skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Richard East-Producer
Richard born in Australia. A fine art graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, in 1977, he has worked in the entertainment industry for 24 years in Australia, London and the U.S. in various capacities including promoter, producer and artist manager. He is a peer of the Australia Council. Richard has been involved in Mamma Mia! from its inception.
Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite
This is one of my all-time favourite entrepreneurial articles. I still think of it all the time, especially when I see a new business being pitched.
I have also come to the same conclusion independently.

You need a sounding board and a source of moral support absolutely. This is best done by a co-founder. However, it CAN also be done by someone who is not a co-founder and more of an advisor.

Also, you do NOT absolutely need co-founders with complimentary skills. That is a myth. Larry and Segie did not have complimentary skills. Bill Gates and Paul Allen did NOT have ALL the skills required to build their business. They had or developed (read learned) a lot of skills on the way, for which they could not hire immidiately - which is the only thing that is required of a founding team.
What Woman Do Not Want?
Interesting that you used google to search for a "new search engine".
Any idea how much they were acquired for? Google won't tell.
Yes, the idea seems to be that they'll gather and monetize the data though I don't think that's sustainable. No one has to make money on this, they could fail while blowing all of their VC money.

All of these widget companies seem like a bit of a scam to me. Do you really need $36M to create a bunch of crappy widgets? I've never even seen a widget from RockYou/Slide/Widgetbox/Clearspring on any of the sites I visit.
I would like US internet to at least be somewhat comparable in major cities such as Los Angeles, Bay Area, New York, Chicago, etc. Overall, the monopoly that the current networks have has forced our networking into an embarrassing state.
Dani, I'm really glad you like Twistori.

I'm also glad if what you say about the eating-own-bullshit is not a problem at Wolfram Research. (But, last I saw, Mathematica itself had a horrible interface, beyond the language itself.)

But, on the other hand, I must always strenuously object when someone talks about "building" user interfaces as if it's a matter of how easily one can plug widgets together.

Which is what this article is about.
Linux Haters Blog
Are you using some kind of hosting company's graphical configuration ? It sounds like you should not have made www.abc.com forward to itself, and that you are probably ok now, but it's hard to tell.

To really know what is going on here, we would need to know more details -- for instance, by "domain forwarding" do you mean a CNAME record, or a rewrite rule on an apache web server ?

Also, can any cgi code running on abc.example.com tell what name the browser is being used to reach it ? This might matter for the code you use to run the site.

You can educate yourself about these issues without learning everything in the world about the internet, and if you are going to be making money from web sites that would probably be a good idea.
EU Plots against the Pirate Bay
I'm very interested as to who is behind wimp.com. They seem to be aggregating a lot of previously popular videos and using them as reddit linkbait. And it seems to be working, at least, it has been recently -- http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wimp.com/?metric=uv.
They're both private so we'll probably never know though I doubt the sum was very large. Clearspring isn't doing so hot, I think we'll be seeing a lot of startups like it fizzle out.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/clearspring-lays-off-20...
Free Diet Plans Free Online Diets
The practice of consuming a diet in order to lose weight is known as ‘Dieting’.The term ‘Dieting’ is used for losing weight but in some cases, it is also used to gain weight.The diet that facilitates losing weight is known as the ‘Weight Loss Diet’.
someone should combine this with openmosix!
So AddThis makes out as the real winner.. they got eaten up by a bigger fish, funded by that sweet VC money, without ever having to prove themselves.

I couldn't agree more with how much money is spent on the lamest things... $36M for widgets. Then again, back in the 90's, people would pay thousands to have a counter installed on their page.
I love how 3 year plans are always in their first year.
nice, what are you researching?
Wow.

Kalin is actually a really interesting guy, and has lots of stuff to say, and yet this interview is practically worthless because of the interviewer's antics.

Look at me, mommy!
This is also linux's great strength!

It means that in a diverse ecosystem it will always be a small player, so not too attractive to malware writers.

That advantage would go away quickly if linux got more than say 20% marketshare.

Possible middle ground: 'geeks' setting up custom linux boxes for friends and family, such as a checkpointed vmware player running ms windows on top of a linux distro, on every reboot it wipes all changes to the virtual windows box and starts afresh.
How to Make an Entire Sea (the Aral Sea) Disappear
Worldwide Distribution of Blood Types
I'm glad he quotes Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential is a great book and convinced me never to open a restaurant-even though cooking is my 3rd passion (behind hacking and photography)
the way I read the article it's more about a format upgrade that will allow capacities up to 2TB. Correct me if I'm wrong please...
> I'd suggest the free literature from the Mises institute if you want to understand banking.

