skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thanks yan! I think I'm starting to get the bigger picture. And yeah, you're right about this- its a hobby project :) I love learning things my own :) And about my experience level, uhm not really a coder by heart but have guts to do it.
There are already graphing sites out there, but they're more data oriented than calculation oriented (not sure if that makes sense). But basically if you could hook the calc up to a graph and make them really easy to create and share you would be able to get some virality. If you had a ton of graphs out on the web with ads on them you (like millions of them) you could make some money.
No; on several occasions we've invested in startups that had already raised money.

Technically it depends on what size financing triggers conversion. In practice investors tend to be willing to waive converting regardless, because of the advantages to the startup of doing YC.
That's one of my favorite Asimov pieces - of all his literal thousands of articles, that's one of the creams of the crop.

What are Mensa forums? Are there any links? Not surprising that it's right-wing based: any hierarchical system will be pervaded by the sorts of people who think they deserve something great because of their natural talents, and while I'm of a similar mindset in some ways, a lot of people like that are boring and fanatic about it. (Fun times joining an Objectivist forum as a kid - goes to show that any good idea portrayed simply will attract a lot of misinterpreters.)
Clicking the word 'fun' on this site is apparently the way the guy is testing his celebration code.
Hey mate, I went to adwords.google.com and used their keyword tool to see what people are searching for. Here's some top results:

ny lottery - 450,000 January searches

nys lottery - 110,000 January searches

pick lottery numbers - 18,100

lottery past numbers - 14,800

new york lottery results - 12,100

Other interesting results: ny lottery org (12,100), nyc lottery (9,900), new york lottery com (6,600), nyc numbers (3,600), www ny lottery org (2,400)... and finally ny winning lottery numbers (1,000 - first mention of winning in combination with the way I typed the words in).

So, yes, these terms are getting searched. A lot of people are looking for the newest numbers, so if you could automatically have those post up, that'd add value to your site. Now, the way you'll get traffic to this site I'm guessing is SEO - so start thinking about a domain and keywords you want to go after. Monetizing? Totally doable I'd imagine, but not sure how you'd go about it. Links to playing or buying lottery something-or-other online might be good. Maybe sit in a convenience store and ask everyone who buys a lottery ticket if you can talk to them for a couple minutes, and ask them like five questions about their interests.

Do people who play the NY lottery like horseracing? The Yankees? Hot dogs? Going to Miami? It seems to me like you could get traffic with some effort, and could monetize with some effort, but the effort thing is key here. You're going to have to mess around and experiment to figure out the monetization side, and going to have to spend some time getting pagerank and relevancy if you want high traffic. But - it seems doable, and I'm going to guess you could carve out a few hundred bucks a week without too much effort, which is pretty cool. Good luck with the endeavor.
Of course, the fact that there are socialist countries out there which arguably treat their citizens better than America does has nothing to do with it. [Note: I overstate here for effect, the "in many ways, for many citizens" caveats are left as an exercise for the reader.]
That's not what I'm talking about.

Stallman declared he'd rather see computer clubs closed than using Windows. He wants to convert (I'm quoting the article) the "important resource" (read: people 'unspoiled' by Windows) to free software (just like Che Guevara who went to Africa to convert people unspoiled by capitalism to the ideal of communism).

So I rest my case: as far as software is concerned, he is a totalitarian.
Glad I could help explain! It really is a marvelous device - if you get one, I hope you like it as much as I like mine. :-)
What if you could just have some settings:
1) I don't want to see any submissions from people who became "members" after me.
2) And, I don't want to see ANY comments from people who signed up AFTER me.

