http://www.economist.com/node/21538145

The Oppenheimers have sold their entire stake in DeBeers - they've cashed out. They went from producing 80% of the global market (in the 90's) to 35%; clearly, the writing is on the wall, and without strong centralized vertical management, the diamond market will collapse.

Time to short diamonds.
> Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store.

No, it won't. You think a startup will have more buying power than WalMart? Giant? Even smaller chains like Weis or Kroger's would blow it out of the water in terms of monthly product purchased.

If you were specializing in a niche market like luxury types of foods this could probably work. I agree that it'd likely take someone with experience in logistics/SCM to pull it off but there is a market for it.
This was exactly my experience.

/. then Digg and then Reddit.

I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else.

Then in a StackOverflow podcast Jeff and Joe was talking about a new place where all the cool kids hung out. They didn't want to say the name in fear of it being overrun and ruined.

With a little research I found HN and haven't left since.
Another name for this might be a temp agency!
More accurate title: "Category theory is such a general concept that you can find something in pretty much any field that can be modelled with it".
I wish someone from kickstarter would answer this question once and for all:

Is it a donation or is it a purchase?

This question comes up constantly ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4506601 e.g.) when kickstarter projects are featured here, TFA is actually about this topic more-or-less specifically. At the risk of sounding cynical: I think it's in kickstarter's financial to not answer this question- they're better off with the confusion & everyone seeing the fee-paid/donation as they want it. That way it's a payment for a product when you have your wallet out- it's a "donation" when the project fails and you are left with nothing. :)
No they won't threaten you. You'll just look, to the small number of people who are aware of the correct style, like you don't know what you're doing.