Those guys have an Agenda with a capital A themselves. I'd suggest reading a broad variety of sources, including some (mostly, actually) mainstream ones. With economics, there is an unfortunate tendency for "free on the internet" to mean "extremist", which is quite different from all the free programming docs we are used to hoovering up. Imagine if the documentation to color forth were the only thing you could get for free on the internet...

BTW, this is one notable exception:

http://www.introecon.com/
Free Grand Slam Breakfast @ Denny's 02/03/09 6AM-2PM
Save your logo as a PNG or GIF.
They are animated gifs (like ajaxjoad.info), but there are some nice and original spinners there.
Over time the vast bulk of any group leave, not just the early adopters.

They'd have to, there are just too many reasons to leave and only a very limited few to stick around indefinitely.

Eventually everybody dies, gets a life or lands in some sort of crisis in their lives that changes it to the point where spending time on social sites is just too expensive.
The main difference between this scheme and propotional division becomes apparent if the heirs discover another 100 hidden in a cupboard after the initial distribution has been decided on. Should they start a new round or should they distribute it as if they had known about it from the start? With a porportional distribution scheme, the outcome is the same, with the talmudic scheme, the outcomes might differ and you have to decide which one is more consistent or just.
So both schemes give a consistent allocation of assets in simple cases, but proportional distribution is far easier to generalize to consistent allocations in complex situations.
Your example isn't quite the same, since the speaking is what creates the English. A better analogy would be "Do you bake good pies" vs. "Do you bake pies well" -- which don't mean quite the same thing, but they're pretty close.
All - I employed Geoff a few years ago and he is a total and uter genius. If I was hiring now, he would be first on the list.

Geoff - I would look at the Central Europe options....happy to intro you to many people in startup land.

Good luck buddy and I am here for ya if you need a reference.
Here's some more information:

http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=29973...

http://community.mybboard.net/thread-44513-page-1.html

phpBB.com website was hacked through a vulnerability in an outdated version of a third-party script called PHPList. PHPList is used to manage the Mailing list on phpBB.com (the website). The hacker got in and compromised the rest of the server through that vulnerability including the phpBB.com forums.
Information about this vulnerability and the security update that patches it is here: http://www.phplist.com/?lid=274
If you or anyone you know is running PHPList, it is vital that you notify them of the security update immediately.
It is important to note that the phpBB.com website was not hacked through a phpBB(3) vulnerability and there are still no known vulnerabilities within phpBB3.
phpBB.com is back online which explains this in summary. (If you previously visited phpBB.com, you may need to refresh your DNS cache to see the site).

Except that it isn't back online yet.
Big Websites Start Small
$20 says it was an employee's final farewell to Comcast.
GE Augmented Reality (real time computer vision + VR) demo with code
An early 'Everything Bucket'-like approach was called 'Lifestreams':

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

I still think the document-organization metaphors of the future will drift more towards a Lifestreams-like model over time, and away from traditional structured/hierarchical filesystems.

We have the cycles to spare, and convenience for the users ultimately trumps convenience to computers (or even programmers).
While not quite as draconian as your ideal, here are a few cool spaces:

theOffice: http://www.theofficeonline.com/tour.htm

Paragraph: http://www.paragraphny.com/

Sandbox Suites: http://sandboxsuites.com/

Another interesting (albeit fictional) club whose strict rules, while at variance with your own, may appeal nonetheless: http://chappie.stanford.edu/~fancylad/diogenes.html
Power Enhancer | BG 244 | Engine Cleaners | Engine Additives
BG 244 when is simply added to a full tank of diesel, safely cleans away accumulated deposits in parts of the engine fuel system (including injectors) and combustion chambers.
This needs to be modded up approximately 27 more times. Every reason which you have for your competitors not wanting to touch this niche is a reason for advertisers not wanting to pay to advertise to your users. Can you identify some local Nigerian companies which are making money, on the Internet, legitimately, from Nigerians?

If not then your model is to be one step ahead of the banstick on Google. It is not a pleasant place to be!
1and1 is great. I use them too.
Your Waist Size Determines Your Career Growth
Maybe it's a problem of language. Perhaps 'user-interface' is the wrong phrase for what Mathematica enables. It seems closer to 'interactive exploration'.

Mathematica is really intended for general purpose exploration, and in that task, as well as many others, a 'hacked together' GUI made out of a few widgets is orders of magnitude more accessible than the raw code. It's not beautiful, necessarily, and it's not necessarily well-designed. It's not likely to replace the detailed, careful work of master designers.

