skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do agree with his point that the internet should be regulated, but it should be regulated to be fair. My current internet is 10 meg download and 1 meg upload... however I only get 60% of this. No matter what speed we have, we never get 100% of it and the only reason companies get away with it is that they're allowed to hide this BS in the small print with an "*up to" so it's up to 10 meg.

I wish for once I could actually get what I paid for when I use a phone company. I mean it'd be nice that when I'm contracted to pay them, they should be contracted to actually do what they advertise. This is where I'd like regulation and serious fines if they don't meet their advertisements 95% of the time.
Everyone knows the value of $1, however I don't think we see a song on iTunes as having a cost because it's less than a dollar.
Wow all these features will enable a whole new bunch of types of apps to be built on GAE.
The receiving emails part is an exciting surprise. I've just been prototyping an GAE idea involving receiving and parsing emails but got stuck in the conundrum of getting Python POP/IMAP libs to work around all the limitations of GAE (no socket communication allowed). I'm just about to give up and saw this news today. Woot!
Twitter's asymmetric follow is one of the killer features. GitHub has it, as well...maybe if GitHub had a status API they could be a Twitter killer.
Ask HN: Have you raised money from your friends for your startup? 
If yes, how did you approach your friends about it? I'm thinking of asking my friends to invest $1000 each (max) for my startup.
The human-parseable URLs would definitely be a big improvement. "Power Users" (i.e., nerds) of CL often type in the whole URL to the city / section that they want instead of going to the main page and clicking from there.
The Economy versus Multicore (or, How Long Can Developers Avoid Multicore?)
That's odd, because I've had no problems at all logging in with my G1, as well as posting comments. However, there was quite a bit of scrolling involved, even in the landscape view mode.
I tend to do the opposite since I figured the comments would affect my reaction to it.
The existing user base of CL, and the chicken-and-egg problem of buyers and sellers, are definitely valid issues.

However I would keep a very simple interface. There are things that I have sold on craigslist and I knew that I would get more and sell it faster on ebay, but right then I just wanted to get it "in the process" of getting gone, and ebay is a pain. It may be because of the computer or browser I use, but it is slow, it loads up all kinds of ads and kruft to show me what I want in a tiny 2 square inches in the center of my big monitor.

In fact, I would go further, and provide RSS feed interfaces and even a newsgroup interface ( not many people will use that, so maybe make a few million first).
I am glad I didnt lisen to the idiots who bitch and moan about the resolution on a 42" 1080p hdtv as a monitor or the idiots who say oh well you have to be ten feet away, total BS!!! In fact, I use 2 akai 42" 1080p hdtv lcd and run 1600x1200 on each (dual monitors) and it looks awesome and i have not even gone to the native 1920x1080 resolution yet, it is amazing!! Crystal clear picture and its useable and is about 3ft away!! My advice, dont listen to the saps who bitch about the resolution only because they feel like losers for having bought the puny 24" LCD monitor when they could have gotten a 42", Nothing looks pixelated or jagged!!, anyway, for me it works great and I had tons of advice saying go with the puny 24" lcd's because you wont be happy with the resolution, TOTAL BS!!!!!!!!! gld every day I look at teh 42" lcd hdtv pc monitors
I've been using it for a couple months, and I've had some problems with it, as it's still alpha software.

As ubiquity gets updates, the ubi scripts get out of step. The command to email a page to someone is pretty handy--if it worked most of the time.

Also, the algorithm to do real-time narrowing down of commands that you might mean gets slower and slower (seemingly exponentially) the more you type. After a while, I find it gets bogged down and unusable.

The only use I've had for it was to make it easier to twitter something, only because I don't have twitter clients installed.

