skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bah, they seem to separate their Mac vs. Windows hardware. For those of us who spend equal time in OSX and Windows via Boot Camp, it'd be nice to have a single device that'll work on both.
Just about every major media outlet is currently experimenting with various approaches to fusing high-quality journalistic content with high-quality user contributed content. This can range from simplistic story commenting implementations to more involved user review & ratings systems. I believe that this is the future (if one exists) for print media outlets.

As to hyper-local advertising, there is definitely a market here. I've seen several instances where local community sites have (very) successfully monetized through a combination of local service provider ads and ad network positions.
This is a tough one. When I was trying to find a site for my last app, I didn't want to buy the .net or .org domain without the corresponding .com domain. I read somewhere that you miss out on a large amount of traffic if someone else owns the .com domain for your site since that's what most people naturally associate with websites. For that reason, I think most people trying to find a domain name will want to find one that has an available .com domain.

If this is something that a lot of people want though, I can add support for it. I just feel like it would dilute the site right now.
[in response to the previous three comments]

Without arguing whether the government should have become a creditor to all banks (which I would disagree with), I understand his claim to be: the system fails if creditors do not take action to recoup their investments in failing institutions--and in this case the major creditor is the government.
Mice can now drink as much as they want...

On a more serious note when will this be tried on human livers?
Which is why the word needs to adopt Comic Sans so we can easily quote lines, but also read text like it's handwritten copy.
FWIW, I've had a different experience with XMPP. Take for example XMPP Multi-User Chat (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html) - which outlines a rich set of interactions between occupants of a room - something I'm really glad someone else engineered for me. Plus, take a look at the XML stanzas (in the examples here: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html) you are sending to the server, they're really not that big or complicated. Lastly, with BOSH (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html) and incredible XMPP Javascript client libs like Strophe (http://code.stanziq.com/strophe/), the possibilities are pretty exciting for web apps.
He makes a claim in the title, but never argues about it.

Here is a summary:

-I like the bailouts

-Socialism is bad

-Capitalism is good

No where does he say anything about why anything is not socialism, let alone 'us'.
The first half of this is very, very good. Really good.

I tuned out in the second half, somewhere in the middle of the big rant about how playing Doom has conditioned me to be a violent bloodthirsty killer. Or whatever. Maybe there was some more good argumentation down there, somewhere, but I shall never know. I was too busy imagining how the streets of South Korea must look now that an entire generation has grown up playing Starcraft. Blood runs in the gutters of Seoul! Don't make any Zerg-like moves on the subway!

Sometimes, even good writers need editors.
TwittyPic acquired. Launched on HN 72 days ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388578
Well, that's why you'd use a <link> tag instead of a <a> tag.

Link tags in the head are information about the whole document. Anchor tags are more vague in their semantics, and in the context of an hAtom item, <a rel="bookmark"> would be the link to the canonical URL for that item.

For a document, <link rel="bookmark"> would be the canonical URL for that document. As in, "If you are looking to save or bookmark this document's URL, you should do it using this URL over here."
well straight away I can think of

younar
youner
yuner

I guess it depends on how you say it and how people pick it up - ask 20 people you know to spell it for you after you say it just once to them and see what the results are like ...
Alternate explanation, which would refute the thesis of this article: H1-B workers are disproportionately likely to work for companies with aggressive IP processes, like IBM and Microsoft, because those companies are also aggressive about recruiting H1-B workers.
Technically, it might still be considered a monopoly, but having a monopoly is not against the law. It is illegal to "abuse" a monopoly position in one market to gain advantage in another one, or to "unfairly" shut out competitors, as you describe. What got Microsoft into trouble was attempts to use their monopoly to threaten PC makers who wanted to install Netscape, for example.

("abuse" and "unfairly" in quotes because there is a lot of complex legal code defining these things, but I think this is the general idea.)
Ask HN: One Weebly To Rule Them All?
We just launched Electobot (www.electobot.com), which provides turnkey Web sites to political campaigns. It's basically "barackobama.com for local candidates."

It's simpler than a Weebly or Homestead in that the site structure and content are ready-made. A customer sends Electobot a photo, edits some text, chooses a look/layout, and he's done.

We believe that Electobot is where Web development will eventually end up, with customers in a specific vertical market getting a ready-made hosted site that's tailored to their business.

There won't be One Weebly To Rule Them All. Instead, each vertical market will have its own Electobot that provides easily-updated Web sites for a monthly fee. There will be one for doctors' offices, one for building contractors, one for restaurants, etc.

What do you think? Is this assumption correct?
A quick skim of the Multi-User Chat though... Firstly, it's 9 years old :/ why is everyone still not using it? Secondly, you can immediately tell it's ridiculously over-engineered.

