skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me or is there something very odd about the video presentation? Phil Bosua uses just about every trick in the NLP book to persuade and cajole. Even though the project is almost certainly impossible to deliver, I ended up wanting to believe it and thinking that if I did contribute, I would be making something amazing happen. I almost felt like I was being hypnotised.

If they can deliver what they say with $100,000 then the fact that they now have 10x that probably means you don;t need to contribute to see the benefit.

Mea culpa.
It exists. First one I found:
http://www.virtualpostmail.com/
You could do the pizza button as a QR Code.
How Bees Decide What to Be
This maybe more a failing of their design and messaging, but I honestly can't tell if this system does what I'm describing. I _think_ it doesn't.
TI-8x calculator resale program - graduating and have no need for that calculator anymore? We buy it and the resell it to incoming students at half the price TI charges!

Emergency mode for smartphones - when you dial 911, the phone goes into a locked down, power saving mode that records audio (maybe video too), transmits your location and attempts to connect you with emergency services. Recorded audio is also transmitted to secure servers for later use by law enforcement in case phone gets destroyed.
> I'm surprised 'literally' was ever expected to mean 'exactly'.

I don't think "exactly" captures the default meaning of "literally". More like "consistent with reality."
Hilary Mason is brilliant. But Yahoo knows what they're doing when it comes to their advertising. YahooMail is one of the most valuable properties on the web in terms of CPM. Their ad display makes for a crappy UI experience, but it also makes them a lot of money.
Google around for "tacocopter." It's not a real product, more of a hack of marketing droids, but you will find discussion of the benefits/problems it has.
Wat programming language
3 Days ago Rohin (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rohin) the co-founder of Pricenomics posted the article: "We Need a Warby Parker for Mattresses" (http://priceonomics.com/mattresses/#industry) to which I responded: "We need a Warbly Parker for Diamonds" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4522922).

Niggler posted a comment to this Atlantic article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4523063) and then submitted it as a new post that didn't get traction because I am guessing of his new status (green name text) in the HN community.

Olalonde (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=olalonde) who is an old hat commented on the article, but didn't get that many up votes or reply's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4525901), but submitted the Atlantic article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611) that Niggler found and brought to the HN community.

Now this great article from 1982 is on the front page of HN.
For code, layout is everything.

Consider how excruciating it is to try and view source code on SourceForge compared with GitHub. On the latter you are literally shown a listing of files with the README already open for any given repository.

Sourceforge has this absolutely useless "Download" link where you have to grab an archive, extract it, dump it into your text editor, and only then will you find out it's not what you want.

It is not an understatement to suggest that Sourceforge is by people with no idea about open source.
If you want to get started with Grails, you should attend this (online) Hackathon.
It would be nice to have a dumb computer for your kitchen that is basically just for displaying recipes from the internet (eg allrecipes.com). It would be thin like an ipad and I could hang it on the wall/fridge/cupboard/above the counter while I am preparing food. It would be easy to clean and sturdy and would keep working even I spilled sauce on it, dropped it on the counter, etc.
With slashdot being sold for that little, I am still holding out hopes for Rob somehow getting his hands on the site again, gutting it, and bringing it back to its old (albeit not really profitable) glory.
If an academic sends / receives emails to do with, say, a student's medical issues, or an allegation of sexual assault, should those be public?
YourMechanic for groceries.

I want to pay a flat recurring fee and have my fridge be filled with basic food products (e.g. like a hotel's minibar) you chose from 3-5 preset packages out of 3 pricing levels, setup how many people are in the house and you are done

the service will calibrate (with your help) the content of the packages, e.g. if you see you eat more bread than you drink milk and end up with too much milk and too little bread, you can tweak it (larger bread package, smaller milk bottle)

All products will be generically packaged and will have a very low price as this startup will specialize in basic products (bread, milk, eggs, cheese, basic meats, popular fish, soft drinks, water, core vegetables and fruits)

Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store

Having statistically well sized packages for most households types will ensure optimal saving and minimal food waste.

you will never need to go grocery shopping again, never need to "remember the milk" throw much less food, and spend so much less on groceries you won't know what to do with the money you have left.

I would start this but it seems it needs a logistics / supply chain pro from a large corporate to be able to pull this through
Tcl uses blocks for pretty much everything, and they're not that bad looking:

if { $something } {
do this
} else {
do something else
}

The first one is actually an expression, but the do this and do something else are simply blocks of code passed to the 'if' command.
Well the market is for careful drivers who once in a while aren't paying attention, or are simply approaching a curve that isn't well marked.