That said, it's still early. I think the concept is good. And even better when you can have context specific commands for each web app that you visit. That way you don't need to download each ubi script as you want them. They dynamically load and unload with the web application.
Younger You  By Dr. Braverman
Here Dr. Eric Braverman explains the nutrients needed for our brains & bodies and shares with us simple foods & routines that can help strengthen you where you most need it, whether it relates to diet, weight loss, strength, Osteoporosis, Loss of Bone Density, Cardiovascular Systems, Metabolism, or other declines that we can relate to the aging process - Here Are Some Answers To Your Questions About Health Concerns.
Building Meaningful Relationships (Draft)
This is huge for me. I have several apps running on AppEngine and one of them is a soon to be released location-based game for mobile phones (starting with the iPhone).

I have had to jump through tons of hoops in order to eliminate the need for background processes. Not to mention that sometimes you need just a little longer than the request timeout to process a data set.

I think that Jaiku is a perfect example of how "eating your own dogfood" makes your product better / more useful. I am really looking forward to the source being released too.
Text editors and electric kettles
Yeah, come to think of it, I have heard of project Euler. I've always forgotten about it, however. I'll try to keep it in mind.

I finally got a basic barebones class system up and running in Lua (without inheritance though). I can see the flexibility and power of the thing. But with power, well, you kinda have to reinvent the wheel for the tools that you're use to. I figured it was a good exercise anyway.

I was tickled by the name LuaRocks. RubyGems. We're getting better at naming things...
I completely disagree with you regarding the Kindle's physical form; I think the Iliad (and every other e-book reader I've seen) is far ahead of it in terms of design.

When I'm reading an e-book, all I want in front of me is a large screen. However, the Kindle sacrifices screen size to make up for a built-in keyboard. 99% of the time that you are using the device you won't have any need for a keyboard, and the Iliad's 8 inch screen would serve you better at those times than the Kindle's 6 inch screen.

For me, the ideal form factor for an e-book reader would look like one of two things:

1) A larger iPod touch with something close to an 8 inch screen.

or

2) An EeePC with a swivel screen so you could use it in e-book mode, similar to the OLPC XO.

Right now I'm using an OLPC XO as an e-book reader, and although it doesn't have as nice a form factor as the Iliad or the Sony Reader, I do consider it significantly nicer than the Kindle. Of course, the low price doesn't hurt either.
Hasn't It Always Been About Status?
Did you see also corresponding "Intelligence Analyst" position description?

http://www.raf.mod.uk/careers/jobs/intelligenceanalyst.cfm

If I understand well, pay is just 16,675 GBP per year? That sounds crazy low. Even other related positions are not that much better.

Are there some tricks to sweeten it for UK army people - like you don't pay taxes/food/rent, extra per-diem allowances, long vacations, good pension?

That's for example how jobs in international organizations can be very attractive despite not particularly high salaries.
But watch out for the many security problems associated with Ubiquity's system for installing and updating plugins.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10053044-46.html
Ask HN: How do I protect my start-up from law suits? (USA)
Hello everyone,

I've been tossing around a couple of ideas for side businesses that I could try out while holding on to my day job, and then see where they go from there. I'm turning over the ideas of selling herbal supplements (not a la Tim Ferriss, I swear), and/or selling consulting services as a patient advocate.

I understand that 95% of a start-up is just getting off your butt and doing it, but I find that I stall when I think about possible legal issues. What if someone with a severe ragweed allergy goes into anaphylactic shock over chamomile contamination? What if somebody gets the idea that I should pay their $100,000 chemotherapy debt because the health insurance company won't, despite my best efforts?

Incorporating sounds like putting the cart ahead of the horse, but I don't want to put my personal assets at too much risk unnecessarily.

What steps would you suggest to shield my business and my family from liability?
You might be interested in XMOS (https://www.xmos.com/), a start-up ran by David May formerly the architect of the Transputer and the designer of Occam at INMos, who are creating new parallel processors based around a parallel variant of C called XC.
I could see having to sign up and register with menkle to sell something -- CL does that. But if I have to sign up to contact a seller, I wouldn't use it.

Its little things like that that make CL such a winner. CL tells users that it cares more about them than profiting or collecting data from them.

