skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Is Vulnerable, Time To Back Up Your Data
TED's head Chris Anderson excited about move
Keyboards layouts for Spanish keyboards without the "&lt;" and "&gt;" key
Twitter improves service, base; next, revenue
Are you kidding me? Have you seen Fox Business news lately? Or watched Rock of Love? Or I dunno, any main stream media in the US in the last 10 years? Porn and pretty naked ladies rule here in America even with the religious baby boomers fighting against it (all the while buying it non-stop in private).

Yes maybe the mentality of the US is still lagging (lots of old people still cling to their religion), but our actions are probably the most progressive in the entire world (we don't need a law to change that)
Anatomie L'Enfer is a good mix between both.
Nanny Placement - Northwest Nannies Institute
We are a nanny placement agency, placing full time and part time, long-term and short-term nannies and childcare providers.
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer
0: stop reading HN :)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Amateur
Pretty cool, except the fact that they advise everyone to waste a sheet of paper to see their green tech demo.
I ended up shutting down my phpBB forum because it took too much time to weed out all the porn and spam. Forum is now a yahoo group and have had no problems.
'that said, most people I know and deal with on daily basis are against porn in general'

I don't think you can really know most people are truly against porn unless you spend all your time with these people.

As an example, perhaps you someone who's stolen a porn magazine from their parents? Of performed a particular sexual act your partner enjoys, that they later state disdain for when dicussing with their friends?
Comparing virtual goods sales to premium web app conversions is a bit of a stretch, but I happen to like Nabeel, and I think that link is a good article.
I would recommend reading Programming Collective Intelligence (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/). It features lots of coding examples and covers lots of topics (like recommendation systems, searching and ranking, document filtering, document grouping etc.)

It's way easier to start with it, than to learn statistics via pure theory.
So long as poll viewers remember that Facebook's audience isn't a representative sample of the human race.
are you asking us to review this? Please give some information on it. Why did you make it? how did you make it? whats your exit?
Sorry, that's Software Transactional Memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
> a perspective on strategy, finances, marketing

Why the assumption that business folk have those skills?

Yes, some do, or rather, some have one of them, but the claim was stronger.

How about going through them and discussing some specific instances where "business" types add extraordinary value? (Note, this comparison will require knowing what engineers know. If, for example, you say "selling equity", you must describe what you know about that that we don't.)

I'm particularly suspicious wrt strategy. Why the assumption that you know the customers better than engineers? Doesn't that depend on the customers, the engineers, and the business folk?

> management in general

Sorry, but you don't get to argue for management by saying management.

> the StartUp will fail because of lack of direction

Startups fail because the folks involved stop working.

What's the evidence showing that business folk usefully add direction in a way that reduces the odds of that happening? Again - the comparison involves knowing what engineers actually do.
It's not, in the sense that you're talking about. We don't operate through a vast system of yesses and nos. We're not just a huge binary cloud, in other words. And nobody's entirely certain just how we work.

Comparing us to computers is really ignoring most of the limitations of computers, and invites far to simplistic - and inaccurate - a comparison.
Surviving shocks and crisis
The most effective debt collecting email I ever wrote
But Apple does have philosophical objections to flash on iPhone. i.e. you can use it to run apps without going via the apple app store.

You might think "how much of an app will that be? it will be a flood of crapware". But then take a look at what people are willing to pay Apple $5 for.
From the linked wiki:

"In 2008, Fry's vice president of merchandising and operations, Ausuf Umar Siddiqui, was charged by federal prosecutors in an illegal kick back scheme involving Fry's vendors. The alleged scheme was designed to defraud the company in order to cover Siddiqui's gambling expenses"
I'll give my thoughts. I'm a nobody though.

* very slow to load

* Awesome logo - did you make it?

* I don't know what it is. "s3mer is a complete dynamic digital signage solution designed to be easy to use, cross platform and feature rich."

Does this mean digital code signing or advertising signs? The image with the reflection doesn't indidcate what it is.

* your sign up form is too long. Which fields are required?

* there isn't an "other" field for the industry.

* Why is there a captcha?

++++ for not having email verification

I stopped here because I still have no idea what it does.
If you happen to be much better at math than programming, starting with the theory could be much easier. This survey is the best introduction I have found. The alternative being to read Vapnik's "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory", which is more longer and much more "Russian".

Andrew Ng's notes are an excellent (non-theory) introduction to general machine learning.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/materials.html
> the Malthusian fallacy: namely that humans cannot grow indefinitely

Nothing grows geometrically forever.

