skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should change the domain name you are operating from.

Also I'd stop redirecting everyone to AppointmentReminder.co & having users login at ReminderBookHQ.com for one thing, its bad user experience and its not great for SEO.

Sure you can claim that you have an EMD (Exact-Match Domain) but it doesn't really help SEO, in fact Google recently released an update to tackle EMDs even further.
Likewise, it doesn't help you have rivals with the same name on a different tld - patio11 - appointmentreminder.org

You should definitely stick to one domain name and preferably change it, unless you can acquire ReminderBook.com. The reason for this is that its extremely beneficial for you to own the .com as you're targeting users who aren't exactly web savvy. Likewise running everything from one domain would be more beneficial to you in terms of User Experience, Branding & SEO amongst other things as well.
Understanding and Beating the Odds of Startup Failure
The curious case of min-resolution: 0
I was an Ubuntu user for years. When tablets became famous, I was thinking: Wow, if I only could have Ubuntu on these devices. Then they lost me because of Unity. I tried several days, but it was simply not geared toward my workflow. Thank God I discovered Mint. Mint is awesome.

Then they introduced this new find-something-thing that sends everything you type to their servers. A privacy nightmare. And a usability nightmare. Thats just the wrong philosophy. So I also dont want them on my tablets.

Its surprising, how quick things can change. I was a huge Ubuntu supporter from 2005 to 2012. And now I warn people to not use it.
What happens when the vaccine printer gets a virus? ;)
The Sokal Affair?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Even for a beginner Django docs are the best resource you can find for Django. It is one of the best documentation you'll find for an open source project imho.
Microsoft's motto is "Don't be so evil that the government can successfully break you into pieces". Google's motto is "don't be evil". We expect vile bullcrap from Microsoft.
Your insightful comment made my day (and freaked me out a bit too). So true.
If it was unsold, that just means the price was too high. No advertising slot has an actual value of zero.
The Andiccio24 Success Story
New Arduino released: the 32bit Due
Bad week for 3 generations of tech companies
> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.

Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.

The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.
I'm an apologist of RTFMP, which is why I didn't include it ;)
This is actually a very good comment. Some of these ideas are nested, logically. A Heuristic is not per-se biased, although a subset of heuristics is in fact associated with the origin of the term 'cognitive bias'. Viz,

Although much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision-makers was done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman,[4] the concept was originally introduced by Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon. Gerd Gigerenzer focuses on how heuristics can be used to make judgments that are in principle accurate, rather than producing cognitive biases
Could probably also include something like Sugar.js or Underscore.js that tries to bring a lot of the missing syntactic sugar to JS.
Can it be that the journal reviews the papers using computer-generated referees?
EU declares war on blind "pirates"
Saudi Arabia wants to transition to 100% renewables
For corporate taxes, effective tax rate is the relevant number. I could not find recent figures, but most rich countries had an effective tax rate in the 10-20 % rate, with Germany and Australia as outliers (below and above) in 2005. The US (well, states) are known to have a high official corporate tax rate, but the effective tax rate is much lower. In general, corporate taxes have significantly decreased on various measures (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/cor...).

This is actually the main issue of this new law in France: distortions and waste around tax avoidance much more than the actual tax rates, which are mostly for political show (the tax will not raise that much money, even though France has the highest number of people > 1 million euros in assets/etc... within Europe).
+1 for building something like this to scale (rehashed from another reply below, but circumstances are the same) ;-)

Might test it later and let you know.
Google, I don't get you. You treat free service users like kings and paying customers like serfs. What's up with that?
I don't understand. Yes, use best practices in the development of software. No, this doesn't explain why you won't support X and even recommend to use a bunch of different frameworks and potentially runtimes/languages.
They're not overly successful--I've had some slow page loads, but no serious interruption of service.
Deeper awareness, penetration and mind-share in its core market.
Bitbucket?
>> I've also gone back and forth on having a picture or not.

It gave me a first impression of you, one that was more affable/likable (a better picture of you, that your skills or GPA cannot give). So, in my view, leave it there.

>> but I AM looking to speak at more events, now that I'm doing open source work for a living.

Why don't you search for interesting tech gatherings in and around your areas and offer yourself as a lineup speaker? One example:

http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=hacker+news+&userFr...
This seems to affect VC's and people here are acting like you can't have startups without VC's. There are these things called banks...
Seconded. I listened to that a few days ago and it's an incredible story.
Hacknow 2012 winners announced: under 18 European hackers
fuck them
French hacker arrested for infecting over 17K smartphones, stole over 500K Euros
If one out of 100,000 cases requires support staff, surely the $50 or so per year (for Google Apps business) should be enough to cover that?

