skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The social network for pets is actually not such a bad idea. I've got friends who build one in a niche:
- only in italian
- only for one race of dog
and it so many users I could not believe it.
It's kind of funny and depressing reading them: they write in the first person as it was the dog talking. Stuff like "hello my friends, today my master gave me a bath".
Wow... :)
(I won't link it, as they seem to be very jealous of the idea).

On "A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young", I'd like to add another way to be unusual:
"A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be travel"
I mean travel a lot, not short holiday breaks of course.
Stuff like go to live 3 months in Mexico, 6 months in Bali and so on.
I did all this for what, 10 years, and I have more ideas than I can chew.
I'm not that good in executing thought.

And one last thing. Pick your most "status quo" friend. You know, those guys who are absolutely convinced nothing will ever change and nothing ever changed and everything is normal as it is, today.
They live in the present.
Run your ideas on them. If they go "naa...who needs that?" you may have a good idea.

It happened to me a few years back when I had already started an online reservation business in Prague and decided to try the same in Riga, Latvia.
This "status quo" friend had already told me Prague would not work "nobody will trust a website to reserve an apartment".
When we went to Riga he told me "naaaa...who would come to Riga, this is like the Soviet Union and it's far". It worked, immediately.

I mean zero investments, html websites and stuff like that. Really low tech.

Thinking about it now, with low cost flights coming in from all over Europe and no passport requirements, he admits I was right.
But I am sure that if I present him with another idea he would still go: "nnaaa...who would..".
Good, time to build it!

You need a friend like that.
This story is only about the short film made about the Mine Kafon. If you want more info on the deminer itself you should check out the designer's blog. His concept also include GPS tracking and an online platform, as suggested here on HN.

http://minekafon.blogspot.nl
Mhe.... a change for the sake of it not because it was really needed I think.
Magical thinking in Software Development
Brainfuck JIT
Why I got a Blackberry
There are commercial mine clearing companies in existence - no need for it to be a charity.
I almost had a heart attack when I saw that picture of it in Chicago. It would be such a monstrosity and a real blemish to the the subtlety of the current skyline. Fortunately, that's just CNet being creative and this is far, far away from Chicago.
If it makes you feel any better, I've held the opinion for years now that ratings are broken across most services on the web. Jeff Bezos even acknowledged as much in a famous essay of his on how the distribution of one-to-five star ratings settle over time. Still, every new service sticks to the binary thumbs-up/down model or five-star. I'm sure you probably know the pitfalls of each, so good luck to you. I'm hoping you'll become the Disqus of ratings for every site. The analogy holds, interestingly, in my mind: comments had no consistency along UX or reputation before Disqus came along.
Sure, it bugs me sometimes.

But I am actually creating value for my clients beyond helping them game a broken budgeting process. I will be saving them potentially thousands of hours of tedious labour and freeing up qualified specialists for much more productive tasks.

The good comes with the bad, sometimes.
Precisely. When it comes to their search engine, Yahoo has a brand problem. They let Google take the lead, and now everyone says "let me google this". Nobody says "let me yahoo this". That's all. No matter how good Yahoo's search engine is, people aren't using it. They are not synonymous with search anymore.

Yahoo slept through the mobile revolution - everyone has a mobile OS, except for them.

Yahoo needs to get over this stigma and start working on other shit, just like Google does (self-driving cars, amazing ISP, google glass, biotech).
Beautiful dresses for you
Here meaning Ontario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Health_Insurance_Plan

There are private insurance plans for exceptional circumstances, but these often over-lap with other policies to such a degree they're basically a luxury offered by companies to entice workers. The only real perk to them is the dental and optical coverage that isn't covered by the standard health-care system.
Please people, make things readable [0]:

I'm one of the 30 other individuals that acutally patched and commited changes
for Bob to include in nvd3.js; I'm looking for contacts for the other 29
contributors. (Please contact me at using the feedback form on congocart.com
or master-technology.com) I would like one of us (I'm willing to volenteer) to
contact Mr. Qunibi of Novus partners in a position of consensuses from those
who actually have code in the product.

My thoughts that would I believe be amicable (i.e. win/win) to both sides is
that they can have our permission to take ALL of our changes closed source
in the own future versions as long as we also (the community) may use the
last release under the open source (Apache) license it has been under since
shortly after it was released on there official novus github account and go
our own separate way. I know my changes were really early to the library
and some of my code may not even exist anymore (lol).

But I believe the cost for them to audit the whole library and rip out all
of our changes and rewrite it all could be major -- I believe Bob could
legally remove all of our code; but for the actual re-implementation Bob
would have to hand it off to someone to do a fully clean-room version to
make them legally safe from being sued. And that could be very costly in
time and resources. Cost wise for them It might even be cheaper for them
to ditch the last 6-7 months of changes and to just revert to the version
before my patch/commit (which was issue #3 <G>). So I think we might
be able to make this a win/win proposition if I can get the consensuses of
the other 29 contributors.
Nathanael A.