I'd consider it a system of last resort, not something to replace careful driving but to enhance it.
Will do - maybe this thread will make me get round to doing it!
"Practical Common Lisp" is a good introduction to the power and readability of non-wonk Lisp.
Free Google Analytics Custom Reports and Dashboards
Afaik they don't have to prove you watch your TV to make you pay. If your TV has a tuner you have to pay as you can receive BBC channels (even if you don't watch them.
"Whether or not they really are impartial is largely a matter of opinion"

The BBC seems to be consistently hated by governments of every party, so they are presumably doing something right.
This paradigm is very powerful. The only thing I see missing from these types of interfaces is the ability to select part or all of the output and use it as input for a new command.

Think of it as an intermediate step of piping where the user has the ability to manually filter content. This UI concept would cover the vast majority of UI needs as almost any workflow could be captured with the following...

1.) Issue command that produces 0..N results.
2.) View results in list format.
3.) Select individual results for details view.
4.) Select 0..N results as input to a subsequent command.
I don't know if the Lifx guys in particular are naive, deceptive, or six-sigma outliers.

But I'm actually surprised that projects like Lifx are able to get any funding at all. A cursory thought in the direction of the project would reveal that the pitch is essentially a) others with tons of experience have invested lots of hard money in this space b) to no real success so far but c) we have the answer and only need a hundred grand to make it large. And d) actually, we don't even need $100k, it's more like $25k plus materials, so as you can see this project is really 99% done now.

This is classic hucksterism; you will see it at any business meetup in any town. Somebody has built a better mousetrap in his garage, leaping over giants, and only needs $25k/$50k/$100k to get to market. The key is they never need large sums of money, only relatively small sums to get to market; a larger sum would indicate that the project is not 99% done, which I assure you it is.

The obvious question: if you have built a better mousetrap and only need $100k to take over a major industry like lighting, why not go max out your credit cards and just build it? Or show a prototype to anyone over 50 who might be able to connect you with an angel investor? Occam's answer: because you haven't a clue how to make it work.

Again, I don't know if the Lifx guys are hucksters. But their pitch follows a classic huckster pitch to the letter.
Paul Singh, 500Startups selects 5 Startups to meet with in Toronto
South Korean Host Bars - for Women
And even without paying the fee, we get the BBC website, podcasts, the last week of programmes on demand (iPlayer), several national and many local radio stations.

No doubt the enforcement system could be tweaked a bit to improve it, but the results are more than worth the inconvenience.
A pre-owned diamond exchange platform. Inspired by this article recently on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611

During these hard times, give people a platform to sell their existing diamonds at a higher price than what jewelry stores are willing to pay. Disrupt the "estate jewelry" market specifically in the diamond space by bringing forth a dedicated Ebay type site that also includes appraisals (automatic/electronic?) as a separate fee. This would encourage people to sell all those diamonds that's been stored in safe deposit boxes waiting to be sold.
Pastetic.com - Aesthetic Pastes - With API
In the case of an android, it could just walk to your house when it's your time to play with it!
I do agree. Nothing says "thanks for your service but you should start looking for a new job" like a pay cut. I've seen some poor souls who hang on, hoping the money faucet gets turned on again, but it's very rare and you never make up the lost income.
It's scary that a 65Gbps DDos might soon only require about 100 KC home broadband lines.
Old books have essentially no value. Cracked (of all places) did a story of how hard libraries work to get rid of books, and all the problems that they face just trying to even put them in the trash.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-anoth...
I think these changes make it pretty clear why Twitter needs to control 100% of the way their content is displayed and why they're killing off any apps that won't do that.

I can't help but think this is also a blatant attempt to copy some essence of Facebook's recent Timeline design.
Isn't the whole point of displaying your karma score the way this site does to make you care about it?

I know it works on me. I don't write the best comments I could, I write the ones I know will be upvoted.
More litigation = more justice in the USA.
How about a Mechanical Turk based recruiter company?
to offer insurance, you have to be able to pay out if a claim is made. Since the insurance you are offering is all or none ( i.e. if social security goes away, it goes away for everyone ), you would have to pay out claims to everyone at once. This is much different than auto insurance where you only expect some small percentage of policy holders to put in a claim.

You need to find someone to take the other end of the bet. So, who would want to insure themselves in the case where social security stays around? Can you find enough of these people to balance out your risk?
A digital photo service that can identify duplicate photos and lets the user delete duplicates easily.

I'd gladly hand over my wallet if http://SnapJoy.com had this feature.
What about an iPad case that is built to hang off the fridge or cabinets? Optionally include a protective layer for ease of cleaning.
Those are tiny, tiny diamonds that could be useful for industrial purposes but will never be useful as jewelry.
Right because programming is just like installing parts into an aircraft.

Since you are obviously an expert in programming language design, I am curious to know, what programming languages have you designed?

He made it flexible in order to appeal to people who want a functional programming style and like to be clever. I don't want to deal with that type of code especially but some people actually prefer that way if that is the way they have been programming for a number of years or if they are just looking for something new.

