skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both of Ark's co-founders are Cal grads. Both of Carsabi's co-founders are also Berkeley grads. Seems smart, Carsabi gets to leave their baby with someone they know and trust, and Ark probably got it for a song.
Yes, if they want a classical publishing style in digital form - let them simply ship PDF which anyone can use wherever they want to. And if they want some interactive "bells and whistles" they should better use the web for that. Also many publishers are plagued with DRM paranoia, and instead of shipping their content in various forms they choose some awkward limited mechanism which requires device/tool X to read it.
I've read all of the comments and believe the consensus is basically:

- It's a lot cheaper for ebay/paypal to let the scammers rip off people than it is to go after them, even when the facts clearly identify the scammer

- Casual sellers are both less able to detect fraud and are more greatly impacted by it

- The feedback mechanism is insufficient "insurance" against fraud

- "Seller protection" and "Buyer protection" are not suitable insurances against the kind of fraud that actually occurs

- The vast majority of transactions are legitimate

- The selling prices on ebay can be substantially higher than Gazelle/Amazon, or other reputable channel

- Fraud will undoubtedly occur in some cases

How about if a 3rd party sold real buyer or seller insurance? They would be in the business of identifying scam-like behaviour from buyers/sellers, help you to avoid fraud it can detect, and ultimately insure you from loss. Not sure how much the premium would need to be in order to make this work, but seems like an interesting idea.
This sort of thing is a natural consequence of high cost and high risk missions. You have a multi-billion dollar mission, and it's doing something unprecedented and using a brand new design and construction. When you build something like that what tends to happen is that you try to keep the mission scope reasonable and then you build the vehicle to have a very high (say >95%) chance of satisfying that minimum mission requirement. But what happens when, say, you create a Mars rover with a 95% chance of working for 90 days you'll likely end up engineering a vehicle which might have, say, a 50% chance of lasting for 5 years. If you set out to do that from the start it would be a non-starter, because a 50% mission success rate is too low for a multi-billion dollar mission.
Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World
When was this at NYTM?
I first started following Rick Smolan's books about 6 years ago (they only produce one every few years or so), and these photo books remain some of the only non e-books I would consider buying anymore... Always beautiful, and often thought-provoking. As a software engineer, this last one on Big Data hits pretty close to home, and I wasn't sure I'd have the same reaction, but I was quite impressed. If you're not convinced, there's a free preview of the book here (mid-way down the page)...

http://humanfaceofbigdata.com/

The info graphics alone are way too cool. Just my 2-cents...
ESalesData - Facebook
eSalesData is a fast growing market specialist in delivering Sales leads, email/data appending, application development and online marketing solutions.
I understand that Twitter's reception desk had birdsong that played when people tweeted, but it became cacophonous at high tweets-per-second.
Some OEMs. In return for large quantities of money, and then you've just swapped one large profit-driven company for a smaller profit-driven company or an industry consortium that would be more worried about not upsetting its members than doing the right thing, and then someone's signature gets revoked because they don't use signed drivers or it turns out that the small community Linux distribution with the forgettable name is actually a front for organised crime and who's taking responsibility for all of this?

We thought about this. In detail. My conclusion was that in the absence of a standards body with absolutely no commercial involvement whatsoever stepping up, Microsoft is probably actually the least bullshit option because at least if (or when) someone screws up they'll be blamed.

(You don't have to go into the firmware settings to choose to boot from removable media any more. You can just do it from the Windows 8 bootloader options, so it's the same on every machine. This is actually a genuine improvement that Microsoft made to the ease of installing alternative operating systems)
Funny, 10 years ago, everybody wanted to get rich by getting into investment banking and work in credit derivatives, even if they would admit to you over a drink in the pub that they didn't actually understand what they were doing. Now we talk about the wasted talent. I guess the moral of the story is that easy money kills dreams.
I had to repeat Calculus because of that damn game!
"Correlation is not causation"

Considering that no one presented statistical evidence of any form, I don't know what you're talking about John.
I'm sorry, but down opting this doesn't change the facts. Neither does portraying Samsung as an entirely innocent and hard-done-by party. They screwed their own pooch.
2012 Yahoo Year In Review: Over 500 Top Searches In Over 50 Categories
Tons of people make websites without SQL or a server side language.

Here's a list of static website generators:

http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-gene...

My personal site is just a couple html files.
Go freelance or find remote work with for US/Canada/Europe companies. You could earn at least double or even triple if you do it right.
Is the incidence of rape by taxi drivers higher than that of the population at large? And are the rapes happening in taxicabs, to customers?

It sounds like you've cited something that's technically true without any context, so it's unclear as to whether there is a trend, or if it's just hysteria.
The core of the lean startup is the application of the scientific method to systematically and consistently gain knowledge about product/market fit. The scientific method is the only reliable way for gaining knowledge about the natural world that has been discovered in all of history. Only a kook would argue against it. Luckily that's not what Marc Andreessen argues.

