skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a fun idea, with three area that can be improved:

1) Like the others are saying, you need to find a (better) designer

2) Playing the game seems to be a massive time sink.
I could never spend that much time on a game, regardless of how good it is. And I don't think it's just me, pretty much nobody with a job could spend a few minutes every half hour to run their taxi company. Which ties into..

3) Too much micro management.
This is mostly a personal preference, but I'd get tired of micro managing my cabs pretty soon.

Things that would make it easier for me to play:

a) Make it possible to play in a rewarding and competitive way spending no more than a quarter to half an hour per day.

b) Less micro management, but that should be a requirement to achieve a) anyway.

I can see the Challenge thing as a mini-game, maybe it could make it on its own as a game widget. Maybe make a Wordpress et al widget that doubles as a game and as an ad for the "big" game?

You have an interesting idea, looking forward to see how it evolves!
This is not a criticism of the article, which is actually very balanced, but I get very impatient with people who attempt to proscribe perfectly legitimate usage. "Literally" can be used as an intensifier, regardless of the truth of the statement it intensifies. People have been doing it for a long time. You can avoid it in your own writing if you hate it.

The article's point (in my reading anyway) is that "literally" sounds a bit silly when used to intensify a clichéed or fantastic statement. I'd say that's true. Of course, that means that "literally" can have the opposite effect than the one intended. Instead of intensifying your statement it can, by making it sound funny, unintentionally defuse it instead. Oh, the irony.

I love the English language.
OpenOffice.org – The Fun Has Gone?
I think the best answer is: don't!

Unless you are a huuuuge company with millions of customers -- end consumers really -- then you are better off doing it yourself or hiring dedicated, in-house staff.

The more directly you handle customer's questions and problems, the better equipped you are to enhance your product, your sales materials, you self-help resources, etc. If you outsource it, they have no incentives to help you reduce call volume, which indicates reduced questions and problems (hopefully not reduced interest!). In fact, they have incentive to INCREASE call volume, because they charge you by the unit.
Is there a story?
I'm so used to ordering from big sites like Amazon and Ebay that I usually don't even check to see if there's a phone number. I expect one to be there.

Nice looking Web 2.0 websites just look reliable, so I don't check for phone numbers on them. The older the page looks, the more i look for a number.
Academicearth is a non-profit startup?
The best I've read wasn't a strategy book per se.
1776 - http://www.amazon.com/1776-David-McCullough/dp/0743226712 by David McCullough was full of useful insights on General George Washington and how he used his smarts to defeat the enemy. He wasn't a great strategist, but very pragmatic (like counting the number of shoes on the feet of his “army’ to asses their battle readiness) and willing to take risks. It book was also entertaining as Hell.
I suspect the only kind of passive income that works is slavery.
Haha, why didn't I think of this.. probably the one link I need - thanks!
This is true. However, there is a difference between, "I'd like to spend more time with my family," which is, as you say, kind of a generic excuse, and, "I want to rebuild my relationship with my estranged wife," which is a lot more personal and displays a level of vulnerability. Add to that the insider comments on the touchingness of the memo and I think it's unlikely that this was the typical generic excuse.
Firefox has some serious issues on Linux. It's admirable that they make a browser for Linux, but they do seem to let a lot more fall through the cracks than on other platforms.

For example, I've seen several websites that crash Linux in Firefox -- not good. The rendering in general is also not as good as win/mac, esp. with respect to transparency.
Ask HN: Has anyone ever gotten funding from this website?
Charles Darwin and PHP
Theres a downloadable Stanford lecture on Hannibal, wich is great; the archeologist guy who gives the talk was involved in a student expedition across the Alps, with a real elephant!
This site charges $250 to put you in front of a bunch of angels. They claim 5% get funded. Has anyone ever gotten funding through this outfit?