<field var='muc#roominfo_occupants' label='Number of occupants'>
<value>3</value>
</field>

Sorry, but you can't really look at that protocol and say it's not ugly and verbose beyond reason. The number of occupants in a room is surely used enough to deserve an encoding of less than 75 characters to specify a number.
I am not sure if this will work or not, but here is an idea:

Instead of thinking of teaching as a 'presentation' of sorts, try changing teaching into a conversation. Don't talk at the developers, put them (and yourself) into a low-stress casual environment.

Try a 'translation' approach: Ask the developers to talk about what they know about PHP. For instance, they might talk about accessing a MySQL database via PHP. First, have them write a script in PHP that modifies a database. Then, slowly write a script in Ruby that does the same thing. Explain what you are writing as you go. Show and explain all intermediary steps. Invite them to ask questions. That is essential. The main point of this method is to draw parallels between PHP and Ruby. Question them periodically on 'hard' topics to make sure they understand.

Be sure they have a Ruby interpreter in front of them so they can interactively learn themselves. Encourage them to explore while you are conversing with them. Encourage them to take notes. However, don't go too overboard with introducing new material.

Afterward, give them rote drills on the things you guys talked about. Give a ton of those drills. Make them up on the spot! Don't expect them to do all of them, though.

Repeat that process.

As I said before, I have no clue if this would work or not; it's only an idea.
It's hard to make that case, because ownership of data is ambiguous. For instance, if I have my phone# on my profile, and you sync it with your mobile device, fine. If you take my contact details and add them to your address book on another site, well that's not so fine. But is my phone number my data or yours in this scenario? Looking at my photos on FB is fine. Posting one of my photos on your wall or making it your profile pic is fine. Uploading it to another site in your own gallery... But didn't I put that photo on the Internet for all to see? Well, perhaps not, if I set it "friends only" on FB then there was probably a reason for that. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Facebook's technology and the terms of use of its API attempt to strike a balance for issues like this. Interoperability is fine on paper, but FB isn't just a website; it's a part of the plumbing of people's real lives.
Baby's gestures reflect family's wealth
Added as a separate post to counter the "And violent crime certainly has not been falling in the inner cities"

The actual numbers don't support his or you're assessment. Dramatic increases in a few areas dramatic reductions in others, but our worst city is has 2/3rd of the crime of the worst city in 1911. Tracking where the populations moved shows that crime is down overall even as people migrated to other areas.

1911-1914
Baltimore Md = 5.8 vs 45 in 2006 big jump.
Chicago Ill = 9.0 vs 16 in 2006
New York = 5.9 vs 6 in 2006
Seattle Washington = 9.6 vs 4 in 2006 less than 1/2?
Nashville Tennessee = 35.9 vs 13 in 2006 big drop?
Memphis Tennessee = 69.7 vs 19 in 2006 another big drop?

Taking our worst cases from 2006 and comparing them to 1911 is a mistake. Our best city has 4.4% of the murder rate of our worst so the variability is just huge.
Some Bugs of Doom (aka Heisenbugs)
This is very valuable information for us entrepreneurs to have. I see you created your account just today, I hope you'll stick around!
Once I get it working, I love it, but there's two problems I've always had with getting XMPP working from a programming/developing standpoint, both of which kept it from going mainstream sooner:

1) there were very few docs that explain the terms (roster, what a conference server is and why that is different from your regular connect server) in the context of other messaging protocols (AIM, for example). Yeah, I know now that "roster" is the equivalent of the buddy list, except it's not because there are operations that can happen on the roster and it's not complete clear which component maintains the roster and a lot of roster operations can happen asynchronously (due do its distributed nature) even when you're disconnected. None of this was obvious.

2) The docs that did exist, even for abstraction libraries, talked about creating XML stanzas and the XML stream and all the different XML namespaces (none of which were explained well enough to know when you would use 'em) and XML this and XML that. I don't want to write XML, I want to connect to a server and send and receive messages. That it is XML stream based is beside the point--and this was always touted as the reason that XMPP was so awesome, but we all know that it got caught up in the XML hype of the period in which it was conceived.

Eventually, libraries started being written that provided the correct level of abstraction for developers rather than protocol designers. Last one I used was Net::Jabber::Bot (cpan), which was okay, but there's still a lot of data extraction from partially cooked XML structures.
I quit a couple of months ago. It's just not worth it.
Emmm...... no. Yes.

Title is total linkbait, article is old. But the science is cool (overexpress chaperone molecules in liver, increase traffic to lysosomes even in old mice).

What's a good HN denizen to do? How about add a link to something a little less fluffy, from the lab the research came from?

http://www.aecom.yu.edu/cuervo/aging_and_protein_degradation...

here's the pubmed link too: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18690243
Alien life may exist among us
Inside the Rise of the Warbots
I'd love to take a look at this when you have it ready. Email me at <my hackernews username> @ gmail. I'll even blog about it!
Japan's government is cracking down on waistlines during employees' annual health check
how different do you think a doctors surgery and a building contractors website needs are?