Marc seems to believe that the Lean Startup approach is not applicable to "audacious" ideas, citing the Macintosh. This is, of course, not the case. The scale of a project might make experimentation more costly, or more difficult, but it still occurs. For example, the Macintosh was preceded by the Lisa. Apple learned from the Lisa (too complex, too slow) and hence the Mac was simpler. Sometimes experimentation occurs not at a company level but at an industry level. To use Apple again, the early experiments leading up the iPhone were performed by Apple (Newton, iTunes Phone), Palm, and RIM. It's not like the iPhone sprung fully formed into an empty market, much as Apple would like you to believe this.
sown, please jump to that Wikipedia article and look at Seligman's publications (at the bottom). You MUST read his book "The Optimistic Child", which you can probably get from your local library. The wording of your posts comes right off the pages of that book, and you're old enough and smart enough now to consider the phenomena described in his research and put it to good use.

I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.
I think calling it 'stupid' is a little strong. There are hundreds of millions of iOS users, and many newspapers exist serving cities with smaller populations than that.

iOS is also a very different environment with regards to payment:

- On iOS the process of purchasing paid and free apps is the same: you type in your password.

- On the web the process of purchasing paid applications has built-in friction: 'free' is the default, and payment requires the user to trust the store, input card information etc.

There are more people on the web, but web users are less willing to pay for things.

I don't deny that a larger audience is better, but it adds overhead to support more platforms, so focusing on one can be an advantage. Marco, the creator of The Magazine (http://the-magazine.org), mentioned that he hasn't ruled out other platforms, but with limited resources it's easier to focus on iOS for now (he's the sole developer). Apparently after four issues he already has enough income to pay market rates per-word to writers and hire an editor.
A tech demo is a tech demo, it shows what is possible, not what is necessarily feasible to market to the big public as a new UI metaphor. Often it takes a long time to perfect something. So no need to be negative. Don't confuse it with a commercial of something that is actually brought to market.
What Apple Needs To Learn From Microsoft
>Isn't that how representative democracies work?

No, the way it's supposed to work, as we're taught in civics, is to adhere to the laws as they currently exist, and if we want them changed, to get deeply involved in city council meetings until we can beg the council members, who have no understanding of the unseen costs and missed opportunities of the current system, and are typically in league with a local guild, to grant us special permits to do our innovative activity.

On the way, we're supposed to develop our own political faction, and eventually get powerful enough to figure we can use the city regulatory apparatus to hold back our own enemies.

Because we wouldn't want to risk people having a subpar experience from one of these upstarts, in contrast to the consistently ideal service we get from city-blessed operators. Or something.
That's fair, you're inclined to downvote if you feel it's right. Only John knows if he's innocent and unless Belize has some smoking gun they're either going to manipulate evidence to convict him or he'll get a fine and walk free. As far as I am aware they've said they only want to talk to John, he's not charged with anything he's merely a suspect who won't get a fair trial. The aspersions on the legal system are somewhat warranted, Belize doesn't have a glowing reputation when it comes to a fair justice system. Here's a story from 7 News Belize from 2011 that points this out: http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=20213

As for the photo looking fake, I'm not the first to notice the image looks a little unbelievable. Look at the contrast on his skin; tricky shadows from lighting interference or something else at play? The photo looks like it was taken using a 0.8 megapixel webcam on a laptop from 1999.

And fair enough about the EXIF data, however I find it hard to believe that a "security expert" like John McAfee would make such an amateur mistake like letting an image with location identifying data be put up online. John obviously needs some psychiatric help, the dude is obviously deteriorating if you read his posts they're sounding more and more like ramblings of someone with an unravelling mind.
Ask HN: What are the current market rates for mobile developers in?
eBay makes money off the listing fees. They don't care whether you get your item or not.
That's how I read it initially. Letters didn't match up perfectly, but with the weird, shorter name, I didn't give it much thought.
Prepare to be awed:

> An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news. He drew his data from a Canadian organization—the Inventor’s Assistance Program—which
collects a small fee to provide inventors with an objective assessment of the commercial prospects of their idea. The evaluations rely on careful ratings of each invention on 37 criteria, including need for the product, cost of production, and estimated trend of demand. The analysts summarize their ratings by a letter grade, where D and E predict failure—a prediction made for over 70% of the inventions they review. The forecasts of failure are remarkably accurate: only 5 of 411 projects that were given the lowest grade reached commercialization, and none was successful.

- Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

The full data table is available here: http://www.fptt-pftt.gc.ca/pdf/Astebro_Gerchak.pdf (page 36)
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد واياكس امستردام الثلاثاء 4/12/2012 بث مباشر
The public folders are going away
You are not a developer, you are a coke machine
agree!!!
As much as I disagree with some of Rupert Murdoch's politics;

Good on him for trying something new and failing. He is trying to sell his product and it failed.

And not only did it fail but he was straight enough to give us an idea of the costs and pitfalls involved in trying to run something like this. I wish others were as straight up with outlining their failures so we can all learn from them.
That isn't a conservative estimate. I worked for a news organization with a staff of about 30. Our budget was around $4.5 million, and we were pretty light on the (expensive) software side. That's also not accounting for profit, which is typically why people do these things.
For example when you buy e-books through some web store, you don't expect all of them to be free, you pay and get your PDF/ePUB or whatever. So it's not an entirely foreign concept for the web.