Malthus's discovery was that any increase in food supply was matched by an increase in population until food per person was pretty much the same. He didn't actually say anything about limits to growth. But guess what? He perfectly described all human societies all over the world for over 50K years. The data clearly show that Victorians and cavemen and modern day residents of Ghana had basically the same quality of diet on average.

The Malthusian equation has only "stopped" being clearly applicable in a select few industrialized countries and since different points in time after about 1820. For most of humanity the equation actually still works. That's a pretty flimsy set of evidence to start talking about the "Malthusian fallacy" with its huge pile of evidence.
Do as your told, get the latest tech news, http://tech4000.blogspot.com News With Attitude!
I "closed" my account when Beacon happened in late 2007 (closed = deleted all my friends and set my account to 'deactivated'; Facebook won't let you truly delete your account). I had first joined in the early days, in March 2004.

I thought about returning to Facebook, as many friends are on it. But reading this article has confirmed I was right to leave. Thanks :)
Who is the audience for your homepage?

People without offline advertising experience don't know the phrase "digital signage". If you're lucky they will leave through the Wikipedia link and learn the term, but that page only tells them "Ah, this is something I don't care about" so they won't return.

People with offline advertising experience won't learn about s3mer from your homepage. It doesn't explain why s3mer is better than other products. The only information is a few bullet points about video encoding, and that's selling features instead of benefits.
Many companies now selling internships
We have a state-of-the-art recommendation engine on nakedtube. You need to create an account to start using it:

http://www.nakedtube.com/recommend

A little more about it:

NakedTube.com Revolutionizes Adult Video Discovery with Powerful Search and Recommendation Engines
http://www.klixxx.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&v...

... lots more innovation to come :)
100K for 30 years, is not as much as you would think. The problem with teaching right now, is that there is not a concrete way to have really great teachers shine.

In enterprise, employees that would perform really well would be accordingly compensated (theoretically) with a higher salary/bonus. This doesn't happen with teachers though. You could be a terrible teachers, with terrible results, but have tenure and still reach that 100,000k mark without a hitch.

I believe unions are important to ensure some job security and fair practice, but not at the expense of our children's education. There should be competitive practices in public education, that allow teachers to earn way more than 100,000k, but also does not guarantee that a teacher will rise on a pay scale when they just babysit in a classroom.

I speak from experience as I was formerly a teacher in NYC, where I encountered many teachers that were not competent to teach, but yet continued to exist in their role. There are schools that are trying experimental means to increase the quality of teaching - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?ex... - but ultimately we need to think of a new system of rewarding the best teachers and getting rid of the worst.
Have you considered working with someone in PR?

I used to be dead-set against that advice, but good PR folks act as a quality filter to many of the big-name tech bloggers.
I'm sorry, we're out of time
Google Business Card
Even after browsing the site, it's not clear what it's about. It has to do with playing ads on a screen, but what's the concept? Do I get payed for playing someone else's ad? Is this a piece of software for creating ads for myself? You mention a downloadable application, but in the movies everything is happening inside a browser running something on localhost. It's all very confusing to me.
What about an automated coffee shop? A machine that remakes coffee when it gets low with a reserve of beans it grinds automatically, dispensed in different sizes by coin or bill. Have a machine on the inside and on the outside, facing the street. So you can have your romantic atmosphere and make a lot of money selling coffee quickly to people on the go for the mere cost of a machine.
[The human brain is not a computer] in the sense that you're talking about.

Is the human brain a machine? 71 hits for: http://blogsearch.google.com?q=%22brain+is+a+machine%22

8,400 hits for: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22brain+is+a+machine%22
The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans
Breaking the back button should be a capital offense.
I immediately clicked on the video because I didn't understand what the concept was. You should make the video larger (I don't want to full screen) and maybe do a commentary soundtrack with it to help get across what you're doing
Forget romance, go for the money.

Love what you do, but love money much more.
Start of by explaining what the software does. It's not explained on the frontpage. Secondly, people don't cover technology, they cover human interest stories. You have no angle at all. Create and angle and retry.
ask hacker news: what other utilities do you know that others don't? :)
Is this software that's designed to run on flatscreens in coffee shops and retail stores? Who is the audience for the site?
Useful chart for time conversion functions
Rubik's Cube inventor is back with Rubik's 360
Passport RFIDs cloned wholesale by $250 eBay auction spree
I had no idea what your site or product page did until I found this link, then it instantly made sense.

http://www.s3mer.com/tour.php

I suggest you change your homepage to be a lot more like the tour page.
In all seriousness, give us a shot:

http://popupchinese.com

We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews.