Low price doesn't mean that you can never afford any service. I received a personal response/apology and vouchers from a marketing representative once after I complained by e-mail about a €2,99 food product (Iglo brand).

Google is either just greedy and reckless, or their prices are below the cost of the actual product (with no support costs factored in), but even then they could afford some level of support. But hey, if they get away with it, no big deal, right?

(Edit: another example, I have a €0,90 per month e-mail account from df.eu and receive personal, thoughtful reponses when I ask them about technical issues like TLS support - how is a much smaller company able to do that and Google isn't? It's obviously not the product price.)
DivX Finland were clearly being facetious. They of course know that their work is on the wrong side of legal but to see it used commercially must have made them laugh.
I know GitHub is down, but how do you know someone is ddosing it?
US had a 92% tax rate for a few years and 70%+ during our great economic expansion after WWII, which was highest GDP grow in our history.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
I almost got an MBA in my twenties but decided to start a company instead. My reasoning was that it would cost me $40-50k to acquire, at which point I would need to take a job for 3-4 years to pay it off. I always knew I wanted to start a company so I figured I'd use those 5-6 years educating myself.

I don't regret the choice, but I think an MBA from a top school can expose you to more complex and big $$$ business environments than you're likely to discover on your own as an outsider without much experience.
We have independent verification that math works, because it is used every day in millions of companies to perform a variety of critical tasks.

The targets of the Sokal Affair were on much shakier ground to begin with.
Anything else, if you run your business on it. Seriously.

Edit: Or your schoolwork, or anything important.
Apps Taking a Crowdsourced Approach to Reporting the Weather
and the only thing I imagine is hackers making people inject themselves bad things instead of vaccines.
Do you think that travelling to other countries -- "seeing the world" -- changes people? Gives them a new perspective? If that can, I think going into space can as well.
Right on time for the presidential election.
You have a point.

Originally this was just a side project to develop something other than the product for a night. It then grew into a personal site to be used on a YC application.

I appreciate the viewpoint, and since I know not what PG & co are actually like IRL, it may be wise to remove the comments.
Petrol 'produced from air and water'
Fair point, but still nothing compared to OS development, where you usually can't release a new version without having to worry about people trying to run it on 10 year old computers and everyone expecting entrenched, old enterprise software that uses all APIs you wish you could deprecate to continue working flawlessly.
A lot of developers can't have the luxury of using the latest and greatest tech because they have to worry about existing customers. They can't start from scratch without upending existing revenue streams.
If you think RIAA/MPAA is evil, wait until you try cutting out big pharma.
Tractor beam built from rings of laser light
I grew up with enough of an interest in space that I heard and internalized a lot of this as a kid. I think some IMAX movies attempted to recreate this kind of experience.

I wonder now much more impactful the real thing would be in terms of altering a person's perspective.
A lot of people in small claims court would at best irritate them. Best is to just leave.
Besides the support issues, it's worth noting that Google Voice is also impossible to use when you are (temporarily) outside of the US due to their braindead geographical IP limitation that blocks you from even accessing the site.

For my voicemail-to-email (and occasional forwarding, etc.) I am currently using Sonetel (http://www.sonetel.com). $1/month for a US number and you can contact real humans when things go wrong. (no affiliation, I'm just a happy customer)
Probably someone that wants to practice with their botnet. GitHub is a formidable target.
>RubyScript is what we need => efficient code, à la coffeescript, with a Ruby syntax.

Why not make a Ruby -> Coffeescript compiler, since they're a lot closer in the first place?
I noticed yesterday I can't install anything through https://, git:// urls work fine
Hardly believe that (Atlassian owned) Bitbucket is doing such attack. Bitbucket offers free private repos, not just git but mercurial hosting. Although way less popular, I think Bitbucket has features to gain ground in the long run without the need of tactics like DDOSes.
France, like Arkansas and Idaho, has a high percentage of the country engaged in agriculture. A sensible comparison would be PPP GDP per capita growth rate.
Manifesto Ibridi
If they need to be five times more efficient, why is the plan to spend a lot of money on things that do not directly impact customer service, like giving away rides to poor people, and using self-produced Biodiesel?
How is this on the front page of HN. I have seen far more interesting things on the second page, and I have submitted posts with useful information!
Take a look at http://www.sonetel.com, they are cheaper than many other options and also available internationally.
While DivX Finland didn't have permission to produce translations, many countries consider translations to have their own distinct copyright. Translation is a creative process, rather than a mechanical one. (This is why you can't pass that French course by pushing everything through Google Translate.)