So the site stays about the same for ME. Even though it may look different to someone else.
Agreed, but it's hard to reverse a trend after the fact. The key is that he react to negative forces before they occur, which involves a bit of magic.
No one ever said that this would have a greater effect than all that, just that this type of thing, along with Mark Cuban's latest offer, will help small businesses and startups get off the ground in a time when getting any type of loans through traditional outlets, banks, is nearly impossible. I was meaning to be vague as to not spur any economic debate, sorry.
As an aside, the Bombardier Q-400 is a great air craft. The acceleration is incredible and it's by far the quietest turboprop I've flown on.
I think perhaps you meant to qualify your statement by time rather than space. I.e. "not much in the short term" rather than "not much in the big picture."
That's great information. Does Google Analytics break down if they are coming from .edu domains or do I need more powerful analytic tools? Thanks
Justin.TV just agreed to webcast it.
i'll keep your advice trick :) thanks!
Snakebite: the open network
Design Flaws, Hernias, and Anemic Quality
Awesome, thanks pg - now I'm looking forward to getting the app in shape for applying.

Side note: I'm impressed with the speed and helpfulness of the answers on HN - I asked the same question on linkedin, twitter and facebook and got vague repetitive answers explaining the basics of how convertible debt works instead.
Dan Brown is the author I love to hate. His Digital Fortress and Deception Point are hilariously bad. But don't bother spending any money on them; just borrow them from the library.
Great Idea. InstaCalc.com has this sort of thing for sharing spreadsheet like calculations.
Honest question: Can you give some examples? I'm not familiar with the market and being a Canadian the Kindle isn't an option anyway, but I'm curious as to what nice options are available with a proper e-ink screen.
Peter Schiff to the Saudis: Buy Gold Mines
IPhone Game iShoot earns the Developer $600K in a month
Can you please cite the source for this? I have not read that the AZW format has been broken. People, however, have figured out how to read mobipocket protected formats on the kindle. That's a big difference.

A hacked AZW format would allow me to convert it to non-DRM format and even share it with other kindles.
Like most of us, I discovered programming using proprietary software (namely MS-DOS and QBASIC), and if an intolerant idiot tried to prevent me from using those tools, he would have been hit by a (then) heavy keyboard.

(by the way, the case against using BASIC is certainly stronger than the case against using proprietary software.)
When he holds the keys to the user accounts and the stories, he can react pretty quickly. He's shut off accounts temporarily (once to avoid an edit war over a title), and during the Obama election, a lot of stories ended up dead very quickly. That's what kept the site contained.
Brazil! Brazil!!!!!

One of my favorite movies.

And a serious mindfuck.
I'm not sure to be honest. I think it may. You're basically looking at a reverse DNS lookup, and that's not exactly accurate, but might put you on the right path.
What are they going to spend this money on?
Certainly - if we have to wait until some company currently getting angel funding is big enough to hire up all the fired auto workers, we are really screwed:-) I think what you guys are doing is awesome, but think that it's basically impossible to predict much about long term effects: some YC company might create a system that saves the newspaper industry, or they might create the final nail in the coffin. Who knows... you (the generic you) just have to get out there and try and experiment and do your part.
OK, maybe I'm just totally off base then:-)

Sorry if I am.
Have you considered who/how you're marketing this to? Maybe you could find a way to target engineering and science students. What does the $15 version offer that the online one doesn't? That wasn't immediately obvious to me, but I didn't look to long.

How does the calculator handle something like solving a matrix of complex numbers. I had to do that a lot in linear circuit analysis and would have loved a better tool to do it with.
Gaming.

I think his point relates to "say it for the sake of saying it" as opposed to "doing this for a reason." So, case in point, I come here to get in debates. I use Tumblr to store my ideas (I don't follow other users, and I've tried to disable the following count so I'm not influenced by my far-too-many followers). But for Twitter, I see it as "I'm here to talk for the sake of talking." I don't get it. As it is, now that my Twitter shows my Tumblr posts, I've been slowly picking up Twitter followers, and it baffles me. I follow people using RSS, and I've asked before to allow HN to give me a "new replies" RSS feed so I can centralize everything (and internally, versus on an open field like FriendFeed). I'm horrified at the thought of adding yet another outlet to post links and say random things - there're too many already.

