skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue really is that you can't charge high rates to these people simply because they probably don't have that kind of money sitting in the bank.

You may be surprised if you dig a bit.

One of the problems with selling software solutions is that so many companies don't understand that they need software solutions - because they don't understand what software can do.

To pick some examples from when I was dealing with that sort of client I've seen folk:
* spending days every week manually copy/pasting email addresses into spreadsheets
* manually adding name/address info to a 1k+ paper mail out campaigns
* spending a monthly four digit amount to a print shop to do layout work that a basic template in Pages/Word could do.

... and none of those people understood that the addition of a piece of software - even an off the shelf piece of kit that just needs configuring - could take that pain away. It could save them hundreds, sometime thousands, of dollars a week - every week.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

Those clients really understand the value of their time. The tedious stuff that you can automate away is usually the stuff that is stopping them doing what they want to do. If you can show them ways for them to stop wasting time on things they are not making them money, and back that up with case studies / references, they will happily find ways to pay you.

But you have to show them the value first.

Back in 1999 when I started my first business my idea of sales was something like "I do X. I need to get really good at X. I need to find people who want X. Ideally rich people who can afford to pay more for X". Much like you this ended up with me wandering around various places going "Hi - I do X".

Having gone through.... some learning experiences... since then - and having seen some excellent sales folk do their thang I finally figured out that this is totally arse-backwards way of going about finding work.

You start by looking for people who have problems that you can solve. Ideally big problems that cost them lots of money/pain. Then you figure out how to get yourself to the same place as the people with that problem. Then you then sell them their life without that problem (and incidentally that you do X that can make that problem go away).

You don't network to let folk know that you're a developer looking for work. You network to understand other peoples problems, and to help them understand that they're solvable.
Yes. Google Image Search reveals this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davelawrence8/3663647101/
Spend More Time on Your Mission - The Money Will Follow
Sorry this is off-topic but does anyone know why there are no independent Netflix services? I'm thinking back when you could go to your neighborhood movie rental place...well, now imagine that selection is specific (ex. Western) or curated, and also imagine it is online, available for viewing. Is this just too hard to get the rights to? How did local movie rental places get the rights to rent out films?

People sell pirated films on the street here in Brazil and I once heard of a cultured 'pirate' who only sold pirated, high-brow DVDs. It got me thinking
Excellent post by Justin Kan.

The other part of the fallacy is thinking that nobody but you could have thought of the idea you're thinking of, or conversely in our patent damaged world, that if you thought of it independently then you can't be infringing a patent because what you thought up was 'obvious.'

Both thoughts are wrong of course. If you're going to build a business around a concept these days it seems like you should always file a provisional patent if only to force the due diligence on patent infringement ahead of time.
The problem with that is there is so much good stuff buried way too far down the list. Outside of the top 5% I could find a fair amount of movies and TV that I know would appeal to many individuals.
I did get an invite and installed, but I can't actually do anything with it. There's no Android client, so it just sits on my laptop doing nothing.

I thought it would at least have some sort of local network sharing service like DAAP, UPnP or anything at all.
or "wc" <enter> <ctrl-v> <ctrl-d>
Is the Economist still cashflow-positive?
Ask HN: CRM's & ERP's Overcrowded market?
Would it be a waste of time to create a basic CRM or ERP to build on it, eventually to compete with the big guys?

If so, any input or ideas?
Not "people like this" (i.e. self-appointed "experts"), but actual experts from industry and academia.
Well I remember testing it on love hotel, which I specifically checked was in symbola if I set the font manually. But it wouldn't render if it was embedded in normal text.
Pretty cool. Congrats on releasing!
Aside from people's very worthwhile answers describing the complex number system, I think it is worth mentioning that the use of the term "imaginary" is an unfortunate historical remnant. In experience, a lot of the average student confusion comes from their trying to get their head around the naive meaning of imaginary.

Now that modern mathematics understands that all number systems are more or less games with axioms, we know that no part of a number system is really more imaginary than any other part. "Imaginary" might better be termed "augmented" - we can augment the "real" number system by adding an element "i" which we say is equal to the square root of -1.

And it is just as ironic that the "real" number field itself has perhaps as many weird elements as say the rational "imaginary numbers" (pi, e, Theta etc)
i too love cheeseburgers
Most of the movies here are crap made for people who don't have any sense of art. If you think the ones with highest scores are best, you don't even know what a good movie is.

Check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFfTot3qYMc

This is what a good movie is. It reflects the life as it is. It's not for entertainment. It's for art and people looking for good movie.
Show HN: A simple timer
OT, but this picture from Tonico is funny http://www.tonido.com/images/syncarch_mobile.png Couldn't they find a newer PC clipart or is it some kind of quirk humor?
And are obligated to stay in the market and provide liquidity, no matter what the circumstances.
The clustering was based on the regularized SVD / matrix factorization results. Details in my e-book.
$1500. He mentioned on twitter.
Ask HN: GoF Design Patterns and Dynamic Languages
Hello -
Excuse me if this question is elementary, but it is something that I would like to get a better understanding about in order to be able to code more properly/etc.