[0]: Use what's best for you, but I pasted in vim, then 5gqq 8G=G gg>G
Does it bother you when people are incompetent?
Little bit of a rant, but here we go.

I'm a web developer, and I was contacted by a previous client who said he's getting some SEO work done, and the SEO company needed the FTP details and Google analytics login details. Instantly this rubbed me up the wrong way; anyone who knows about Google Analytics knows that the login details are tied to Google accounts. Which, in every site I've ever managed, or seen managed, has been the developing company. So I found it really ironic that a company who specialises in SEO doesn't understand how Google Analytics logins work. So I replied with the FTP details, and kindly told them how Google analytics worked and how I needed the SEO company's email address so I could add it to the GA profile. He forwarded that email to the SEO company, and I received an email back, with the same copy-and-pasted dot point list of FTP details (which had already been sent), and Google Analytics login details. They didn't even read my email. And it bothers me that people so incompetent are actually working and making money, and their clients are none the wiser. And that they are probably going to mess with an otherwise really good site I made.

Does it bother you when people are incompetent?
Why would I want a desktop where half of the thing has poor usability and loads of bugs?
Google: SSL is not the problem in passing search queries
Great apes have midlife crises too, study finds
Linux apps you must instal
Click Frenzy's failure to launch
British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row
Yes, but

Savings are naturally limited, growth is potentially unlimited

Let's say your company sells a product and it costs $10 to make it. You can go and maybe make it cost $9 to make it, but not much less. So you improved their profit by $1 (hopefully)

Instead, if you can make it sell 10x more product (which could be feasible), hence having a better effect than savings.
I'm wondering if the reasoning that you should build a startup based on your own needs is applicable to ideas that have already been solved abroad and will not be imported in your country for some time. We don't live all in the Silicon Valley and people feel the same needs all over the world. Let's take the Stripe example. I live in Italy and I would use their product right now. Too bad they are not here and will not be here for quite a long time I foresee. Is it a good idea to create a startup that solves this need NOW for Europe? PayMill thought it was. The same for Netflix; in Italy (and most of Europe) we don't have a single decent service for renting movies online. Sometimes I feel I should build a service like Netflix here, but what if Netflix comes here 1 year later? It would probably crush my service.
I find it staggering that something that has attracted national attention, with so many big name, class A retailers behind it has failed so badly.

The people running the site have known that a mass of traffic would be visiting the site at 7PM, and it has crashed under the load.

This is the equivalent of advertising a national sale and telling people to turn up at 7, and locking the doors. Unbelievable.
In globalized world, sell first, build later
How about a bio-solution? A fast-growing 1-year non-reproductive plant or weed that's engineered to grows best (or not grow) around old explosive chemicals? I imagine dropping seeds from a plane around a (old) minefield. After a few months you'll see plants popping up and you'll know that's where the old mines are.
> using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a giant Lego set

What terrible writing.
I can't agree more. 8k as a Rails dev? Converted to USD at current rates I make about 4.9k as a C++ dev. I feel like I am doing something seriously wrong. :/
Justice Katju's letter to Maharashtra CM
Sounds like they might have an official policy on how to release stuff as open-source, but it wasn't followed.
One thing I would suggest is when you mention it, have a link ready with an email signup so people like me who are intrigued can easily sign up to get a mail when the beta releases. The name seems fairly popular at least a google search for "Tinj" or "Tinj movie reviews" didn't work. (Although the hacker news thread came up with the second search)
The Problem Fair
The first thing I do is the "responsive design test" and collapse the whole thing into a single column. The design teams did a nice job, however the ad team never got the memo! And I'm now looking at this: http://imgur.com/l7p1U
miitla.com
Is the Kindle Obsolete? One Man’s Opinion On A New Alternative.
I disagree jval. Yahoo still has heavy proprietary tech in its ad systems such as Right Media, and they still are one of the best web media properties in the world as recognized by advertisers and advertising agencies responsible for spending billions in ad dollars (most tech geeks are not aware of Yahoo's heavy role in ad tech).

If Marissa can bring parts of Google's hard driving culture to this company, it will do well.

She's already recruiting some great people, such as veteran De Castro and young gun Robbie Stein (who used to be product manager on Google's Ad Exchange) and his Stamped team.

If she can hold on to the reigns and keep this pace of change for at least another 12 months, I think the future is bright for Yahoo.
Which font should I Use?
A truly random path would be pretty good, since you approach perfect coverage with repeated runs. Alas, the wind direction is not random, particularly in this kind of environment.