"Put down your programmer's card" -- very uncalled for.

Any language can be abused or used in styles that are difficult to read or maintain. Almost all languages that I have seen have more propensity for that than CoffeeScript.

This one of the best language designs ever because of the significant whitespace (which to me is logically the most obvious rebuttal to your comment), small amount of required punctuation, intuitive and practical keywords, solving many of JavaScript's problems, appeal to Ruby enthusiasts and functional programmers which represents a sizable chunk of the best software engineers in web development, and compatibility with JavaScript. In order to do all of that it needs to have the flexibility that we are discussing.

CoffeeScript allows for the closest thing to my pseudo-code that I have seen.

Anyway I have spent way too much time on this discussion already.
more on layer 7 attacks and cloudflare - http://blog.cloudflare.com/saturday-night-fever-layer-7-atta...

(i love these posts; i'm old + jaded and have no specialist knowledge of networks and protocols, but they're like the spaghetti westerns of the internet age :o)
Ok that makes sense, thanks for taking the time to explain. Seems obvious now! :)
I think that's exactly what the $1 pledge is for.
The new iPad app is atrocious. I thought I somehow accidentally got the phone version somehow because it appeared so jumbled. It's better in portrait, but I normally use landscape and there is an incredible amount of unused space. I still haven't figured out how to switch to my other Twitter accounts, I just see one. The web view is now full screen so I can't read tweets and have a link open at the same time (handy with breaking news to read the story and then reactions).

tl;dr seems like a huge step back
Rackspace and Github accused of patent infringement
My favorite behavioral economist is Dan Ariely - his TED talk "Are we in control of our decisions" is really valuable to entrepreneurs. Link here: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...
Fully agree. Either you get sucked into working in Enterprise and have your Entrepreneurial drive beat out of you, or you never work in Enterprise and thus cannot relate to their problems.

To an Entrepreneur, Enterprise just seems slow, dusty, old. They don't realize the power behind the check & balance systems in place and the challenges of maintaining such a large organization. When you've got 10 people in a boat, you can keep them all rowing the same way with a drum. When you've got 20,0000 people all in 10-20 different boats, one drum just ain't going to cut it anymore.
Not really. At least when it comes to desktop software a lot of free software projects I use regularly are hosted on sourceforge. Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.
Does your business needs an app? | Māris Antons
Not the case any more, though I think it used to be.

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ8/
Here's a Parse sample app that does something very similar:
https://parse.com/anywall
I think the new design: https://twitter.com/twitter is pretty ugly and puts the author's bio and URL in an odd place. The banner image will interfere with that text and make it difficult to read.

I'm curious why they didn't roll out this layout to everyone: https://twitter.com/yankees It's much cleaner.
And a lot cheaper than a maid.
How long have they owned it? There's lots of people (it seems everyone on HN for a start), who buy domains "for a project" that never quite gets started, and end up owning 20-30 domains.

In general, I think those kind of domains will sell for anything around $200. If they're holding it for a sale, they'll probably want more, like $500 or more.

If they've used an anonymous registrar, you can check the domainwhois sites for a history if you really want, and contact old owners of the domains, it might still be them, but otherwise I'd say forget it - they probably don't want to sell.
So basically geeknet = thinkgeek. Is this some kind of really delayed stealth IPO?
I would say the whole thing is a monetizable business. To have good data, you'd need a mix of human and tech input. So why not charge $x for y number of updates? or charge for specific searches that requires more human work? or charge for a premium account that shows price fluctuations of certain items for the last 6 months?
We are far from solving signal-to-noise problems with technology
This will happen once we have a federated social network with individuals maintaining their own little slice of the Internet. Please happen soon rather than later!
Ouch. I'd venture this is a fair indication of the directionality of the value of these aging 'name brands'. It seems not unlike a former arena-filling headliner reduced to doing van tours of Holiday Inn lounges.
Zipper was a trademark?! I need a kleenex, and maybe a band-aid, and a ziploc to put the waste in :-(
The Secret to SMB SaaS Distribution is Community
The deepest site
Problem: Customers ask for a cup for water in restaurants with selve serve soda fountains and proceed to fill the cup with soda. (Is this a big problem?)

Solution:
QR codes (or something else) printed on the inside bottom of each cup intended for soda. (water cups would be normal cups.) Then the machine would only dispense soda if it sees the QR code. (Or same idea with RFID)
Agreed, that wouldn't be too terrible, but then, again, I think that I always end up using a while loop for those cases when I have to "redo" stuff.
That would work too - something where I wouldn't have to worry if I touched the screen/device even if my hands were covered in batter/sauce/etc.
Are the Virgin Mobile gateways for other countries affected, or is this US-only? AFAICT online access to my Canadian account is still using a run-of-the-mill user-defined password.
When I open a /. discussion, I expect that most of the highly-rated comments are marked Funny because they're dripping with snark or are marked Insightful when they're decidedly wrong.