If I understand correctly, the GoF Design Patterns were originally created to address some limitations with the object oriented approach used by Java at the time (Please correct me if I am mistaken).

Is it true that dynamic languages address this limitation to some extent and thereby reduce or eliminate the need for the use of some of these patterns?

Specifically, my questions are:
* In a language like Ruby for example, do you find yourself using GoF patterns or does the fact that the language has functional aspects/duck-typing/etc. reduce/eliminate the need to use these patterns?
* If the above is true, are there new patterns that you find yourself using?
* If one is starting with dynamic languages today, is learning/mastering these GoF patterns still a requirement?

My intention of course is not at all to create an argument about this topic, but rather to learn how to best approach learning programming now in 2012, specifically with dynamic languages in mind (Such as Ruby and CoffeeScript, for example).

Furthermore, I am not a CS student and have been teaching myself programming over the years (Started out with scripting for system admin purposes but gradually became interested in programming/development itself). Being self-taught has its virtues and limitations. One such limitation perhaps is the fact that I may have missed out on some of the important teachings such as these GoF patterns in a classroom setting/etc.

Thank you for your time.
The rule against showing a render seems just a little rough. In some cases I think a render of a product is important and it seems like really crippling a hardware project if they can't show the design of the product. I get why, but that seems like the toughest of the restrictions to me.
I feel like it would be better to propose a solution than to just complain.
If you're on Linux: Select text and run xclip -o | wc
I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this.
You outlined the problem:

> The system expects me to remember to tap, because they (the engineers) needed a way to check where and when I get off the train. That’s fantastic, but this step doesn’t fit in my normal behavior, it doesn’t fit in my historical or expected train usage patterns. It baffles me as to why I should be tagging off; there is no logic to it, and from the user point of view, there is no need.

What is the solution? You cannot have barriers so that you tap in and out of stations, since lots of people buy tickets on the train. (I always wrongfully assumed that the clipper card worked like so: you tap in at the boarding station, and then hopefully you remember to tap out at the arrival station: if you forget you are charged a full fare unless you tap in again for your potential return journey, in which case it is simple business logic to connect dots.)

You've labelled this "an engineering problem" but you appear to have forgotten that engineers have constraints.
Ask HN: How has this worked out for you?
Most aspiring entrepreneurs I have met predominantly fall into the following 2 categories:

1. Planners who spend
- 25% of time networking, meeting people, going to meetups etc
- 25% of time following a rigorous process to select ideas.
- 25% of the time doing other miscellaneous activities like attending a startup school, hanging out on HN/online forums
- 25% of the time implementing their current ideas.

2. Doers who spend
- Mostly 100% of the time executing on an idea

So, if you find yourself associated with one of these groups, my question is, how has it worked out for you?
Thanks for the feedback. I'll see what I can do.
Ask HN: Could you refer some really great mobile app developers?
Well, Rotten Tomatoes offers an API, and IMDB offers all their data for download in text files.
My point was, if he didn't like something they did, he should have used his voice. I personally don't care if I open a box, in fact, it would be less work for someone to setup the phone for me.
lol..works on mobile too
Winklevoss Twins’ Advice for Zuckerberg: Facebook Should Be More Like Google
Not holding my breath for AeroFS. Following Git Annex Assistant development blog and waiting for the beta. Sounds awsome!
http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/
I'm surprised at how many people leave this out. It's a simple function that most writers/editors use, but for some reason lots of writing applications leave out.
Nomenclaturing: Let's Ture to the Max
I find it strange how the writers assume only Earth-like life would evolve on another planet. They speak in terms of bacteria, plants, animals... It doesn't make any sense to me. Out of the 3.5 billion years that the planet has sustained life, animals (first sponges, then cnidaria, etc.) have only been around for 630 million. Evolution didn't happen according to some goal; organisms evolved to suit their habitats.

So saying that plants/animals wouldn't exist on a planet significantly hotter than ours is really strange to say - they'd have no -reason- to. Because the evolutionary tree on that planet would be completely different from ours, the organisms' forms and internal structures will be very different in many ways. The same things won't have happened in their evolutionary history.

And of course, life would be adapted to the planet itself. You might say, "Enzymes don't function at those temperatures." Well, the life on hotter planets will have evolved to use different enzymes that -do- work at those temperatures.
Show HN: Our first ever marketing campaign
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell
They charge zone to zone. In order to know what to charge you they have to know your end point. How do you propose they figure this out without you telling them?
Let me explain one big use case. I'm from CircleCi (hosted continuous integration - https://circleci.com) and this is really to help people like us out.