But it does succeed at placing extraordinary power at one's fingertips. When the elements simply work together, and the data can be simply, easily, and quickly plugged into to a display function and a manipulate function in a line or two, it opens really exciting new possibilities.
So bootstrapping is a challenge. Will users wait out the 'training' period?

(Or similarly, if a forward-thinking group is willing to help train, are their choices representative enough of what the impatient masses eventually want?)

I think it's a promising area for experimentation.
Thanks for the invaluable advice, everyone. Really appreciate you guys taking out the time to reply !!

I've made the decision ... it's going to be a startup. If nothing else, it will be one dandy adventure !

thanks again!
Utility Mill - Easily Create Online Python Utilities
-eur seems French. The meaning is the same anyway.
Common sense, unfortunately isn't common.

This all the more makes you respect Darwin, considering that when he first came up with it, it went against the grain of society even more than it does today. Humanity has a long history of not letting facts get in the way of 'rational' discussion.

This leads to all kinds of suffering but there are enough individuals with an agenda that get ahead on this suffering that nobody seems to care.

Tough choice between Einstein and Darwin when it comes to being a stand-up scientist. Einstein probably has the bigger influence in our daily lives but Darwin stands out for out-of-the-box thinking even more imo.
Succinct but definitely not universal. Like seemingly everyone else here, I'm a startup founder, and I did it because I thought what I created needed to exist.

A "liquidity event" (god I hate that term) might be possible but it's not the driving force. If someone offered me a huge sum of money, I might be tempted, but I'd just take that money and work on the next thing I considered needs to exist!

I don't think people obsessed with the goal of money beyond anything else create startups, although they might find great riches as a result of their efforts. If money was the only thing in my life I'd probably have tried to found an investment fund or a real estate company or something.

Sorry to talk about myself here but in such things one can only really refer to one's own experience.
I think all we can say for certain is that if you give up you are guaranteed to fail. Not giving up is only a prerequisite for success, not a guarantee and anyone who is at the stage of having not yet given up but also hasn't hit the right success combination yet is just an unknown until either they give up (by either choice or circumstance) or they succeed.
Hacker news? I don't think so.
So why hasn't it been struck off the books?

I distrust any government that keeps such laws around just in case they need something to get you with. Overcriminalisation, I think it's called. Not that I have a surfeit of trust in other governments but you get the point.
Beta Test Site For iPhone Developers
Yeah, but at least America has a free enough press and a transparent enough legal system that you can have reasonable faith that an attempt to prosecute anyone for some ridiculous outdated law would generate enough outcry and derision that it probably wouldn't go ahead. Or if it did, it would be overturned, as in the law you quote.

Singapore, who knows?
Focusing on making everything look slick upfront is an easy mistake to make. The first step is to get the essential "process" working. In some cases, the graphical design of the site is a part of that task, but in most cases, the core of the site's success is in whether the user workflows work well and people are using the site. So it's certainly wise to focus on that first.
That isn't a strong endorsement.
How do they identify who is a 'native'? And does it not seem a bit suspicious to anybody that the area where the 'A' blood type crops up in Africa is also the same area where slaves were picked up from and returned back during abolishment?

Also, if you overlay the O graph on top of the B type, you see some correlation with the language family (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Languengl...) in Africa.

Unfortunately, the addition of european languages in South America spoils the correlation.

I bet it would be quite interesting to compare ethnic groups with language families and blood types.
"It’s proposed that ISPs should disconnect subscribers who share copyrighted content, based on information provided by the entertainment industry."

Because the entertainment industry is completely fair and balanced.
Still Doing the Math, But for 100K A Year
It works fine. But doesn't have sb-threads enabled so, at best you can use it for fun or development. Webservers like hunchentoot will give errors if you open a second request at the same time.

The way to fix this is, to do a which sbcl to find out where it's installed for me it was in /opt/local/ then download the source from http://www.sbcl.org

In the sbcl folder create a file called customize-target-features.lisp and put the following code in it...

(lambda (features)
(flet ((enable (x)
(pushnew x features))
(disable (x)
(setf features (remove x features))))
;;; Threading support, available only on x86/x86-64 Linux, x86 Solaris
;;; and x86 Mac OS X (experimental).
(enable :sb-thread)))

now sh make.sh
and then export INSTALL_ROOT=/opt/local/
and sudo sh install.sh

Try sbcl

if you get an error that it can't find the core
then copy the core in output folder in sbcl to where it says it can't find sbcl.core

that'll give you sbcl with threads on macosx and Aquamacs that loads it in a fraction of a second.
I am going to model this mathematically soon, but with a very small sample size, you can quickly reach a pretty accurate result. And in general, most results are pretty clear - number of states in the u.s will always be the same, no matter how forward thinking you are.