An interesting demining approach is to buy the local villagers lots of sheep and pen them in the areas of concern. Once in a while a sheep goes boom. Meanwhile: wool and baby sheep as a side effect.
It depends on how you add $1 to revenue. If you do that by increasing prices, you are right. If you add $1 by extra sales, you have to take the cost of delivering the service/product to the client into account, and there is often a marginal element to that. In other words, your cost base is not totally fixed. So some of that dollar is eaten up in delivering the service
Wallpaper Megan Fox | Seducción 16
Did you see all the lush plants in the video?
There's an old SF short story about a writer who, after wishing he never had to wait again (for the bus, in line, to hail a cab...) realizes that those interstitial moments were his most creative.

Also seems to me it's like those nights you can't sleep, but because your mind wanders where it wants, you end up feeling rested anyway. Or "unstructured time" in the schedules of over scheduled kids.

If you keep the moments where nothing in particular is happening, you allow for those moments where anything can happen...?
This seems to be the perfect place to create interactive lessons, in the spirit of Bret Victor work.
I wonder if you could offer £10 per retrieved landmine as a bounty, and let local entrepreneurs try and work out the details...
Been waiting for this for two reasons: a) websocket support and b) now the version of IIS that runs under visual studio 2012 and the server matches hopefully avoiding any surprises (v8).

Oh - and provisioning a new server doesn't require 3 hours to apply updates :-)
I don't understand this concept? Anybody care to clarify?

edit: specifically, What constitutes a voting ring? Why would HN want to find and prune them?
Ask HN: Anyone else get a HN password reset email this morning?
Just seeing if it's a bug, or if someone is trying to hack my account.
Yes and no.

While cloning a service in a different geographical area may be profitable and successful on the short term, it's never going to be a Facebook or a Google on a global scale. It's like opening up an Italian restaurant in a small little town that doesn't have an Olive Garden yet.

If that's the kind of business you want to be in that's fine, but it's not the high-growth kind of startup that many of us are trying to build.

It's "just" a cash cow.
That author is bankrupt now, for what its worth.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-dad-poor-dad-bankrupt-163...
This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing.
One alternative to this is to just create lanes with rope.

i.e. you drive a stake in the ground on either side of the field (if that's even possible) and just create a lane where each of these rollers roll through.

It won't work in every single landmine, but it can provide a 'grid' within which you know what has been cleared and what has not.
I have did that with AsmJit 4 years ago: https://github.com/miaout17/justfuck/blob/master/src/JustFuc...

Shame on me for using Visual Studio. I turned to pure Linux/Mac development environments in recent years.
tax is a robbery anyway. We only pay it because the government will take away our personal freedoms if they didn't receive payment. Do you honestly think if tax was 100% voluntary people would willingly donate without being coerced into doing it?
Cigarette Company Finance Increase, Wismilak Manufactures
Cigarette Company Finance Increase, Wismilak Manufactures
I also thought that was a good pitch. Please make a post or something when you have the beta open, I'd like to try it.
"China barium price,price of barium in China"
Why was this only tested against grsec but not SELinux? Is there some reason that it's not interesting to test SELinux against this exploit??
Sure does, but without them we'd be lonely, all two of us :)
Just dodge around the new UI and it's quite usable. Or better yet get Start8 and automatically skip the new UI on log in altogether (and get a win7 style start menu as a bonus).

Why they would include a tablet oriented touch centric UI in a server product is a matter for another discussion...
> When business dump toxic byproducts into water supplies, in places where nobody has yet legislated against that, is it not immoral?

The morality of it is irrelevant because it is deemed to be an infraction of a law in most places
Also check out the book "The Art of Woo" Goofy title, but a very interesting book on selling ideas.
37signals can be considered small
A little something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0
The Harwell Dekatron lives
Except there is a limit to how much you can reduce costs, not to how much you can increase revenue.
I think their stated reason is very much to be expected: they are a financial institution, their whole business model (and therefore mentality) is to act quickly to decrease risk. Makes perfect sense that they would take it down first and judge later.

I'm not saying it was the right thing to do, but it's consistent with what I would expect, assuming the scenario is true (internal code, open-sourced without some higher-up knowing about it, higher-up hears about it, freaks out).
Tweaking the parameters gives (in my opinion) some more interesting behaviours: http://jsfiddle.net/9ww7P/
iirc, The British did this in India but with snakes.

It wasn't long until the locals just farmed snakes to sell to the British.

Plus, retrieving landmines would be a pointlessly dangerous task, when all you really need to do is blow them up when nobody is around.
Elon Musk, the 21st Century Industrialist
Does anyone have any good (read: not micro) benchmarks comparing Server 2012/IIS 8 to Server 2008/IIS 7.5? You'd think it's been available long enough for that, but that does not seem to be the case...
Involtini di pollo con cuore filante di carciofi
Interesting.