Why not just allow the user to select his business type, and offer a default template of content and items -- and they can customize it some more.
Smartphones Under Assault from Beige Box Bunch
Dawdle Invites Game Resellers To Set Up Shop
I get the impression that Google cares so little about haters that they don't even bother to correct them. If someone claims they're doing something immoral, then they'll respond, because they don't want people to have a bad opinion of their character. But if someone says they're stupid or won't make money, their attitude seems to be that the appropriate punishment is to remain benighted.
Why Not Bring a Neanderthal to Life?
Watch out, or the graphic design police will write you up for soliciting "Spec Work" --- http://no-spec.com.
No you can't, not really. What about comments you left on someone's wall? What about replies you wrote that are now in someone's inbox? What about tags you added to other people's photos?

Once you start to participate in something like Facebook, you really don't own the interactions you have via it. If anyone does "your network" does, but since that isn't an entity in any meaningful sense, Facebook the corporation must do.
China 10 years ago, maybe even now. Every society has laws, but rule of law requires that they be reliably and equitably imposed. Anytime you regularly have to resort to bribes and shakedowns from government official to get business permits and adjudication of conflicts, rule of law is on shaky ground.
The Accidental Businessman: One month as an iPhone OS developer
Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)
Pretty different, actually. In fact, podiatrists and ear/nose/throat practices, plumbers and trim carpenters may need different templates.

We found that when we began talking to local citizens advocacy groups. We initially thought that they could use the same architecture/structure we use for political campaigns (they're campaigns too, right?), but found out they need a different site template.

Good question, pclark--thanks for responding.
Once they go belly up...

Not likely. More likely is that someone that has deep pockets and lives in Redmond purchases them for something like 2X (8 billion).
Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) looking for community sponsorship
shit happens. being able to contact someone when it does is important.

i used to work for an isp and we had a private irc server that was very valuable in the case of outages when we needed to broadcast information to other departments. if i had to deploy it again now i'd choose an xmpp server, but either way, relying on an off-network communication server is not a good idea for a variety of reasons.
Ask HN: What do developers want from an equity-only job?
Hey everyone,

The startup I do marketing for is looking for a Ruby developer, to take the lead from our freelance team that wrote the alpha. What aspects of the work, the team, and the opportunity should we be emphasizing the most to overcome hesitancy about taking an equity-only job?

As lead developer, it's a core team position with strong influence on tech decisions and a say in who else we hire. It's challenging, important work at a still-young Boston startup (one with a strong core team and advisory board where every member is working only for equity for the next six months). We know that the right person is out there, but what should we be saying to attract them to this opportunity? You can see our current job post at http://bit.ly/oEKO if you want, but we're thinking about completely re-writing it.

What aspects of a similar role, team, and opportunity are important to you? What would make you want to work for equity?
Congrats, it looks like a great synergy!
Think IPv6, or openID and you'll see what the feature is ;)
Yeah, he was quick to point out he was razzing Atwood. And Its been been written that the Zed Shaw personality that writes online and the Zed Shaw personality that you'd meet in meatspace are complete opposites.

But still..."Ferengi Programmer" metaphors are unclear at best, terrible at its worst. There's a way to highlight the danger you're talking about ("religious adherence to coding standards / design patterns without comprehension") without being so gimmicky and still be entertaining.
" At the end of the day, there is a certain irony in spec work. A prospect requesting it is ultimately saying, 'My project isn’t important enough to hire a professional who will take the time to understand my situation and goals and invest the time needed to create a suitable solution.' "

Is there something wrong with is? If I want to create a webapp and have no clue about graphic design, I would be happy with something that looks ok. I'm not looking for somebody to understand my situation, I just want something better then a border="1" table with default buttons.
The other word for "equity-only job" is "founder".
Free grant applications
Are you looking for a way to finance your education or start a business that will benefit others? If so, here are a few free grant secrets for you. For starters, the government may be willing to finance your endeavors
Agreed. Keep in mind that Facebook's original V.C. Investments came from the C.I.A.'s "Advanced Technology Research and Development Venture Capitial" Arm. (Say that three times fast.)

Governments being governments, they'd likely throw good money after bad. They might also feel, having gotten everyone in one central database, that Facebook is "too big to fail".
I know the Dawdle team really well, they are very hardworking guys (who love video games) and have put a lot on the line for Dawdle to succeed - I really hope it does.

I've also used Dawdle before - it was quick and painless to buy a video game.
do you mean equity online = no pay?
Reminds me so much of the RIAA.