There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
A system of seniority-based pay, negotiated between two monopolistic cartels, does not sound like the best way to ensure that someone is paid $100K for being a "good teacher".
@Seun

You did a great job with nairaland, which is essentially the number 1 Nigerian website there is right now, So I'm sure you'll be fine with this one too
We have a state-of-the-art recommendation engine on nakedtube.

Ironically, your HN submission on this very topic was killed: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=redman
mildly funny...not cool to rain on the guy's parade though
I was happy to discover rlwrap. Not every REPL or utility-with-its-own-prompt out there supports readline by default.
It would of course be protested as outrageous, and would also be hard to implement, but I bet if you allowed someone to pay for their education partly by selling a stake in their future income (capped at a certain point, or possibly with a buyback clause of some kind). This would actually lead great teachers to seek out great students, too -- instead of retiring on their teaching pension, they'd retire on .1% of the incomes of each of a few hundred students; if those students are making six figures...
How Michael Phelps Screwed-up His Google Reputation in Just 24 Hours
Agreed. That is basically our credo.

http://www.nakedtube.com/about
What is this “crisis”?
But you're comparing exceptional teachers to average doctors/lawyers. The people that could be great teachers have a lot of good alternatives, so if you want good teachers to teach, you need to reduce their opportunity cost by paying more.
I don't think these things need to be extremely accurate. If there is a lot of work for plumbers and little for physicists then some of them will make the jump. If the average person is unemployed for 3 months every 3 years that's 8.3% unemployment. But, while 2 weeks every 6 months is not that bad 1 year every 12 is a killer.

My point is simply that a light hand is probably better, but avoiding acting when things are getting really bad is a horrible idea.
Because Google did it.
Ironic indeed :)

Maybe requiring a login to use the engine is too large a barrier of entry? We've been planning to offer an "anonymous" engine for non logged in users but don't have it slated until after our UI redesign.
Spit in their face.

I deserve the down mod.
Fermi’s paradox solved?
This reminds me of the equally-doomed idea during the '60s to build underwater homes.
Is Google Evil? The Great Debate
Maybe requiring a login to use the engine is too large a barrier of entry?

It seems to me that is generally the case on the web. There was some discussion about login requirements as barriers here on HN recently.
You need to tell me what problem it solves, and only then tell me how marvellous it is. Don't give me loads of buzzwords - the "Ginger Factor" is very large. Tell me the situation where it is useful. I, like others here, don't really know what you're providing.

And again, the video is too small, and it all takes too long to load.
If you can't get big guys talk about you, try to contact some smaller and local ones. Atleast we at ArcticStartup are happy to know about new startups but actually very few contact us directly.

And if you contact them use some to explain what the startup does, why and how are you etc.
IBM has developed a computerised voice that is almost indistinguishable from a human.
mmv (moves multiple files based on a simple pattern replacement language). Example:

mmv "*.mp3" "old_#1.mp3"

prefixes all files in the current directory ending with .mp3 with 'old_'. Btw., the quotes around the arguments are necesssary because mmv uses some of the same metacharacters as the shell does.

Multiple substitutions are allowed, e.g.:

$ mmv "*.*" "#1___#2"

renames blub.xyz to blub___xyz.
How To Write Proofs
"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign." --- Mark Twain
What I don’t like about Python
Google Earth To Show Ocean Floor
Apple may use 'Nuclear Arsenal' of patents to delay Palm's iPhone rival
There once were a bunch of monkeys in the jungle. They were plenty of bananas to pick and eat. Each day they would pick some bananas, eat and be happy.

One day a monkey said to the others, "why are you going out to pick bananas, don't you know its a recession?" (Why he would say this was never quite clear, and is a matter of much debate, even to this day.) And so the monkeys stopped going out and picking bananas. What was the point? There was a recession on after all.

Eventually, many monkeys starved due to the great banana recession. The survivors eventually slowly started to pick again but told ever after of the great banana recession and the terrible toll it took.
His Cube is most famous, but Ernő Rubik created quite a few other puzzles, also
Here are my thoughts:

* Slow load time (I'm located in Europe)

* It's not clear what your startup does. At first, I thought it would be something using Amazon S3 because of the name "s3mer". The "What is s3mer?" section is also very unclear to me.

* Why the Adobe Air, Mac, Windows XP and Windows Vista logos? If it runs on Air wouldn't it also run on Linux?