It's a shame because I like how minimal Twitter is. It's zen in a way. I just don't see the point to having one and keeping it: one site is enough, and my poison is Tumblr.
Twittering makes me a better person, duh. http://twitter.com/smujesse
From the quotes you put around the phrase "human rights", am I to understand that you don't think human rights really exist, or that they aren't rights, or something?

Have you moved to Singapore yet? You seem to be pretty enthusiastic about it. I did not mean to say that it is an example of all of the bad things that can coexist with business freedom, just some of them.

As far as per-capita GDP goes, Singapore has the major advantage that it's 100% urban. I suspect that Malaysia's per-capita GDP would be a lot closer to Singapore's if you only considered downtown Kuala Lumpur.

I think the major problem in Vietnam and Cambodia was that they had a civil war, and as usual, the people who had power after the war were military leaders. In Vietnam things got a lot better after the war; in Cambodia, things got a lot worse, as they often do. (In fact, Cambodia is almost uniquely bad in the history of the world, as far as I know; there are lots of instances of conquering armies killing 50% or 100% of a conquered people, but I don't know of any others where they killed more than 50% of their own population.)

In both Cambodia and Vietnam, the civil war was made much worse by a US invasion. Maybe you think the same thing would have happened to Singapore? I suspect that they had an equal chance of ending up like Thailand, or urban Malaysia, or other countries in the area; and it's not clear to me that aggressively persecuting Communists made a civil war less rather than more likely.
From the article:
After all, technology was improving, so goods cost less to produce. Why shouldn’t prices reflect that reality?

When it's cheaper and easier to pull MORE gold out of the ground, that's not strictly speaking a fixed money supply.

When Rome (the empire) dumped a whole bunch of new found (stolen) gold on Rome (the city) that caused inflation too.

If your money supply is growing - it's growing.

Now if you have far too lose a monetary policy and you're inflating the money supply way too much and way too fast, that can be disastrous.

But if Alan Greenspan had found a way to convert led into gold, we would have gotten the real estate bubble even with a gold standard.
Oh, God. Every time I try to use IRC I turn off my computer hours later wondering what just happened to my time.

Do people ever use IRC productively? I'm curious how that would work.
Nearly all the professional applications (engineering, finance, accounting, etc.) only run on Windows (or Mac OS X for the design stuff).
Just because there's a ton, doesn't mean its saturated. Moreover, do the owners of those apps have the ability to direct 10k users daily towards downloading their app? I would seriously look into it. Same with Android. Its silly to dismiss the iphone just because there are competitors. You can kick their ass even though they were first.

Edit: I should also add, the iPhone/mobile apps would likely far outstrip the sales of the $15 download, because people are used to buying iPhone apps, and Apple has made it much easier than buying from you. I would even suggest reversing the flow, so to speak, and talk about how iPhone users can find a free version online from their home or work computers whenever they want.
The desktop version runs standalone in a borderless window and includes six color schemes and the ability to close the side bar. My background is in EE, so we designed the linear equation solver to handle complex number (both in polar and rec format) which is perfect for solving circuit problems. So you can enter in your mesh loops and solve for various complex values. We'll have some documentation on how to do this, but basically if you have a set of simultaneous equations with complex coeff you can enter them in each box and solve for the answers..
IPhone and iPod touch shares continue to grow
Apparently, they can be. Check out this user's profile:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstejerean
Isn't the $15 download already the "pro" version?
Good point. We created this calculator using just JS and CSS so it should be really simple to port to the new Pre, which is our plan. However, our background is not in programming so starting up iPhone programming might be a bit of a trip...
Yeah, maybe we need the "Super Pro" that includes Graphing and other cool features. Or take away some online features and wrap them into the "Pro Only" package.
I don't think HN is going down the same path as Digg. It's still keeping it's focus for the most part.
I want a netbook with e-ink. (of course we'll need higher res, color, faster response time e-ink, plus a built in reading light since they aren't backlit)
But this to me would be the ultimate portable computing device. add a headset with VoiP service and set up some way of getting calls without constantly draining the computers battery and you have a killer device.
You don't need to register to read NYT. It's a cookie thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460294
Except he hasn't.