I'm considering applying for my company - www.trailbehind.com, after we launch our new version next week.
I initially upvoted you because I agree with your comment itself, but on reflection, this is the kind of response I'd expect from...other online news communities. Picking out one relatively irrelevant line from an article because it touches on an issue about which you have an opinion doesn't facilitate good conversation about the article itself.
Zuckerberg is the only person out right now rocking the tie + Northface fleece look. Not sure it's going to catch on...
Want Git Preinstalled On The Next OS X?
The NYPost isn't exactly a bastion of journalistic integrity and award-winning reporting.
Hulu for Academia, this is awesome!

I don't know if any of you feel the same way, but I didn't appreciate how much random and interesting subjects I could learn from college until I graduated. Now I can attend lectures on my own schedule and in the comfort of my home, nice!
People like these dictionary editors have an interesting place in the evolution of language. They contribute to the stability of the language, which allows us to communicate more effectively by enforcing clarity and precision, but at the same time, the ideals they champion cannot survive longer than a few generations. Something like a "defender of punctuated equilibrium," which is actually not equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_drift
I would still be using godaddy if they didn't try so hard to sell all sorts of useless extra features. It feels really scummy using their site.

In other words, I don't think they have quite the customer-service focus he says they do.
Title is somewhat misleading -- this isn't really a leak, considering anyone with a developer build of the phone (available from T-mobile) could build the publicly-available source:

> Since Android is open source, you can easily download,
> compile, and install it onto your phone. This requires
> root access of course. Currently due to proprietary
> issues, many things are broken running cupcake onto HTC
> G1. Broken items include Bluetooth, OPENGL, and etc.
The fact that my webapp has literally doubled my profit margin last year makes me think that web apps are a trend with legs.
Most of the green lobby is opposed to nuclear, and the "alternative energy" push is largely a project of the green lobby.

Show me an example of where Obama and the Democrats (excellent name for a rock band) have promised anywhere near as much money for nuclear development as they have for "sexy" and ineffective tech like solar, wind, and biofeuls.

So much for "do what works".
Found an old ICQ account I forgot I had with an embarassing nickname.

ICQ wan't tell me the password unless I can remember and still access the email account I had 10-14 years ago. ICQ has, apparently no way to contact them and no other way to delete an account. Great. Thanks, ICQ.
A thread about AngelSoft funding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168575
Like I so tactfully implied, you are by far the biggest misogynist in this thread.

You take the typical casual misogyny of HN and elevate it to a level that makes even the rest of em feel uncomfortable!

Bravo!
Our business plan is fairly typical of these sorta games. It is free to play, however players can pay to get extra abilities and items. Usually, a game develops a core group of people who do enjoy it, and they're willing to pay a few quid a month (or more, on occasion). Since our cost per player is pretty miniscule, that works out pretty well. Of course, we also do advertisment (which only shows up after a few days, to avoid scaring new users away), but that tends to do terribly in such games.

Btw, this has been incredibly useful, and we're busy reworking issues pointed out here (new users' experience, for example.)
Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers
Helping the Terrorists (with our communications infrastructure)
Stewart Butterfield on Creativity and Innovation
this is great! thanks for the link. perfect to listen in the background as we hack
A bit more about the supposed next-gen iPhone
This is great. I've been watching some lectures online recently and found myself wishing for a good consolidated site. I wish there catalog was a bit bigger, but with luck this will grow. I wish they had some social tools too. Like a forum for each lecture for people to discuss and ask questions.
Ask HN: Sample of code ?
Some job ads mention to provide a sample of code.
I find it extremely hard to provide a sample of code that would represent how I work. (I'm a web developper).
When trying to find an example, I was always unable to dig out something without giving 130 pages worth of code...

How would you do that ? What do you show when asked ? What is working ?
Why all Web 2.0 sites should be twitter apps.
Why should a Web 2.0 site that has nothing to do with microblogging be
a twitter app?