Also, generally when you start making the claim that so-and-so are just getting free advertising, you're arguing in the wrong direction 99% of the time. ;)
You had my admiration, with the Ubuntu theme ;-)
The nice thing is that most ssh config settings are also used by mosh.
I haven't heard of Mosh before, so I can't comment (I'll try it soon), but I just watned to point out that ssh+screen (or ssh+tmux) gives you exactly the same, and is an apt-get/yum-install/pacman-S away.

From reading about mosh, it seems to require a UDP connection, thus non-trivial routing. I forward ssh connections through ssh tunnels (sometime multiple layers), and it works great. Can mosh do that?
Whether Academia is full of shit is irrelevant to the validity of mathematics. That being said, the GP comment basically demonstrates a peculiar cognitive bias. A variation of a logical fallacy: "I'm not dumb, therefore I never do dumb things." Of which we see all too often grafted into politics: Viz: Science is objective, therefore my (self-interested political) viewpoints are also objective, infallible, and inevitably correct.
Hey. I understand your concern about "fluff" posts but this was a very informative article and I think you're giving it a very unfair reading.

1) The post is mistitled. Read it as "Rules to make thousands of dollars from your ebook". The raw # of sales is usually not as important to the author as the net profit, in terms of it being "worth it". That's why he computed an implied hourly rate. There are other benefits to wide distribution, but that was not the focus here.

2) "Anecdote" != Anecdote. Is this a peer-reviewed scientific study? No. Is it a useful, detailed description of a real-world event? Yes. A thought experiment is not as valuable as an actual experience. (Would you read the architecture design notes of someone who built some software, or a sociologist who was making wild guesses about what "might" work in a programming project?).

But if you want to go into the "data" realm, read about John Resig (http://ejohn.org/blog/programming-book-profits/) and Peter Cooper (http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/). Both are "internet famous" to some degree. Both made much less off their books with a publisher compared to this posts's strategy. Publishers give you about 5-10% of the cover price, so you might get a buck or two per book. Do you really think their marketing/distribution efforts will get you 10-20x more sales?

3) I'm actually an ebook author as well, and have sold 1700+ copies of a technical book/screencast on math costing $19-$59. I agree with most of the points: price high, no DRM, publish the book yourself. I do allow other 3rd-party channels for a "Kindle" version of the book, which is much cheaper, doesn't have high-quality print formatting, etc. I also have an upsell for a premium version with extracted images, slides, video tutorials, etc.

I felt compelled to write this because, as an author in the intended audience, I found the post very helpful. I want HN to encourage positive conversations and I didn't think this criticism was justified.
I'm guessing that that was probably a joke?
On the motives for DDOS attacks - http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks...
Not quite what you were thinking, but I think viruses might be a piece of the puzzle:

print DNA -> PCR -> insert into vector of choice (i.e. some virus) -> transform organism of choice (i.e. some E. coli strain) -> purify drug

(this is going to be one complicated printer with lots of expensive inks)
Tell HN: Join the #startupschool2012 irc channel on freenode.net
Because support hurts margins.

Google has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and supporting anything other than their ad products doesn't make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. I'd wager that most google products lose money, and I'm almost certain that GV is unprofitable.

Is this morally correct? That depends on ones value system. Google tells customers that they don't provide support and users continue to consume the service. If you want support, the price tag is higher than free.99.
Yes, because a respectable company like Atlassian would risk their entire business to give a small boost to just one of their many products by dealing with black market botnets.
I believe he was making a joke.
I'd love to check some out. Which of your posts would you recommend?

edit: Just checked out Easy Retirement Planning. Looks pretty sweet. What age do you think is a good time to start using such a platform?
If it's upvoted, then the HN crowd finds the language interesting. If not, then it will fade away like every other article that doesn't get votes does.
You mention HDMI out. $100 chinese tablets have it [1]. Arguably they don't have the same screen and quality battery as the Nexus 7.

1. http://www.ainolstore.com/ainol-novo-7-mars-cortex-a9-androi...
Student promotion: hashdays Security Conference in switzerland
Students: Pay what you want for a hashdays ticket!
hashdays Security Conference October 31st - November 3rd 2012
Single page link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expan...
To Thomas Fuchs: How would you modify your tips for those publishing non-fiction e-books?

I work for a company that publishes non-fiction in the major digital marketplaces, and we're doing fine right now. One of the major perks that we see with using these marketplaces (ex: Kindle) is that they provide perks which we could not provide had we been selling e-books ourselves and asking our customers to sideload content to their devices. For us, we see the royalties to them as necessary costs.. or investments to make buying and reading content as convenient as possible.

