skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. It's nice to get started, but you really want something like Mahalo Answers that brings back a core group of folks over and over again to do something virtuous--like helping each other.

Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also, syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget also helps folks.

Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of time and keep them safe.

That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop, nginx, memecache, etc.

Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts).

We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange. That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant.

.... time will tell I guess. :-)

all the best, Jason

ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.
>Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows?
Is that really serious? OK so Adobe9 doesn't work on Vista, you can't rollback to 8 and Adobe's site won't let you download 8 if you are on Vista.
But that's not really serious for the majority of PDF users who are happy to fiddle with the registry to fix things but aren't capable of installing Foxit.
I'm also in the midst of creating a startup, but in canada and i can tell you location does matter. Whether its finding like minded people to partner with or finding good programmers or finding investors that know what the internet is, location is key.

If you were to go out to Calgary for example (huge oil producing town, for those that dont know it - everyone's there for oil) and tried to find someone that wanted to invest in a startup instead of oil, you'd be there forever and chances are you wouldn't find 1 person with any kind of relevant experience or knowledge. You'd be pitching to rich people without useful backgrounds. They would be expecting immaculate pro formas (which very few startups have) and would laugh you out of the room when you asked them for 100k to seed anything. 100k isnt worth their time, it costs them 400k to simply do a background check and due diligence on you.

so in short, location dictates the people that are around you and yes, that matters more than anything.
They were highly visible in the design industry even befor blogs and products. I still remember the day when they went first online. The site was innovative in it's design and featured a sort of manifesto (The 37 signals. Each signal was one blurb about how to do awesome web design.) When they changed to products, they were already well connected.
I meant in technical ability. Silverlight's install base is difficult to predict, although having a killer feature could help a lot. That said, i prefer open standards based solutions like Mozilla's Canvas 3D project.
I'm surprised at the number of Adobe supporters in this thread; it's Stockholm syndrome-esque.

For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong.

For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears):

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html (the installer rant that ultimately led to a meeting with Adobe and the installer team starting a blog)

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.ht... (Why install two out-of-date copies of Opera, Adobe?)

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_... (Comedy licensing ineptness)

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_messa... (on John Nack's message-massaging over the installer nightmare)

So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?
Well I still wanted to smoke test it locally before deploying the change, so < 5 mins would have been a bit hard :P
Is Entrepreneurship a Viable Career Option?
I noticed a sharp increase in local Twitter usage on the radio here as well (US) a few weeks ago. That was most likely in response to Britney Spears' account getting hacked.
Sorry for the ignorance, but I didn't really get what "neuro-linguistic programming" is. Tried searching, but didn't get useful information. Can someone explain this to me?

About bold-faced font, ok, voice heard, and I'll make necessary changes.
If you need location information I have a ton of it already at hackrtrackr.com, tell me what you need and maybe i can set you up a feed. bradleyt dot marsh at gmail
Networking is hard if you're not doing anything interesting. If you are, then it's quite easy.

This is the biggest take away point from the post above. If what you're doing is really interesting (and not just interesting to you) and you have passion about it, people will chew off your arm to hear more.
[quote]but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it[/quote]

Of course! That's exactly what I meant. Freedom is not a great marketing fact. Being Free is.
This is transparency after the fact. The actual bill was only available for review for something like 10 hours before it was voted on and passed. 1100 pages in 10 hours? Great.

This information should available on ALL bills at least a week before the bill is voted on by congress. I for one am appalled at how this thing was driven through.
Mono/Dalvik Interop: C#, IronPython and IronRuby running on Android.
Not sure if you're still looking, but if you are, you should definitely check out GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com). The interface is a lot easier than EC2's and there's no need to constantly backup the data on your cloud server instances as (unlike EC2) the storage is persistent.

I've been using the service for just under a year now and I completely swear by it.

Mosso is very limited by comparison---but I guess in the end it depends on what you're looking to do and how much flexibility you need.
Enforcing Manners, Tumblr Shuts Down 5 Blogs
He does have a point, although he's been so busy being a jerk that he hasn't communicated it particularly effectively.

Software like Apache, Perl, Postgres, and so on all make the lives of software developers easier. When I spend time working on a project like that, it brings something I'm being paid to do closer to completion, or makes future paid work more lucrative. (I can charge the same amount, but it won't take me as long, etc.)