Under the gold standard, there is a feedback loop allowing the market to control inflation (that is, people can invest more or less in mining technologies/companies).

To some extent, this feedback loop also exists in a central banking system; it's far from being as efficient.
OK, one more comment, then I'll stop. :-)

Does the desktop version do all the math functions of the web/free version? Most EE types aren't too into closing sidebars or color schemes. I guess if I was a student and there was some sort of teaser, like a way to ease the pain of linear circuit analysis, I'd probably buy.

I wonder what other stuff you could add to mess with competing iPhone apps. I'm a Luddite Blackberry owner, so I don't know quite what's out there.
The first hacking of the Stanford-Binet L-M IQ test (the one I took as a kid) documented in published reports was by Robert Sternberg, who discovered in childhood in the 1960s that the answers could be looked up in a library. Sternberg has gone on to become quite a well informed critic of IQ tests, although he still attempts to develop easy to administer mental tests to measure intelligence according to his triarchic theory of intelligence. A very notorious example of cheating on that same brand of IQ test came much later when a little boy's mother looked up the answers for the Stanford-Binet L-M before having her son tested at a supposed specialty center on highly gifted children.

http://positivedisintegration.com/justinfu.pdf

Somehow the psychologist who administered the test was unable to tell that the boy was simply providing answers he had previously learned from the test manual. That (and her articles on IQ testing) has shot her credibility with me.
If you're running for election I'm guessing you're old-ish? (From the point of an 18-year-old, where old-ish is 28+?) In high school I worked with a bunch of teachers on Internet-related stuff, and I found that there's a disconnect in how people across the gap view privacy.

For people 18 year old and younger, there's never not been an Internet. When I was 8 I had already been told a bunch of horrifying "keep your security" stories. I was probably younger than 15 when I first heard about sites like 4chan terrorizing people for years on-end. The result, though, isn't that you hide yourself (which is the reaction I see in my father especially). It's that you decide exactly how you'll let yourself be seen online, you avoid things that'll get you in trouble, and you don't take the Internet too seriously. Most harassment things won't happen if you sound reasonable, don't botch up spelling, avoid fanfiction, and don't actively taunt Anonymous. Similarly, a lot of stuff online is less serious than you can let yourself believe: if you get threatening calls, they almost never mean a thing. People troll. It's easy, and it's become a part of society.

In the end, the sheer amount of information means that almost nobody gets targeted. You're a small bubble in a vast ocean. We young brats see it like that, anyway: now, everything is considered public information but still under your control. (I was called into a teacher's office for something I said on Facebook: I said that it was my private space, that the teacher had no right accessing my information, and that the person who took my stuff off of Facebook was violating terms and against the law. She couldn't do anything after that.) So it doesn't become a matter of privacy or not: it becomes a matter of just what is most public.

I agree with you about Twitter, though. Constraints aren't particularly useful in its case.
> Furthermore, there's a huge gap in local news these days. Local government, schools -- all this stuff that really matters to people has no medium any more.

In Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood and specialty newspapers are still prevalent, numerous, and of good quality. A real joy to read compared with the neighborhood papers of New York City. But, then, I guess the Twin Cities has a culture of indie publishing.
We have plans for more cool EE features, so that's a bonus. Right now it's more general purpose so we could get a nice first release out. Maybe we'll see some traction if we market it more toward engineers.
> In my experience, programmers think they know when they're being productive, but they're often wrong.

So true.

http://www.geekherocomic.com/2009/01/19/efficiency-and-compr...

> That's not to say that programmers have no clue, just that our internal radar isn't exactly infallible. People tend to feel "productive" when they feel like they're "getting a lot done," but real productivity depends on whether you're doing the right things and whether you're doing them well.