Putting aside twitter's viral marketing potential, I will focus
instead on two key issues in Web 2.0 apps: (1) reducing spam/
inappropriate content; and (2) encouraging user contributions.

(1) Reducing spam/inappropriate content

Since twitter users have a reputation to preserve, they are unlikely
to spam your site and/or submit inappropriate content. Moreover,
filtering of inappropriate profile images is already done by twitter
so you don't have to do it.

Also, you could allow contributions only from users with at least
some minimum number of followers to ensure that they have a reputation
to preserve.

(2) Encouraging user contributions

Whenever users contribute content to your site, you can put their
photo, name, twitter home page, bio, url alongside that content as a
reward. So basically, the incentive to contribute quality content to
your site is self-promotion.
I've been a big fan of watching this stuff for edutainment. It's much like watching TV documentaries but with actual depth and insight about the subjects.
F# and Haskell, Estranged Cousins
$1MM/yr is 4 consultants at heavy utilization, or a very good second year of shipping a product, so that number isn't at all scary, but more to the point, my tolerance for risks to my family and personal assets is pretty low.

I guess if you live in California, form a California corp. There are other reasons to avoid Illinois and New York corporations, hence Delaware.
LÖVE - a 2D game engine for rapid game development in Lua
How we make websites
I'm bookmarking this, love it!
The bandwidth will probably cost $100.

I guess that means discipline is worth $159,900.
One good thing, which in principle, makes up for all of that. They included the source.
It's more of a prank, but, one I need to solve.

When shitty domains get voted up to the Top 10, people will see those and infer the overall quality of the domains on the site. Worse, no one will ever register those domains and they will sit on the Top 10 list forever, unless I delete them manually. So I've got to figure out some way to make the Top 10 list accurately reflect which are the best domains. Currently I'm thinking something along the lines of a popularity equation which uses time and clicks, similar to what HN does with time and points.

Thoughts?
There's no need to be rude about it. What makes twitter better on the desktop than the web?
My hope is that Domain Pigeon will give people options so that they don't have to use names like Oodlu if they don't want to.

In a sense, we're on the same team :)
Seth Levine's VC Adventure: hiring as a core competency
Want Bob Pittman’s Money? Start a Newsletter Business.
I've started using twilio.com for a new site. They offer a toll-free 866 number for $5/mo + $0.05/min. Now it's not a phone line or voicemail per se, but rather a service for programming phone features like an answering service, support ticket system, company directory, or anything else. You can forward calls onto any phone too, so they can connect with a real person as well.

I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message. voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to listen to messages which is a big plus for me.

Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.
IControl 101 - #22 - GTM Data Centers  DevCentral  F5 DevCentral  Documentation and Tips
"Here's my website, go look at some of the open source code I've published" tends to work well. The more code you throw at people the better -- that way it's clear that you're not hiding a large volume of garbage while showing them a few good lines of code.
(1) I think all your questions are answered at the Opal spec site: http://tinyurl.com/aulrpj

(2) If you think that hardware-level analysis is out of scope for assessing a corporate full disk encryption system, you're out of step with the security industry; hobbyists do hardware analysis in their spare time. There are obviously likely to be much simpler way to verify encrypted storage than "looking at the platters".

(3) Like I said originally, if you're religious about open source, more power to you. It's obvious that there's little I can say to make you happy with the TCG. But, and I mean no offense, from what little I know of you it seems like they know much more about this topic than you do.
Somewhere around July 2006.
I think somewhere around 5% of people who apply to YC get funded. Would you pay $250 to apply to YC?
Fannie Mae Logic Bomb Would Have Caused Weeklong Shutdown
Why is this link here?
How come when I was looking at the source of the Enron website, there is a reference to onlinehealthpharmacy in the Google Analytics tracking?