It sucks when it affects your livelihood, but you just can't fight a changing market. Artistic skills and talents are commodities, shared by many. All we're seeing now is that artificial barriers that have been previously created are no longer sustainable.
err,

# Have at least 1 year of experience with Ruby / Rails.
# Have experience with MySQL and JavaScript

If you're really seeking a lead developer - I'd change that to at least 5 years of developing web apps, with around 3 in ruby.
i am a lead developer on both projects on which i get paid a salary (my 9-5) and on a number of projects that i work for equity (the rest of the time).

for me, between the two positions, as a lead developer, my roles and responsibilities are pretty similar. i have influence over the hiring, the design, technologies used, engineering, timelines and deliverables.

therefore, the things that would attract me to an equity position is an inspiring team, an inspiring team leader, and a strong sense that we will succeed after having met and talked to the team. and not just success ten years later, but success within the stated timeline of startup. i hate release delays like i hate long meetings.
What's wrong is that you won't be paying "them" to do it.

In other words, no.
pretty sure he means equity = no pay now = partial ownership of the company = more pay, more control later
Of course there's nothing wrong with it. I want my offices to look nice, too, but I don't need a weeklong branding consultation to figure out what kind of potted plants best complement my company's persona.

I think this is a classic business model problem with consultative services: 60-80% of the work is, in fact, cookie-cutter stuff that can be executed by any barely-competant practioner, and the remaining 20-40% doesn't easily command the premium required to staff an expert firm. So firms pretend that the low-margin 60% doesn't exist.

I don't get why graphic design, alone among all professional service practices, should be exempt from project risk. Some high-end lawyers we've worked with have practically fallen over themselves to offer advice in anticipation of a professional relationship; I've tried to do the same thing with my clients, prospects, and peers.
maybe my mistake, i went from engineering founder to "lead developer" as that is my role in my 9-5. i imagine that they are looking for a founder who runs the engineering side of the house, not just a lead dev. the positions are probably similar, but not he same.
Richard Branson's success is largely built on sheer bravado.
One of my favorite videos: Branson dousing Stephen Colbert with a glass of water on live TV.
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/66562/detail/
not with the requirements they are asking, which tells you that the equity stake will be some measly amount

* Have at least 1 year of experience with Ruby / Rails.
* Have experience with MySQL and JavaScript
* Enjoy working in a startup environment
What are you talking about? Soliciting spec work and then shoplifting it without paying is exactly that --- theft. But asking designers to take potentially billable hours to audition is also just that: an audition. If you win, you get paid.

Obviously you're not going to get Happy Cog or Coudal to participate in spec projects, but that just seems like the market working; proven talent doesn't need to audition, because they get their pick of projects. Indie filmmakers probably won't ask Ed Norton to audition either.
When I was doing freelance development, I had about one pitch per week for an opportunity like this. I never accepted, even though a lot of the ideas and even teams sounded solid. There were usually several reasons, but they boiled down them not offering enough equity. These "startups" were almost always pretty-non-technical founders offering 1-2% premoney for a "lead developer" position. In my view, the very fact that they felt that the technical development of a web startup was only worth a couple percent spoke volumes.

My advice: if you're looking for a skilled lead developer for a software startup, consider them an equal founder and split the pie accordingly.
New Artificial DNA Points to Alien Life
Oh. The other title they might be looking for is "sucker".
The requirements aren't an indication of equity, at all. We're looking for someone who's skilled, not necessarily experienced. Room to grow and a chance to prove yourself is one of the opportunities a startup offers, after all.
Curious: has any part-time project you took for equity ever come close to panning out? Have any of them totally cratered? Have you ever gotten screwed over?
For a person who can walk in the door as a key developer, there are plenty of paying projects that can make the same promises...
think of it as a game. If consumers get to sue companies for ridiculous amounts of money based on minor or imagined infractions then companies will in turn respond with ridiculous terms of service. Just on the off-chance that some idiot will sue in case facebook gets acquired and they forgot to wipe a backup tape with your data on it.
We're looking for someone who's skilled, not necessarily experienced.

Are you sure you have the ability to differentiate between the two?

On the whole, I'm pretty skeptical of startups that have no revenue or funding and are looking for an equity-only lead developer. It sounds like a bunch of non-technical people trying to get a code monkey for a few percent. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Ask HN (+girlfriends): Review my site - RetailFans.com
I just launched RetailFans.com and would love to get some feedback from the HN community. The site is focused around fashion, clothes, beauty products etc. and works on a similar algorithm to news sites like HN (except that it's product-based) - the latest popular items rise to the top of the list. It's not exactly a hacker's paradise, so if you have someone nearby that more closely fits my target audience, it would be great if you could persuade them to have a play around and look over their shoulder.

Any feedback you can give is much appreciated. I really liked the stream of consciousness feedback that sam_in_nyc gave in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446638 - more of that would be fantastic.

As a side, HN has been a great source of inspiration during this project - thank you.