Such an engine has to start small and be trained for a few months, otherwise users will think it sucks. As it grows, it adapts.

I bet one could actually do this very easily using yahoo BOSS. Want to take a stab at it? If anyone wanted to work on this, I'd help, so long it was written in python.
Coffee shops fail because of poor management and/or poor quality. 4Barrel and Ritual succeed because they are quality focused. If you are a coffee shop- roast and brew the best coffee possible; this takes love, work, and an interest in coffee. Owners of successful coffee shops like the ones mentioned try to roast and brew the best coffee that they can. The author must not have set themselves apart from other coffee businesses in terms of quality; either that, or poor management. If you have quality and capable management it would be hard to fail. Defining coffee quality is beyond the scope of this site- methinks. ( basically, it is buying great green coffees, roasting them very well( don't burn them!), brewing them as best as you can( French Press or something without paper( and often (every 30-45 minutes))), having staff that care about keeping the quality standards ( good luck with that one!!), and thinking: about how to have better quality and be more efficient). Actually, it is fairly easy.
The $200 figure was created by digg PR. Later on they decided that $1000 was more believable (also not true). And elance wasn't involved. The site was pretty ugly for the first 6 months. But that was in 2004, the barriers to entry are higher now.
agree. there's enough people out there that live on facebook that i postulate that more than a few would pay something for facebook++. i think they could make a killer product around photos alone.

zuckerberg has said it many times that he thinks of facebook as a utility. despite my reluctance for many years to use facebook all that much, more and more it's becoming ad much a part of life as IM or email fot me. with so many users a few dollars from a small percentage goes a long way.
I feel that way as well, and I assumed I was ignorant or stupid because I couldn't make sense of it... then October hit and it became obvious that a large number of companies that made their fortunes on this system also did not or could not understand the whole thing either. It was kind of reassuring in a "you're smarter than you let yourself think, but not smart enough that your house isn't underwater" way.

The last time I felt this way was in the mid-late 90s sitting on the porch with my dad in rural Nebraska. We couldn't figure out why so many tech companies were darlings of the stock market. And sure enough, while there was some (read: substantial) lasting value in the internet business, there were a lot of really stupid dot coms that didn't bring anything to the table.

I believe that there's a large amount of capital seeking returns right now. That is to say, I think at this stage of the world's economic evolution many organizations have obligations to invest large amounts of money, and that there's some ratio of money to real work that is off kilter possibly. For this reason I think tech and the financial bubbles represent a class of problem that we're going to see repeat itself (irregularly) going forward. It would sure be nice to be able to capitalize on it, somehow. :)
FTA: you get $100k/yr as a teacher after working at the same job for ~30 years. A sweet pension is also possible -- although who knows whether this is still the case or will last.
pg has been actively discouraging 'this is off topic' posts. He says that they won't get upvotes or comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460096

By that logic, either net.kook conspiracy theories are on topic, or something hasn't worked quite according to plan.
Real time polling is all well and good, but it seems like facebook itself is a bit of an elite audience.

Do you really need facebook's infrastructure/tie-in to run a realtime poll? What advantages does running it through facebook have?
Ask HN: Does anybody have the link to the trading systems post? (couple months back)
A couple months back there was a post about trading systems and how somebody created one. It lead into a fairly interesting discussion in the comments, does anyone know the link?
For some reason I've always had the impression that O was rare. I cross checked with wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type#ABO_and_Rh_distribut... and it seems a bit less than A (O+ and O- compared to A+, A-, AB+ and AB-), but no means rare. Did anybody else have this prejudice?

The 'native' part also seems a little dubious. What is that supposed to mean in terms of their samples?
Don Dodge from Microsoft had this post a long time ago: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/freem...

Money quote: "The average is less than 3% conversion."
First time a story is #1 on HN and reddit at the same time?
Management is to general. What specifically do you want this person to do? Build plans? Make decisions? Make sure the office is clean?

If it is shape our business. I would say you need someone with a background in what you guys are working on. I think it'll be difficult to find this person out of your core group. One of you needs to do this job for the time being.
Yeah, I know, he told me off for it too, but I can't resist... When I see trash, I have to call it trash.
While this video did indeed introduce me to the concept of fractional reserver banking when I first saw it a while back, it's generally good to remember than lies that only slightly deviate from the truth are to hardest to identify. The video is quite competently done, but it makes unsubstantiated generalizations.