That doesn't make for good conversation.
Did anyone else think this was the Dyson vacuum cleaner that uses a ball instead of wheels?
Nope! But I suspect this story is more common than I thought? Any insight from your experience?
Flip Craigslist on its head. Post things you want to buy, the service fills in questions and details on them using a combination of Mechanical Turk workers and social crowd sourcing. Looks like Reddit, with comments even, has Buy Local™ and category browsing options. Emails/SMSs you when it finds things that match your 'buys'.

Subset idea: comments on Craigslist postings. "Went and saw this couch. It's huge and hideous in person."
It's easy to see the money they make from ad clicks, but it can be hard to see the money, reputation, and respect they lose to get it.
A set of four fair dice that always roll a winner
Service that stores all your measurements for prefect clothing sizes matching. If you decide to purchase something you allow clothing store to access your profile on that service, same way as you allow some site to access your facebook details. Your order will be sent to tailor
in China after payment. More advanced idea would be to use 3d model of customer. After that it's possible to show me clothing ads with me as model while I browse ecommerce site.
Instacart? The latest YC class has that
Nope. Investments mean you own a piece of the business. Kickstarter doesn't allow that.

Legally, Kickstarter is just a channel for contributions. If you want, and if the project offers it, you can sometimes pre-order goods in exchange for your contributions. But you get no interest in the business beyond your pre-order, so it's not a security.
A streetmap I can easily draw on top of, add links and annotations etc. and send to a friend. Downloadable mobile version too. Lots of other
potential add-ons.

A friend of mine is visiting London, a city I know well, so I wanted to give some tips for things to see: most of the existing services I found have a bad UI, lousy performance, buggy etc.

This was the best one I found and this took ages to create; yet should be simple:

http://quikmaps.com/show/216340
ReWalk ushers in the age of the exoskeleton
It's bad because it's a vertical cartel, from mining to distribution. Cartels are illegal in that it limits the free market using artificial price controls. It's the artificial price controls that are illegal. Apple faces competition from Android, RIM and Win8. DeBeers diamonds do not face any competition from any other diamond producer because they spent 50 years establishing their network for "gem" quality diamonds. DeBeers is beyond marketing. Why did the U.S. government go after Microsoft? Standard Oil? Why did the U.S. prevent AT&T from merging with TMobile?
Number 3: A startup in the same co-working space as me is working on exactly that (amongst other things) – http://www.audioanalytic.com/
The license fee is not mandatory if you simply own a television, it's mandatory if the TV is tuned and receiving live broadcasts. I called them up four years ago, told them I only used by TV for playing Xbox, and they haven't sent me any hatemail since then. (They did threaten a visit, which never transpired)

I personally find it less hassle to call them once than to continually throw their mail in the trash, but whatever floats your boat.
Opensource crossplatform game IDE with native code generators
This would be great if it could also generate javascript code to run the app (backbone.js, angular...) then you could plug that into calling your backend.
I've got a similar idea I've been working on called EasyPost.co. I'm not sure where it's going yet--I know a lot is broken within postage but that's an area I've thought about
Leaked Windows 8 tablet pricing suggests Microsoft may have already lost the war
I like this idea- it would be cool when exploring a new city if had a preset tour feature where it would guide you through these past historical events, crimes, etc. depending on which theme you chose.
GoCardless is hiring developers & dev-ops (London, UK)
I see it as a donation to an entrepreneur, artist, or other innovator.

I sometimes turn down the rewards. And I'm always offered the option to do so. Which means it's definitely not a normal for-sale arrangement. Who would order something from Amazon and then check a box saying, "Oh, just charge my card; don't actually send anything"?
>> Having a massive buying power, the prices of these basic products will be much, much cheaper than any grocery store

more buying power than your local chain supermarket?
Eh, Christmas is basically just hijacked Winter Solstice. I would say that of all the holidays, the ones triggered by Astronomical events make the most sense since seasons have (or certainly had) very real importance to the cultures that celebrated them.

That is not to defend the actual traditions of Christmas though.
I don't understand how the warp-bubble would itself travel through space-time faster than C (it's effects are inside of it), only that the space-craft traveling through that warp-bubble would. But the space-craft is stationary / in the center of it?
The Ostrich Pillow
Print Newspaper Advertising Will be Lower This Year Than in 1950
7 More Open Source Software Alternatives
Hold on the "Me" icon to switch accounts. It took me a while to find that.
We rolled out our beta yesterday, sending out invites in short waves. You should get one very soon. Thanks for being patient!
Jsc, run javascript code from the OSX command line
A great example of how user testing is a necessary complement to click data.
Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat
I'm not sure I'd use something like this for production, but anything to let me do mock ups quicker is nice in my book. Can't wait for the invite.