The problem this solves is that you need credentials to clone a git repo from GitHub. That's easy: you can add an SSH "deploy" key to the repo.

BUT, dependency management tools (like bundler, pip and npm) allow you specify private repositories in your Gemfile/requirements.txt/package.json file. If you use a deploy key, you won't have access to those repositories and your CI wil fail. This isn't a problem you face as a developer, because you have an SSH key on your machine valid for all your GitHub repositories, this only affects your CI server.

So now a 3rd-party hosted CI server can use an Oauth token - something we already have - to download any repository you have access to.

There were already some ways of doing this - we could have added an SSH key for your user. But this is easier, and you don't get a notification saying "Circle has added an SSH key to your account", which panics people. This is also more convenient in a couple of other ways which I won't get into.

But there is one final problem, and it's a big one: your CI server adds this key to the machine before it checks code out. Since you can run arbitrary code in the CI server, you could possibly steal the OAuth key, and act as the user. Uh-oh! You can try and prevent this, but it's a bit tricky and error-prone.

So what Circle does instead is make you explicitly opt-in to a user key. If you need to access multiple repos, we'll detect it, and tell you how to explicitly opt-in. This means you'll also get a notification saying "Circle has added an SSH key to your account" which is good in our opinion. Then we don't use that key for public repos, and only use it when _you_ are the pusher (your teammates will use their own key). We're also making that key passworded, which you can't do with OAuth.

That still isn't good enough for everyone. Some people prefer to specify a user to run all their tests, and that user has restricted permissions using GitHub's team management tool. This is great, and something we explicitly support as the most secure.

So I think this is great if you're using your own CI server and trust everyone who can commit code to it. For 3rd-party CI servers like Circle, I feel what we're doing is safer. Feedback welcome.

Finally, I don't want this to appear negative. The problem that I raised above is one that GitHub is aware of, and one they are solving. I can't say how they're solving it, but I know that it does indeed solve it. I believe this is step one, and a great move in the right direction.
Autumn Harmony
Hacker Ideas
For Common Lisp to support converting [1 2 3] to a vector:

; [] to #()
(defun bracket-reader (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
`(vector ,@(read-delimited-list #\] stream t)))
(set-macro-character #\[ #'bracket-reader)
(set-syntax-from-char #\] #\))

And for your in-place hash:

; {} to hash
(defun set-hash-values (hash pairs)
(when pairs
(setf (gethash (car pairs) hash) (cadr pairs))
(set-hash-values hash (cddr pairs))))

(defun in-place-hash (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
`(let ((hash (make-hash-table)))
(set-hash-values hash ',(read-delimited-list #\} stream t))
hash))

(set-macro-character #\{ #'in-place-hash)
(set-syntax-from-char #\} #\))

I just sketched these together. I am a CL noob. No doubt there are more concise approaches.
I'm the author, look me up when you're ready to talk.
Wordpress takes a simple thing (One-way flow of text from author to reader) and makes it easy. It could be a lot harder to deal with something where information was going both ways.

A very important part of an interactive webpage is how it changes over time and with different inputs. Web developers have no trouble looking at some example widgets and imagining all the possible things a user could make them look like, but most people (might) have trouble doing that.

The same thing, I imagine, applies to running servers. I only know a bit about operating servers, but from my experience there is a complete, unremovable complexity that comes with having a powerful set of tools. Perhaps, we could remove almost all the configurability from the instant-server kit, but then why would you want to run your own?
Even a situation where 99% of people use a handful of providers is a lot more free than everyone being forced to use a single provider.
Waste of time, unless you're putting a spin on it.

There is a market for a CRM for sales people rather than management.
They do. Knight didn't get its trades busted.
If it's so easy to do better, I suspect an alternative (that works for people without smart phones) would have been mentioned in the post.

As it stands, it's just a matter of riders developing the tap-out habit.

Transit systems elsewhere have used this system. If you'd never become used to the old more casual system, you'd just always know to both tap-in, and remember to tap-out, or you'll be overcharged. If you'd been more used to, say, BART than CalTrain you'd also be better primed for the Clipper system: it works like the BART turnstiles, only without the clear physical barrier/reminder.
Oooh, wanna test me? Went through a pretty deep dive on the streetview stuff when I was working where you are but I'd be willing to bet you I could build you a 3rd gen car that would out perform the current ones for a lot less than $40K. I'd get dibs on Rod though, that man is hecka talented with a CNC mill.
Not Like Steve
No, they don't. If they do learn it, it's certainly not in 8th grade.