* The "Change Language" overlay is blinking when the site is loading and displayed by default (WebKit nightly ;-))
If this is what I think it is, I like the general idea of the product. It's for big screens in train stations, taxis etc. right?

People usually understand things better with examples, so I would try and get some images of it in action (on an actual screen, in an actual public place) on the front page.

Kudos to Harkins point - the front page should show benefits rather than features, and be targeted to a specific audience.
Zadby here. We were a member of the LB08 class. Extremely valuable connections and advice came out of this program. We wondered ahead of time if we were too advanced for seed funding, but we had no questions about the value after the program. Terrific investors/advisors/program.
Have Keyboard, Will Program
Guess What Happened To The Guy With The Microsoft Tattoo
For the past few weeks I tried to get bloggers to review my startup

Show it to people they trust, who are easier to access. The reason is: startup bloggers get flooded with nearly-identical requests. They are more likely to pay attention to you if you first pass the screening test of a trusted friend of theirs. If your startup is interesting, a recommendation from the friend will be passed along.
I had the same question. They have a PR problem that's probably cutting into their bottom line, but that's a long way from being unprofitable. If someone wanted to know which company I wanted the keys to, it would be the one that's make money hand over fist, not the one everyone thinks is really cool and is in the red.
So if I did it without the license as compensation it could be classified as a really weird holiday and then it would be legal?
It's true they did - but bear in mind that (AFAIK) displaying ads just on their own pages was never profitable. Google didn't actually start raking in the cash until they got into adwords and adsense.

IMHO it's more difficult to create the affiliate network by virtue of the fact that to be profitable, your affiliate network needs to be obscenely large.
Your assuming a faith is correct, but christian faith is a splinter group of Judaism which has plenty of splinter groups within it. Without bias choosing any group over another without evidence is simply guessing. Is it the baptists or the born again, or some non denominational feel good blob of goo?

People don't need to make assumptions or guesses about anything, your first option is to have no opinion, but if you want to make a guess you have many many options:

The absolute simplest idea is the world is random there is zero cause / effect relationship. There seems to be fairly direct evidence that this is not the case but that could still be random chance.

The next option is everything will happen. This covers all bases and is impossible to disprove.

Albert Einstein like many scientists assumed there is some underlying causal relationship in the universe and there are some rules which define behavior so there are limits on what can happen. Which seems like an obvious assumption but it's in opposition to Quantum Mechanics which he never really accepted. That was an act of faith in spite of evidence. He basically said, I see this with my eyes but I don't accept that this can be possible.

So IMO, Einstein had some good ideas but he was a poor scientist.
India set to sell a £7 laptop
phpbb2 and phpbb3 are worlds apart.

A forum I 'run' for a client used to get up to 200 spam users a DAY with phpbb2, but since upgrading to phpbb3, it's not had a single one.
You simply have to have a compelling product. You have to have an easy-to-understand product, You have to have a very simple two line pitch.

I throw all the press releases away. I care a lot more about a good two sentence pitch.

Butt really, you need to email them that quick pitch to the appropriate email, or get in contact with the right people. It's about connections and promoting a solid product.

Maro's right, though - I'm still not sure what it's all about. Your description's bad.

*Disclaimer: I write for Mashable
For google to use 'dont' be evil' as a motto is fine, google never said they weren't.

I think judgment on whether or not a company is evil or not should be left to the world at large, not that company.

As soon as google starts saying 'we're not evil' they've crossed that line, but as far as I know they have never actually done that.

But by taking on a motto that strong I think you set a high bar for yourself as a company, and you should stay very clearly on the 'right' side of that bar.

In my opinion google has definitely failed to live up to its own standards.
Mostly 2 and 3. Parsons got his start doing direct marketing and his tactics reflect that. All the "Hey! Look at me!" and "But wait, there's more!" are the sizzle the sells the steak of cheap domains. Parsons does it because it works and folks like us get dirt cheap domain registration because of it.

I admire Parsons because he built two successful tech startups from scratch a Silicon Valley outsider. When you think about it, all the GoDaddy girls and upsells are just a different flavor of the VC whoring that goes on in other parts of the industry.
> In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.

On a boat ride in Brugges, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.

He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.

An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.

A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.

This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?
This is a very refreshing approach. In a day where lawyers, contracts, and debt collectors are so prevalent, it is nice to see that respect and honesty still work. Used to be that a handshake was enough -- now a legal contract isn't even guaranteed to work.

I would suspect if one is willing to honestly and openly communicate with your customers when conflicts come up, instead of hiding behind lawyers, the results would be much better.