Also, there's no listings in central Texas.

It does look a little bit (like someone suggested) like a parked domain. I think its the overabundance of whitespace and soft pastel colors. Do something different and unique. I suppose it can even be ugly, just make it a different kind of ugly than Craigslist and domain squatter pages.

There are a lot of things people would like to do on Craigslist but can't (your question above). Many of them are unfortunately viewed as illegal or immoral by various cultural groups, municipalities and governments. Perhaps you should host your site offshore and tap into new markets, offer new features like anonymous cash, etc.? I wouldn't do it, but it'd be interesting.
The only muse necessary is sitting your ass down and actually beginning the process of creation.

The muse is some mystical bullshit that we feed one another to make things look like magic. No one wants to hear the dirty details of creating something because, for some reason, it ruins the image of the final result.
I'll mention his refrigerator, and the atomb bomb was surely worth money.
This is from 2006....
The graphs for "All time" loads slower than before the move to google.com.

Often times, I find I just check which of my posts people like reading, and it gives me a tingle bit of feel-good before I close it and go look at something else. However, I often have to do 4 clicks to get there.
Not to nitpick, but for the record, Nokia is a Finnish company, not Asian.
Is there are particular reason for me being downvoted?
Chris Swain on the Future of Video Games
Thus does the creator of Arc manage to compress the entire career of James Burke into a single sentence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

Not that the long-form version isn't entertaining as well.
Wasted Research Resources
Lysp: 21kb self-contained Lisp interpreter w/ macros etc.
Thanks for posting the link. I found this particular tidbit especially useful:

"The first is to create 'canary' accounts. Create accounts that have e-mail addresses, like "something-really-long-xyz-123@gmail.com". This account is not going to get any spam e-mail. When it does get its first spam, you'll know that it came from your database."
My my. This is the stuff I studied in undergrad, and I have to say that to this day, I still don't know how FFTs work, with the butterflies and everything.

I suppose it's been a point of pride for me to go back and learn it well, but I don't get to use it much in the type of software I write nowadays. This is a gentle reminder for me to crack it open, along with tons of other stuff I've been meaning to learn/relearn.
I believe folks in Obama's administration tend to be pro-neutrality:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2233906/obama-appoints-net...
I can't seem to login from my (dev) G1 either.
Most historical genii I know of attribute their greatest work to something outside of them. Is there a good counter to this observation?

Even if we start with your premise, that it's only the person's brain, the brain itself is an amalgamate of many, many other things, very few we have direct responsibility for. So, even then, it doesn't make sense to take full responsibility for any genius we may possess.
And what do you see it being replaced by? Ruby? C#?
Whew, that makes me feel better. I really like thinking about things, but I also really dislike the pressure that comes from thinking my ideas are only valid if there is a clear way to turn them into something practical.
Excellent feedback.

FYI, we have post specific attention data for both web and feed right on the first page after logging in.
screenshot: http://flickr.com/photos/jaxn/3121401122/ (blue is web, orange is feed)

It is our feeling that post-centric analytics is really what bloggers want. It also allows us to do topical analytics as well.

Also, I don't currently include an "all time" view, but I am going to rethink that decision.

Thanks!
Hacking Android For Multitouch Web Browsing on the T-Mobile G1
The keyboard is incredibly useful. I annotate things that I read, and I'm grateful that they've got a keyboard. Meanwhile, the screen handles text well enough that on the small setting, one page is about equivalent to a page in a book.

You can't compare a laptop to a Kindle. You just can't. The electronic paper that it uses is in a league of its own. I can see comparisons to Sony's e-Reader or the iLiad, but if you can deal with a laptop for reading you're nowhere near the intensive reader that would benefit from something like a Kindle.