I don't have the same incentives to make a Photoshop clone, though, because my interaction with graphics manipulation usually consists of an email like "here are the graphics" from the graphics department. I don't care if Photoshop doesn't work, it's not my problem.

That said, I do edit my photos with Gimp, and I think it works great. So again, there is no incentive for me to improve it, I think it's fine already.
All suggestions are valid, so I'll think about which changes will make sense or not. Thanks for your inputs.
Thanks for sharing - this was a great writeup on getting start in selling software.

One word of caution from my own experience: networking is not a sustainable way to build a business, but it is a great way to bootstrap your sales process.

3 reasons:

1) If you want to grow larger, it is necessary for the sales process to be bigger than your own set of relationships and abilities. At some point you have to make a break from the comfort of being yourself in a networking environment, and implement a more robust marketing plan that involves PR, advertising, other sales people, etc.

2) Networking itself has a limited (though sometimes highly targeted) audience. This is perfect when you start, but limiting at the point you need to grow.

3) Even if the goal is to remain a small consulting firm, automation of at least some aspects of lead generation and sales is necessary for efficiency. For instance, putting a process in place to hit up your existing customers for leads.
Slow news day? :/
Ok. Suggestion accepted.
I'm glad you liked it :)
Great idea. Unfortunately it's too late to stop it.
I believe "winning" is a bit of an understatement here.
Add rel="nofollow" to the widget links and I'll believe your goal is to help people and not game the search results like everyone else. There is nothing wrong with optimizing for search traffic. Competition is all well and good. But your site is nothing more than an ad-laden Wikipedia clone with a Yahoo Answers clone tacked on. Actually, a much better business model than most startups...
I can't see the link, who's winning??
Google has already played down the important of PageRank - specifically in a patent they filed a few years ago. Google for "trustrank".
Anybody on the world can vote.
Is that a good idea?
Isn't it about US taxpayer's money.
Ask HN: Feedback on our app: groupieguide.com
http://groupieguide.com

We have been working on this project for the last couple of months and we want to gather some feedback before we release a public version.

GroupieGuide helps real-life groups organize, communicate, and promote themselves by making it quick and easy to build a customized website. Think of it as a simplified Meetup.com with Twitter/Tumblr-like customization.

We created this sample group for this post, feel free to tinker with it.

http://seattlehackers.groupieguide.com/

password: welcome

If you want to grab an invite:

http://seattlehackers.groupieguide.com/invites

http://cohitre.groupieguide.com/invites
Convenient clickable links:

http://seattlehackers.groupieguide.com

http://www.groupieguide.com
Further Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_kong_defense
I have always had a feeling that McKinsey is hyped.

I am amused that the bought into the hyperbole that Web 2.0 is. Especially when the noise around Web 2.0 is dieing down and the dust settling.
Then ask for $500k for an oil-related software startup. If location dictates the people around you, then you have to adapt your ideas to the people around you.

If the mountain won't come to Mahomet...
I didn't say I respected them. The whole company is about treating everything as a joke. They aren't selling expensive software licenses here. They aren't fishing for respect. They want the "wow" factor. And they are good at getting it.
That's pretty anecdotal and light on details... All they say is they rewrote their software and it was the right thing to do. OK, but I haven't really learned anything.
What exactly is NSFW? (Of course, reading HN is not exactly work-related anyway, right?)
A list of Twitter apps
If anyone cares for ancient history, one of the biggest attention getters for 37signals was their manifesto which made up the entirety of 37signals.com before they revealed what they actually did. I still remember seeing it for the first time and it went huge (yet I can't remember HTF things went viral online back then... :)).
What's wrong with starting with '0' for the first item and incrementing up from there? Guaranteed uniqueness.
hmmmm . . . I wish something like this could get tied into the larger network of meetups. For example . . . how would one get 2600 people to be aware of a system like this?
Prince Rupert's Drop
"The very high residual stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged."
Great idea, but I really don't ever see Facebook asking anybody outside of the company for input on this.
If you mix pigments of all colors you wont get black, you will probably get some kind of brown. Thats why you need the K in CMYK - you need a specifc black paint, which contains pigment that absorb all colors. But you cant mix colors to get black.
"The very high residual stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged."
Ask HN: What are your favorite quotes from 37Signals' "Getting Real" book?
As many of us are fans of "Getting Real" philosophy, how about we share our favorite quotes from "Getting Real" book on Twitter?