My town's school system was the second in the entire state, and they taught Algebra I (ie, factoring/FOIL) in 8th grade. I went to a well-respected private school, and they taught complex numbers in 10th grade, and polar coordinates only in the honors section of 10th/11th grade classes. For those, they taught matrix multiplication and determinants for 2x2 matrices only (ie, not 3x3 or up). This means that any real linear algebra was completely out of the picture.

This was well more than enough to score a very good score on the SAT II Math IIC exam (is this still even around?)

I was fortunate that I was able to teach myself outside of my school's curriculum (and my school also let me place out of certain classes), but overall, the standards are far below what you might hope.
But what about "release early, release often"?
what is your budget and timeline?

Can you ask your network vs cold call emails?

Maybe check out - http://www.scoutzie.com/
I can't reply to the child comment, for some reason, but to expand on this idea: a jury's role is to basically decide if the facts as presented apply according to the law. The frustration technical people express is mostly that they want to decide what the law should be as part of the jury. This defeats the point of the legislative branch: if you want laws that make sense in a technical way, devote your life yo becoming a senator or congress person. Don't expect juries to suddenly gain the power to overturn laws because they "know better".
True, and to me the ease of use increases by getting rid of what I perceive to be superfluous parens. I'd rather write the first code block and have mean the same as the second. This is a trivial example, but when LF + indentation become significant it eases deep nesting.

Ideal:

if (empty? x)
foo
bar

Less ideal:

(if (empty? x)
foo
bar)

The clojure comp shortcut looks good to me, but why even need the outside parens if it was the only line in that block?

(comp foo bar baz quux) x

Ideally, that should be valid as well. I know this kind of reduction won't work in a lot of cases, but I appreciate syntax sugaring like this where I can get it.
I was going to say, "it's in the article" then I went back and realized it's not in the post (I think it was in previous posts about it).

Kinda surprised since they could have done a lot of PR with, "THIS GUY MADE 1500!"
And remember that a solution that requires building big BART-like stations to prevent you from just walking away without going through a gate would be a terrible solution to a nearly non-problem.
Firefly better than Citizen Kane?
Perhaps, we could remove almost all the configurability from the instant-server kit, but then why would you want to run your own?

Freedom. e.g. being allowed to use a pseudonym or post breastfeeding photos.
Having used Clipper a few times, I think an easy way to make it less annoying is to just have more card readers. All the stations I've seen have so few you have to scan the entire platform to look for one.
For a first venture into programming, this was nicely done!

One thing, I thought the definition of a "word" is something like 6 characters, so a really long word could be considered 2+ "words". It seems like your definition of a word is a set of strings separated by a space. Is this intentional?
So what's wrong with this? People are not being forced to do anything.
Giving more importance to the average rating in RT, rather than the tomatometer, would give a very different ranking. Avengers has more than a 10% lower average ranking than any other movie in the top 10.
Twitter responds to IFFFT
Show HN: the one million euro map
Is the Internet Really Making Us Dumber?
Thanks zrail!
Ask HN: Math,how many unique melodies can be created?
If number of musical notes are fixed how many unique melodies can be created?
All of those things are fantastic but extremely isolated. Some of those things make the news every time they happen. Agendered thinking is pretty marginal.
There are few online news sites I would commit to subscribe to (except LWN, Linux "Weekly" News), but I would gladly micro-pay or tip for many individual articles if it was convenient and secure. Preferably some trustworthy third party service, not a site-specific feature.

I don't want advertisements to be the answer. Ad blockers are easy to install. When I disable my ad blocker and Ghostery, I'm reminded of just how blighted mainstream news sites have become by ads, social media buttons, and floating sidebars.

On the other hand, pay walls and subscription-only content reduces public access to news and the sites' Google juice.
Yes. I'm much more interested in the informed opinion of one person or a few experts than I am in the bland, diluted aggregate opinion of everyone.

The former at least has the potential to give me something other than safe, obvious choices.
That's just it though while Doctor Strange Love (1964) was #32 and Up (2009) was #924 there both vary good movies. There was plenty of recent and fun movies vary low on the list, consider:

Bowfinger (1999), Solaris (2002), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), From the Village to the City (1974), Going Postal (2010), Legally Blonde (2001) that's that's 4913 to 4918.

PS: Granted, rating movies is a huge multi dimensional problem, just ask Netflix, but you don't need a lot of accuracy to find a good movie.
>> Could the US have a bigger fake ID market simply because it is easier to fake an ID here?

It probably has more to do with the increasingly harsh cleavage that exists between the underage seeking novelty and the overage acting in ways they view as being protective. The stigma associated with it makes both more fun and more connected with risky behavior.

I don't really see the point of going through the trouble of procuring illegal falsified documentation just to drink in the central European countries I'm familiar with. "Sure, let the 15 year old have a beer, what's the harm?" is the reaction you may encounter in several places outside the US.