See here:

http://www.enron.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=41

There is this where the Urchin tracking code is:
<div style="position: absolute; left: -1963px; top: -2988px;"></div><div style="display:none"><a href="http://onlinehealthpharmacy.com/">Best Pharmacy</a></div>

Anyone?
Perhaps you can just say "here's something I've built, completely by me."--I don't seen how a few lines of code is going to say much, writing neat code is like comp sci. 101.
I feel uncomfortable. How long has William J. Bennett been lurking on Hacker News?

My last comment on this topic is to quit while you're behind. It is a lot easier for your future girlfriend to find out how much of a kook you've been on the internet than it is for you to figure out how much of a "lady" she's been with her previous relationships.
I think this is a great piece of advice. It seems especially valuable if you are selling B2B and your clients are not all web-savvy. I am going to take this advice and try it out. What could it hurt? I might have to talk to customers who come to me and are already somewhat interested in my product and close the sale (potentially). It's worth a shot.
Under "Are you a lark or an owl?", the worst part is that most people cannot nap during those times because they are at work :(

What about napping at say, 6pm when you go to bed at 11pm? (Up at 6am daily) Will it help, or will it just make you too awake to fall asleep at 11pm?

Of course, no one can truly answer this for me except myself so I'll experiment with this starting tomorrow for a few weeks .. see how it goes :)
Sorry, more proof that tone is impossible on the internet. My first sentence was just being jokey. In retrospect I should have probably not put it in there.

The rest of my post still stands though. (I'm not editing my original so that the thread will make sense.)
Just purchased 3 domain names, oisie.com (for the shape and look on paper), sayideas.com (maybe a live video site, for idea sharing), idgeo.com (hmm, maybe a tracking solution of some kind)
or maybe pollution can kill them. Hm.. or maybe global warming and destruction of habitat. We should do more of these!
There are several angel groups that charge money to present to them. I would not recommend doing this.

Angel groups generally are worthless (out of 102 YC-funded startups prior to this cycle, zero got money from angel groups), and the ones that charge you to present seem particularly dubious. If they had good deal flow, they wouldn't have to charge you to pay their operating expenses; angels would pay them for access to it. Plus the best angels tend not to be members of these groups; they don't need to. Which means this is a world where lame startups present to lame investors.
From Starbucks to Startups: What Coffee and Web 2.0 Have in Common
Zimbabwe abandons its currency
Does anyone else find himself thinking: Hm... why is this article in mainstream media? Is it because everyone craves for immortality? Is it because people are scared of invasions? Is it because people want to feel better that humans aren't the only ones that reproduce and expand their territory seemingly endlessly?
Plastic power
Not particularly.

Maybe with an install of Xcode. But it has absolutely no purpose whatsoever being installed by default.
The LEGO Turing Machine (YouTube, w/sound)
This is where contributing to open source really comes in handy. For one of my earlier jobs I was unable to show any code from previous employers but had a project on SourceForge. From what I heard, it helped land me the job.
IO::Lambda: call for participation
Well, how am I supposed to know? )
All I'm saying is that it's very unlikely he misunderstood anything there.
One difference is that YC money is capped at a very small amount.
Phone Rubik Cube Solver Is Pure Genius
DMOZ, Wikipedia, Yahoo Directory are the classic broad starting points. You could also begin with the top 100, 500, 1000, etc. sites from some ranking service (like Alexa), or top N results from major search engines on queries of special interest.

Depending on how you order discovered URLs and sites for crawling, it may not make too much of a difference where you start a truly web-wide crawl: you'll quickly reach major hubs, and everything else, after a short period. Then it's a matter of where the crawler chooses to spend its attention: which paths, how deep.

If you keep crawling 'over and over' you may want to pick what you revisit based on your own followup analysis, not the seeds of your first crawl(s).
CVS and SVN are installed by default. So are Python and Ruby.
Thanks for the advice Paul. You'll have our application in the summer, and I'll skip this site.
Thank you. I had the same question.
If you're dumb enough to pay money for this, you're dumb enough that your site will never make any money. The only ones who will get rich from this are the owners of the site - they are selling you a dream, and you are paying for it.