Love to hear your on this Thomas. Thanks.
Good article, especially the LocalForward config was new to me.

One real usage that is invaluable for me, is the fact that the config is used for SVP also. This saves a lot of typing.

With a key based login set up, copying files to a server is a matter of

scp file dev:~/
Only a very well orchestrated DDOS using a botnet has the endurance and strength of this attack.
One can think that they are distributing some malware through github or that an anti USA hostile government agency is reaping code. Only Github knows.
Ask HN: How do you avoid co-founder fatigue?
My co-founder and I are close friends. Startup is going better than it has in months. But lately, his faults are getting on my nerves.

Right now, I cope by "shutting it down" - just keep my mouth shut and stick to the work. Even though I'm not trying to be pro-actively mean, I think it comes across that way because normally I'm chatty and making jokes.

What are some things you guys do so that you can deal with your co-founder?
> the odds of which are 4/13

Actually slightly lower, 15/49. (The difference is like 0.15%.)

(I mainly mention this because I used to think my odds of drawing to a flush in poker were 1/4 per draw. It took me embarassingly long to realise that I needed to remove the cards I could see from the deck.)
Github is being DDOS'd? I hadn't noticed. And I use Github. Every day.
The typical botnet operator cycle:

1) Send email to <large_site_here>, asking for a large ransom, preferably in Bitcoins.

2) If <large_site_here> does not pay, fire your packet cannons at them.

3) Rinse and repeat.
GitHub takes over Twui (Twitter's for Mac UI framwork)
Do you want a shoebox for Facebook?
Shmublishing
I think some people simply WANT to start businesses. Period. I know I did. It wasn't about trying to become rich; I'd be perfectly happy with a decent "lifestyle business." I just like the control of making my own destiny, and reaping the rewards of my own labor.

If I didn't think I could afford health insurance on my own, I wouldn't do it. I'd suck it up and take a paycheck, hating my work, but I wouldn't feel that I could afford a risk to my own life/health or my family's.

Is there extra motivation for the extra risk? I say no. If you decide to take the plunge and start a business, you're in it to SUCCEED. Extra stress CAN, under some circumstances, improve your odds -- but it can also make you TOO cautious, because the stakes are too high. And I submit that running your own business is enough to get you into the "ideal productivity" stress zone all on its own, without having to worry about whether you're risking your LIFE as well as your savings.
Write a bit of code that automatically inserts a footer on every page with details of who bought it.

"this is The personal copy of Tom Wainworth - tom@wainworth.eu"
Usually $HOME is the default path, so you don't even need the ~/, this works fine:

scp file dev:
>I think when it does show up, no one will be happy

Lawyers will.
A human brain is but a finite machine, therefore there are only finitely many propositions which you believe. Let us label these propositions p1, p2, ..., pn, where n is the number of propositions you believe. So you believe each of the propositions p1, p2, ..., pn. Yet, unless you are conceited, you know that you sometimes make mistakes, hence not everything you believe is true. Therefore, if you are not conceited, you know that at least one of the propositions, p1, p2, ..., pn is false. Yet you believe each of the propositions p1, p2, ..., pn.
"You must be a US resident to accept payments." My reason not to use them.
But they can file bogus paperwork saying an informant told an officer that the house has drugs in order to get a warrant.
I really like the collaborative editing environment, but my concern over the potential danger of a loss of data that I have no control over means I'd give that up without thinking twice.

My solution is Dropbox and native apps.
The guy decided to interject Microsoft into Google's fiasco. I don't know if he had some experience that he felt represented the rule and not the exception, or if he just wanted to rub shit on them (MS). Either way, that was completely uncalled for; especially considering Microsoft does and can provide support, and even very good support at that; and especially considering that you could mention at least a dozen major corps that provide much worse support on their best day then MS does on its worst day.
We could have a philosophical debate about what number a finite precision representation represents when you exceed its precision. But on a practical level, if you print it, what do you get? An exact integer, or a floating point representation?
Show HN: I travelled cross-country to Startup School only using YC apps
Giving away rides: makes paying riders feel good about paying, good advertisement.

Self-produced biodiesel: beyond the "feel good" advertisement, they may actually be saving money if they get the used cooking oil for free. "Right now we’re starting with a downtown loop, which serves primarily entertainment venues, bars, and restaurants." -- Restaurant owners likely are donating their used cooking oil to the bus that stops at their establishment and drops off patrons.
Does anyone actually pay?
[nsfw] rule34 DuckDuckGo
I can't believe is needs to be said, but that was a joke. It had to be.
What does that get you over ssh and screen?