I haven't used an iLiad before. I've never heard of it. The picture Wikipedia showed makes it look ugly, as I said. However, the Kindle is significantly better than the e-Reader, which is the only other one I've heard to be a legitimately good product.
Also: Amazon lets you publish books directly from them using createspace.com, and you can sell a Kindle book for no charge (I think).
I did both times. The first time was a big risk because it was my first startup. I don't have advice on the best way to do it, but I can tell you this: If you're anything like me, then taking money from your friends and family will insure you keep the startup going no matter how bad things get. There's almost no greater motivator not to give up than taking money from your friends' savings accounts. I should have given up several times before we were acquired. I had to ask all the companies interested in acquiring us for a small amount of money if they were serious about entering into 'strategic relationship' discussions -- the money was used to keep the power on, the net connected, and to keep my team from being evicted from their apartments. Honestly, I would have shut the company down six months prior had it not been for the fact that some of my best friends had provided capital. It paid off financially, but took a big toll psychologically.
Agreed -- I thought that was a good idea (useful + cheap to implement + low false positive rate).

One thing I've also debated about before is whether to use a per-site or a per-user salt for passwords. From this article, it sounds like a per-site hash is enough to defeat the rainbow table services.
Well, if it really, really hurts when you put your foot anywhere below your heart, then its not a problem to stay laying down.
A bit late in the day perhaps, but I had a couple of observations:

* Search should be above the fold. On my MacBook I have to scroll down to see the input field. Also on the results page I’d put a search box at the top, auto-focused (a la the Google homepage) so I can quickly perform another search.

* "You may have better luck with an account :)." - Why not tell me how many domains I could see if I did sign up instead? I’d be much more likely to fork over $14.95 if I knew what I was getting in advance.
I download a lot of books for free. It doesn't compare to the feeling of physically owning a book. I couldn't ever trade a physical book for an electronic version. A lot of people agree. I still see sales of my book going through, despite the fact that it's available for free on Scribd and for download as a PDF.
Thanks for the insight.

What was the average amount of money you raised from your friends? What was the largest and the smallest?
You've just had some bad luck with working with the wrong people. Lazy people are a fact of life. However, it would be a mistake to treat the entire "community" with such distain.

There are many people who really do work their butts off in attempt to get shit done, especially in the startup word.

For example, I've been working tirelessly to launch a new SaaS product and finally got the first real version of it up last night (http://www.brainbankhq.com). It's taken way more time and commitment than I had expected, but it's something I had committed to launching and turning into a success, so quitting was never an option.

I know several other people who work their butts off trying to create a product/company that will turn into a success venture. These people work hard, have families and still make large quantities of progress.

You're simply projecting your image of a handful of people onto a community. For that, you are wrong.
You're right that most laptop screen's aren't good enough for reading e-books, but the OLPC XO is an exception because of its special display. Granted, that display still isn't as nice as e-Ink, but it is good enough for serious e-book reading.
Except, that on a site like this, it distracts from the meaningful, insightful, or educational content that might otherwise take its place.
Yes. And is that necessarily a bad thing? Amazon has a reputation for excellent customer service. They're extremely dedicated to making your experience with Amazon great. Doesn't that mean the public has less to risk with an Amazon book reader? I'm biased because I have a Kindle and it's a sheer delight to use, but that's kind of the point. Posters here are acting like the Kindle's reputation is undeserved, when in fact it is a superior e-reader in the sense that it's easy and comfortable to use. People who go only for technical superiority often ignore the user experience, and that's equally poor a way to look at a product.
i agree this is probably the easiest way to get this done otherwise. http://code.google.com/p/iui/
I've read real estate investment books that advocated getting interest only loans and refinancing every few years (to take out the equity), but that assumes the value keeps going up.

In this situation it didn't.

But should the bank take responsibility for the market price of her home going down - by taking a loss on a loan and re-valuing the price of the house? No.

She wouldn't be complaining if her house was now worth a million.
What display does it use? I didn't know it used a special display.
The last element of an array is foo[-1] regardless of it's length. :-) And try implementing a circular buffer using an array of N elements with 1-based indexing and then 0-based. Sorry in advance for the loss of hair due to the former.
My blog (http://www.maximise.dk/blog) uses blogger, but they can't tell me how many RSS subscribers I have. By asking Google I found out that I could get this number by redirecting my feed to feedburner and back, and let them count it.