So, is it safe to say that if you 'feel productive', you're most likely not?
"Rationality and IQ are orthogonal"

I'm pretty sure Hans Reiser and the Ted Kazcynski would have aced any such tests.

At the same time there are plenty of people that are not of a high 'IQ' that have plenty to contribute.

So, what you should not measure is some consumer index of intelligence but objective contribution. Tough problem!
My guess is that they aren't, by and large. This is a recession-insurance round, to make sure they have all the runway they need even if things get so fucked that their first shots at revenue generation don't take.
Ask HN: What's your favorite HTML Web presentation tool?
What's the best system for creating and doing presentations on the Web in HTML? The W3C's Slidy is one possibility, but there are others: S5, crunchy, latex beamer, etc. What do you like?
If you open an AZW it's essentially modified HTML. I don't know if a converter is public or not - I frankly don't mind DRM very much - but getting information out of AZW and into other formats isn't particularly difficult if you really care to.
Care to mention why?
"...it also has one more surprise up it's sleeve..."

Fail.
http://280slides.com
one easy way around that would be to set the various karma thresholds as a function of the number of registered (active) users.
Fair enough... But what have they spent any money on thus far? They have a small team and a bunch of servers. I'm having trouble placing the need for this amount of money plus the other rounds.
Can I get an invite. :D
Yep but a single page is a cool place to add everyone! It'd be awesome if Twitter had group support like FriendFeed though....a HN group would rock!

http://twitter.com/ashleyw
I can't judge on The Sixth Sense, because I saw it knowing the ending and so nothing seemed too surprising. The Matrix is incredibly straightforward: the plot is rehashed philosophy mixed with a pretty simplistic story that allows for lots of fighting. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you watch it and it all makes sense in a cool "What if?" way. That opposed to, say, Eraserhead, where you finish the movie feeling like you've had your mind scrubbed hard with steel wool. Again, not necessarily a bad thing.
Why startup times of applications matter
Sears ServiceLive to link clients, contractors | TechJaws
Actually, many of the technical channels on Freenode are quite good.
I'm all for this, too -- but pg doesn't like the Metafilter community, which uses this model.
So it's somewhere between $7-35 per active user?
That final sequence is one of my all-time favorite. Gilliam at his best, directing-wise.
There's also a great number of people that have been around since the site started that are very committed to keeping the signal::noise ratio high.

This discussion comes up fairly often, and the level of discourse or quality of content hasn't really degraded at all.
This is only because the links where put there before pg changed the rules to not allow them... it is just an artifact of a profile that has not been changed recently.
Again though, this is not something unique to HN. Digg is notorious for banning accounts.
I hang out in the new section a lot too. I can't tell if many people also do or not, I assumed before that it was a popular place to sift through. But now I am not so sure, e.g. HN founder pg does not seem to mind if the new queue becomes a firehose:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475779

I am going to miss a good S/N ratio there, though.
This is like someone in 1780 arguing that industrialization devalues everything it touches. Yes, some senses. But the world is net better off. And more important, there is no going back.
Unifying Math and Computer Science
I loved Brazil, but I still have a soft spot for 12 Monkeys.

I also like the fact that both films feature tiny parts for Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent.
i'm going to say that the app looks harder to build than it appears. i haven't messed much with open gl or any low-level stuff, but based on what i've heard/seen, it's pretty complex to build graphics/animation-driven apps.
Yes, please. While a simple Todo system works for this sort of thing, none of the real issue tracking systems I've used have been even close to unobtrusive for small tasks. I'm very curious as well.
The thing that annoyed me about The Matrix is that I didn't think it was nearly as clever as it clearly thought it is. It had a pervasive smell of intellectual smugness. I much prefer movies that present themselves as rollicking good fun, but include some nice little bits of brain-fodder.

I liked Dark City a lot.