Spend the money on some proper SEO services instead, it will do you more good.

And let me give it to you square - your site will NEVER get funding. It's not hot, it has little potential of becoming huge. It's the type of site that can make solid money, but only by targeting the users directly. When you are making good money, the angels will come to you.

If you are trying to raise funding for your site, you are in the business of dreams, not reality.
BTW, I use aplus.net to register all my domains. If you put a drop down box to select the register that I would like to use, I think that would be very convenient.
You can (could?) get an XML dump of the whole Dmoz.
+1 for Twilio. You can get something like this up and running inside an hour or two and it's pay-as-you-go. Great for startups.
pg had it perfect: Never pay to pitch, period.
Not to be a total twilio fanboi, but this is cake if you build a quick-n-dirty app on their api. You could have it email you the sound file (or have it email it directly to your helpdesk software as an open ticket!).
I'd like to know more about the psychology involved. If, due to better benefits, a worker spends less time and energy worrying about their job (and whether it will continue, and whether they feel trapped in it), does this promote a better attitude towards that work or work in general?

Also, I seem to recall reading that psychological studies have found that a significant factor in one's happiness is based in comparing oneself to others, particularly to one's contemporaries. In a society where disparities are not so great, does a larger portion of the population as a result feel happier? Would that have an influence on one's happiness with one's work?

I'm sorry that I only have questions, and not answers. But my news browsing over the years has left me with the impression that some of our (say, in the U.S., for example) accepted doctrine as to what motivates productivity and a good work experience, is indeed doctrine rather than theory grounded in up-to-date and thorough research.
Why not just say: "For sales, press 1. For support, go to mysite.com/help". If they ignore that and hit the sales #, say, "Sorry, I'm in sales. You need to head to the support page-- those guys are generally really responsive!"
".com Checker:" must be a real pigeon; it ran forever it never came back.
I'm not sure how my professors feel about it, but I always try to stick a GPL on my assignments...
Odd argument. I never went for these relative arguments, as you can always find someone much better or worse off than yourself.

At some level, all of us are pampered whiny pussies who should be happy we're in a heated room, aren't beaten, and are at a low risk for being shot. People have their arms and legs cut off by warlords in some parts of the world right now, and my biggest fear is carpal tunnel.

But still, carpal tunnel would be a complete bitch if I got it. So I'm blowing more money on a keyboard than many families have to spend on feed in a year.

Not that I'm really defending Arrington, nor really attacking. Donno him, don't read techcrunch, don't really care anyway. If he's a douche, then have the non-douche decency to attack with something tangible.
> People have been doing it for a long time.

Why is it that commonplace misuse of a word justifies the misuse? Should we get rid of "they're" and "their" and simply use "there" in all circumstances since it has become so common?
White House: C is for cookie, it's good enough for YouTube
My New Guru - Meet Anthony Robbins
I would like to introduce to you my new 'Guru':

Anthony Robbins
Why do you consider me a misogynist? Please justify this claim, or shut the fuck up.

I've never noticed a "typical casual misogyny" on this forum. Never. Perhaps we read different threads.
Exceptions or return codes?
To take my contempt for casual sex and run so far as to compare me to William J. Bennett is just ridiculous.
CVS is installed with Xcode as far as I can tell; Its in the iPhone SDK download (open the iPhone SDK.pkg up in Pacifist and look under DeveloperToolsCLI.pkg/usr/bin/).

Though I'm surprised OS X ships with SVN by default. FWIW, the version of SVN that ships is 1.4.4 (and it still hasn't been updated as of 10.5.6 or iPhone SDK for 2.2.1.

And Python.framework and Ruby.framework are installed to let you run other programs people write. Same reason you have Java, Tcl/Tk and all the ObjC/Cocoa frameworks. Having the frameworks != writing code.
Not really... but awwwwe @#$% it, throw it in there ;)
Pew: Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else