I never figured out how to do it. There were two problems involved for me:

1) I couldn't tell whether it worked or not before I posted something on the blog, thus sending a feed out in the ether.

2) I didn't try very hard.

I don't know that much about RSS feeds and how they work, and frankly I don't care either. I just want it to work.

A straight and simple approach that doesn't require me to have any prior knowledge would work wonders. I think there are many people like me that have a blog, but don't really have the time or expertise to get acquainted with how feeds work and what you can do with them.

Btw: I love this:

Can statzen handle a very high traffic blog?

We think so. Maybe. Hopefully. [write me]

Hope you didn't post it anywhere else than HN where people will understand that this is pre-launch :-)
Stanza is icky. I use it on my Mac to convert stuff for the Kindle, and it does the job but it does it poorly.

It's especially bad on the iPod touch. Reading on something that small is possible, but it's a dread.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070502134255/www.asimovs.com/_i...
Fact Check the Internet’s Future
Microsoft Windows: A Culture of Mediocrity
Idle speculation. The author wants to hear a certain hypothesis, so he digs up poets and primary school teachers who will tell us exactly what he wants us to hear.

The only science in the article runs counter to the author's preferred outcome, so it is surrounded by quotes that amount to "I fear.." and "I suspect..".
Microsoft My Phone Follows Apple MobileMe
Not sure I agree. It seems true that a per-site hash would be enough to defeat _just_ the rainbow table services, but I wouldn't want to have the hacker be able find one password and then be able to distinguish what the salt is for everyone. I would rather have this mitigated by knowing that even if the hacker does brute-force one password, he still won't know the salt for anyone else.
Global Find and Replace In Wordpress using MySQL
I hacked up dalampati.com/ihacker/ a while ago, but it's just the consumption-side of HN.
Why not link to a more useful page?

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
Just in case you were contemplating getting Kinko's to print the PDFs rather than buying the book, it won't save you much money. It was $48 at Amazon, and the cheapest I could make it at Kinko's (online) was about $38.
Well-written? Hardly.
No more ebooks please. Can we have something a little more interactive that makes use of the wonderful hardware we have now?
Because I already submitted it, just over 100 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310045

Glad people finally saw it - the submitter was smart to point out it's a FF extension in the title.
I can think of two things, right off the top of my head, that FeedBurner could do better:

#1. Accurately measure subscriptions. That seems obvious but FeedBurner is actually terrible at one of their core features. It's not uncommon for your subscriber count to bottom out to zero from one day to the next as their system fails to work.

#2. Find a way to find and eliminate the cheaters. FeedBurner's subscribe-via-email feature is a great way for people to scam the system and raise their subscriber counts. All you have to do is make a bunch of dummy accounts, which is trivial for anyone with any kind of decent hosting package, and then use those accounts to subscribe to your feed.

---

Subscriber counts are an important metric for both ego and site valuation. The fact that FeedBurner has such a struggle with accurate counts hurts their credibility too much.
CL postings expire, so I don't think that is a big deal. The way to do the import is to write a program that runs on the seller's desktop, that goes out to CL and logs in and snarfs the stuff, and then has them confirm / edit one by one as it inserts into menkle. That way the IP that visits CL is always the IP of the seller anyway.
So you rewrite the article and summarize it for the people who wanted to see commentary before content? If the commentary is summary, it starts to become a joke.

I understand it for Steve Yegge articles, but this? Christ, some people must be very, very lazy.
You really think this guy is an idiot? Have you attended college, seen what grades do to those who already have a passion for the topic at hand?
The advantage Pixar has is that the environment has been created so that collaboration is easy. Everyone has a framework they've assimilated from previous Pixar generations that makes them pro-collaboration.

Unfortunately, unless your employer has similar values, it'll be challenging for you to create a similar environment.