# What: Share your favorite quotes from "Getting Real" book on Twitter.com

# How: Post your tweets with #getreal keyword

# When: Between Wednesday, 02/18/2009 and Thursday, 02/19/2009

All these quotes will be available to Vote and Retweet at http://ow.ly/jVS

Are you in?
> Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on.

Are you kidding me? Tell that to Bankrate.com
Can you explain what "they might try to siphon off even more of the search traffic for their own profit" means? How does one siphon off search traffic? By building a better product?
The Three Laws of Software

(with apologies to The Three Laws of Thermodynamics)

1. Software written by someone else is bad software

aka. You can't get ahead.

2. Software written by me more than six weeks ago is bad software.

aka. You can't even break even.

3. Its been at least two months since I have written software of any significance.

aka. You are behind before you start.

The bottom line is that software universally sucks. The reason we keep trying to make and use it, its far better than what it replaces. Maybe, if we try real hard, we will finally get it right. If history is any guide, don't hold your breath.
Interestingly, he mentions Pittsburgh twice as a rare success story among U.S. post-industrial cities. (And by "interesting," I mean in the sense of "I happen to live here, and thus have more than a passing interest in the topic.")
Agreed. A statement like "The truth is, no color actually exists outside of our brain's perception of it." flies in the face of the materialism that is so popular these days. It sounds, rather, a great deal like George Berkeley's idealism: Esse est percipi.
This book

http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Nations-North-America/dp/03805788...

seems to have some connection with the content of this article. The article mentions some cities that are key to their regions. The book breaks up North America into nine regions with economic and cultural connections, and names a "capital" city for each of them. For example, Miami as the "capital" of a region including the Carribean. I think the article mentions some of these same cities as being important centers for their regions.

EDIT: wiki page might be better for facilitating discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Nations_of_North_America
So perhaps what he meant is that gold is a good speculative opportunity, not so much a way to escape high inflation.

I prefer not to speculate so if deflation or low inflation are on the horizon I'd rather invest in something that's cheap and pays dividends, and incidentally, is taxed at a lower rate then commodities.
[New York] City Plans to Retrain, and Retain, Laid-Off Wall Streeters
Well duh, if you were the 800lb gorilla you'd be a fool to "settle".
I don’t begrudge Google continuing it’s march up the popularity. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I don't find it troubling either. At least not right away. It would be troubling if
1) Google uses unfair means to increase it’s dominance. If company produces a great product and everyone flock to it, you can’t really bitch that.
2) If Google uses it’s dominance in search market to shut out competition in other market.
I prefer fixed width text because it is a lot easier to read than stretched text.

The article links to another that describes using fluid width to achieve similar results and probably works better on mobile devices. http://css-tricks.com/the-perfect-fluid-width-layout/
It doesn't seem that clear, but it does look better for TPB than I would have expected. Half of the charges against them have already been thrown out, and they are making the argument that, as the administers of the site, they don't post torrents, users do. The prosecution has to point to these specific users (who may have screennames such as "King Kong", hence the title).
I do believe it. Sometimes is worth remembering that the laws of the USA are different to the rest of the world, and under Swedish law, is very probable they will win.
to break this down: you think that showing that the degree of corruption is constant (systemic corruption) will have a greater impact on the public conscious than traditional methods of exposing gov. corruption because the traditional methods have so much variance.

this could very well be true. I will be watching developments in this area.
and you think the people adept at getting the job of government regulator are also the ones adept at avoiding such bias?
Happiness research will be seized upon by socialists.
Mibbit (axod's startup) video featured on Google Code Blog
IPhone vs. BlackBerry: For once, Apple might lose a popularity contest
The GIMP still lacks full CMYK color model support.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

That makes it unsuitable for working on anything that's going to be printed.
It is if you're T-Shirt Hell and you sell shirts based on the concept of causing offense. Their whole thing is to piss people off, and they did it again.
Good point, but I wonder how much of that is reality, and how much is Greenspan's mistake - you know, that we're entering a brave new world where the old rules do not apply.
The VB version was a working prototype. They had built a war chest on its back but the prototype was blocking their future. It was making them vulnerable to the competition. They smelled blood in the water and it was theirs. The feeding frenzy was about to begin.