Python being 'too slow' makes sense, but at the same time it doesn't. For example, it has much more behaved GC (and reference counters)

I guess if Google wanted to make it 'super fast' it could. Or use PyPy. Or Jython
Let's bring back the Renaissance-era model of the Art Patron. Instead that twenty-something pull out a roll of bills to buy a scalped sports ticket... get them to pull it out to fund the creation of a sculpture, a song, a painting.

Connect the influx of money and people directly to the creation of the "cultural contributions [that] attracted those neo-yuppies here in the first place". This has the advantage of turning those neo-yuppies into participants in the culture they're here for, rather than just consumers of it.
Truly random paths would give you the 97.8% probability that there are no mines left, over a course of N field traversals. Obviously, that ain't good enough.
sure, but what I mean is legally how does that policy need to be established? Does the CEO or board need to give individuals explicit authority to produce license agreements?

Some random googling brought up:

"Executing Corporate Contracts. Except as otherwise provided in the articles or in these bylaws, the board of directors by resolution may authorize any officer, officers, agent, or agents to enter into any contract or to execute any instrument in the name of and on behalf of the corporation." [1].

But does this apply to software licenses too? As a user of a software package is there any reasonable way for me to determine that the correct legal procedure has been followed. If the source has been out there under the GPL for 9 months, could they still revoke the license because it wasn't authorised? Or have they not done due diligence?

As a software engineer, what kind of authorisation should I be looking for? Does it need to come from upper management?

Those are the kind of issues that might have come up in a court case, and perhaps have been resolved to some degree (perhaps it's already been tested in a previous case, and I'm unaware of it).

[1] http://danashultz.com/blog/2010/06/28/who-can-sign-a-contrac...
You may wish to follow your own advice there. Calling out the differences between cultures is a fundamental part of racism - "we're better than them and their funny ways". Yes, it can be done in a non-racist way, but the way you've phrased it is just plain wrong.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20...
Not exactly what you are looking for, but the bing team posted some perf increases they saw when testing Server 2012 http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/06/07/...
> pretty unusable remotely thanks to the new UI

How so? It's much more easy to use with keyboard if yo uhave to do anything there (second question is why would you need to do anything there).
What does medium sized mean? My friend has an online store that grossed 5 million USD in the last year, he is looking for help him next-gen'ing his Magento store as well as SEO. Is that something you'd be good at? He wants one solution provider for both re-doing his store and SEO.
This creates an incentive to clear only first few mines, because they will become progressively harder to find and an hourly reward rate would quickly fall to near zero.
It's about the psychology. One thing I've learned from consulting gigs etc is that clients are irrational and you have to learn to deal with it. If you can do the same amount of work but get more kudos for it, why waste energy on the low-rewards activities (i.e. saving money rather than "making money").

So you're right from a programmer's perspective, and about the unhealthy bias. But most people don't think like that.
That's an informative posting. But does it hurt to get about half the landmines by cheap means and do the rest with more thorough methods?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely interested.
Er, that's incredibly cruel, since most landmines are designed to maim, not kill, eg. by spraying shrapnel at knee level.

That might kill sheep outright, but I doubt it.
The difference is this costs 40 € and can clear a couple of mines for that money. Afghanistan is not exactly rolling in cash, so any cheap improvement is a valuable addition to the toolbox - it provides a way for poor communities to do something while they're waiting for America to donate enough money to clean up their mess.

My guess is that demining NGOs will be using something like this soon enough if it proves effective, though, so any donation dollar really is best sent there for maximum effectiveness.
I tend to feel this way as well about clones, however your example IMHO doesn't really catch the problem. If the Italian restaurant is very good and aimed at a selective audience it can win against a big brand that aims at everyone. Of course they can only win if they don't try to clone an Olive Garden. The problem here is not making something small to beat a giant competitor, it's to build something exactly like a service you know to be very very good for the purpose of having it now. Indiegogo is a good example for this; they are like Kickstarter and offer a very good service to Europe. Considering Kickstarted wont be here for a long time I think they caught a good opportunity.
There was a great Ted Talk on using rats for this a couple of years ago [0]. An interesting discovery is that they're also really good for finding TB.

[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/bart_weetjens_how_i_taught_rats_to_...
"I'm based in the UK and was trying via e-mail to speak to a potential client. It just wasn't happening. They are based in the US. So I called them up and offered to meet for dinner there at a time convenient for them"

I'm probably missing something here, but tell me you didn't fly to the US to have dinner with a potential client you were cold-selling yourself to?
The problem is that reducing costs doesn't typically scale. If you want to grow a businesses profit significantly, you need to increase sales. It's entirely reasonable to double your sales. It's pretty difficult to halve your costs.