Taking the lessons of the past and a clearer understanding of the needs of the market place, they created a path to the future. Not a bad choice in my opinion.

I am not so sure about using C#. That is much too tied to a specific vendor and programming model. I am sure VB is best used as a prototyping and proof of concept tool. If you have need of a disposable program, its great. If it must live long, wide, and numerous, it has trouble being even as good as a poor choice. With the right choice and a good bit of luck, they not only survived but went on to thrive.

Looks good to me.
Schumer Vows To Overturn Ban On TARP-Takers Hiring H-1B Workers
I've experienced the same performance issues with the Flash plugin on OS X. I use the iStat menus to keep a tab on my CPU usage, RAM usage and system temperature. Browsing the web takes very little CPU, and there are spikes in CPU usage only when I open a new page and the browser tries to render it. Just reading a webpage takes no CPU, as expected. Temperature remains in the range of 35 to 45 degrees Celsius.

Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius.

This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.
The way one typically knits on straight needles, you knit from the left needle to the right. When you are done with one row, reverse the right needle so it becomes the left, then knit the next row, repeat. What you see is the graphic when you are done knitting. What the pattern should be doing is zigzagging left-to-right then right-to-left in reverse, i.e. the purl and knit stitches look the opposite from each other: to create something that looks all knitted from the front (and all purled from the back), you knit one row and purl the next row.

edit: Also, the graphic could go the other way, but there is usually a front and back to a knitted piece. There's also knitting in reverse and knitting in the round and more, but generally the pattern will account for that.
I disagree.

1. iPhone is carrier locked, Blackberry is not. (Yes, some phones are carrier locked, but they have at least one model with each carrier).

2. Apple still won.

3. Blackberry is entrenched into corporate America, while the iPhone has to hustle the massses. Given that fact, the iPhone is still an incredible overachiever.

4. The Storm has been unequivocally pronounced as teh sucks, whereas the iPhone has been unequivocally pronounced as the best thing to happen to mobile since sliced bread.

5. Being a better loser than your peers thought you were doesn't deny the fact that you're still a loser.
As I'm not versed in math, I wonder, are his opinions valid?
We're not quite sure how we're going to implement the group/location feature but we'll have that in mind. Thanks for the offer.
the first thing I thought of after watching that was to do a study on how applying happiness study findings to your life affects happiness.
Agree! Its quite hard to meet new friends in person when you start working full time. I'd love a place where I can meet and work on small projects with new coders. But my intention would be to meet potential co-founders so having geo tagging of some sort can be really helpful.
Group/events/location features have been mentioned 3 times at least in this thread. For sure we'll be thinking about how to implement this properly.

As for the "how to make them aware" part, we'll try to find ways. If anyone has suggestions, go ahead!
Motorola RAZR2 V8 Black Grey Unlocked
Motorola RAZR2 V8 is a great choice for any situation. In addition to great features of this world phone, calls come in crystal clear voice quality. RAZR2 V8 they must have known it was going to be something special.
if they are priced 'wrong' there is room for a competitor with a product priced 'right'.

No, because Apple has designed in a bias towards cheaper apps in the App Store.
Ask HN: How necessary is a TOS?
I'm setting up a site at the moment and am wondering how important it is to have a TOS. I'm inclined to omit it as unnecessary legalese that my users are probably not interested in anyway. But the latest Facebook has made me aware that in some cases this is something that people pay attention to.

Is a TOS necessary for every site?
Terry Pratchett.

http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discwor...

Specifically for geeks I would start, perhaps, with "Going Postal".
My description for tweeting: "Clusterify.com is to coding as pickup games are to sports."
C+M+Y=K in theory, but in practice the pigments are not calibrated precisely enough to be a perfect black when they combine.
I grew up in Harrisburg. Unlike Pittsburgh, there aren't any four-year colleges there, so most of the ambitious people left and, and after college, ended up in New York, Philly, DC, Toronto, etc.

Western and central PA have a reputation nationwide for producing a disproportionate number of hard-working, successful people... who don't move back. There's definitely somewhat of a "Pennsylvania diaspora" (as well as one for Minnesotans) community in New York.

I think Pittsburgh has a lot of potential to reverse that trend, seeing as it has two major universities and has come a long way in terms of being a good place to live.
Slippery slope. Nobody uses Tumblr for anything important, though, so it doesn't really matter. The "anonbloggers" can easily go elsewhere.