And comparison with regional physical newspaper distribution is not valid, since physical media is limited with physical space. Digital media is not - it can easily be distributed anywhere the network can reach, as far as publisher put just minimal effort to publish it in accessible form. So there is for sure nothing smart in limiting the distribution media to one isolated platform.
Show HN: simple web utility for converting html to image
Predicting failure is easy. Predicting success is hard. Your quote is only about the easy part.
AIR is still a convenient way to create cross-platform desktop apps as well. I've been trying various HTML platforms I can find and haven't found an alternative that I think works as well. It's a shame that the developer community has shrunk so much. It's rare to find people doing or posting about new things.
Capitalism in India: Ratan Tata’s Legacy
They call it 'secure' boot but it sounds like, practically speaking, this is a misrepresentation.

The way that they have set this up seems to be obviously designed for the main purpose of literally locking Linux out of the hardware.

So I expect to hear about an anti-trust law suit against Microsoft (and possibly a number of hardware manufacturers).
It's clearly cardboard. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I know there are different definitions of pivoting going around, so much so that it has essentially lost its meaning. But I just wanted to point out that most lean startup definitions of pivot I have read involve the overall vision remaining consistent. That sounds a lot like what you've been doing, although your pivots are dictated primarily by what you want, and lean startup pivots would be dictated primarily by previous experimentation. Put another way, your pivots are more offensive in nature (i.e. charging toward the goal) and lean startup pivots are more defensive in nature (i.e. mitigating risk when an initial charge doesn't pan out).

EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.
Here's substantiation of this history:

http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf

Besides Gauss, many others including Runge (yes, that Runge) and Burkhardt (yes, the one on Einstein's committee) independently discovered the FFT well before the 1950s. Like so much of Gauss's work, his work on the FFT was unpublished during his lifetime.

Probably it was the conjunction of the algorithm and the emerging power of the digital computer that caused the Cooley-Tukey paper to take off at that historical moment.
Shouldn't the title be "WiFi strength visualized" instead of invisible signals caught on Camera?

Its a cool visualization nonetheless, but the title is a little misleading.
Yes, I actually saw it a while back as well. Still cool though!
Stop telling us how much everything sucks
Even shorter TL;DR: Some news article claimed that launching a magazine only for Apple's iPad is not a good idea. Gruber comes to Apple's rescue and explains how it's The Daily's own fault if they failed.
>The Daily’s failure had nothing to do with it being iPad-only and everything to do with the fact that it just plain stunk.

iPad only?

http://learn.thedaily.com/android/

http://learn.thedaily.com/kindle-fire/

http://learn.thedaily.com/iphone/
>They focus on the follow-on startups and think "because so-and-so did it, I can too!" instead of actually looking at the problem and trying to understand it. They appear to be startups for startups sake.

I saw this mentality when I went to a Mountain View meetup (for a semi-related hobbyist group). One young woman there was a nurse (or related medical professional) and announced that she wanted to get involved in a startup, and could someone point her in the right direction. Immediately a group member asked her what kind of start up and she looked completely surprised by the question and said "something in medicine ... front ... end?"

I've also gone to a Startup Weekend where something like 95% of the ideas were things I had literally thought of myself already but dismissed long ago because of obvious problems, or that the proposers couldn't answer the most basic questions about. When it came time to cast our three votes, one of mine was basically to say "not really exited by this, but ahead of virtually everyone here".
"describe" is a nice idea. Just knowing the range, the mean, and the second moment can be helpful.
HipHop VM on EC2 – “could not allocate 1210089471 bytes for translation cache”
No, but the tone and ensuing vitriol does. I'd hasten to add that this happen with other manufacturers with startling regularity too. I've been given the run around by HP on a similar spec'ed and similarly priced month old EliteBook, that is faulty to point of unsuitability for any practical use. This is replacing a Thinkpad whose screen came away from it hinges after less than 6 months use. Had I written a scathing blog post about either and linked to it here, I doubt that it would have even raised a comment, let alone a single up-vote. And rightly so because just like the OP, it's ANECDOTAL.
Argh, "blue LEDs" is a trigger phrase for me.

BLINK... BLINK... BLINK...

The only thing more satisfying than a duct-taping or LED-ectomy is the idea of finding the designer and "re-educating" them... in a deep, dark pit, lit only by blinking, ultra bright LEDS.
ReelSurfer (YC S12) is hiring a lead designer
ReelSurfer is a free, online service that lets anyone cut short clips from any video on the web and combine them into reels. We are off to a great start, recently closed a 880k seed round and have awesome brands like Reuters, Counting Crows, Sugar Inc, TED, etc. using ReelSurfer to make their videos more social.

We are looking for a lead designer to help us refine our user experience.

Contact us if you have a clean aesthetic with a good sense for designing around the technical constraints of the web and mobile apps.

We want to see:

- Previous design projects: what were the challenges? How did you overcome them? What was the result?
- Your portfolio (links please)
- Your thoughts on the online video market now and moving forward

Location:
We are based in Palo Alto but will consider remote work.

Requirements:
You must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

We offer: competitive salary, stock options, health insurance

Application Process:

Please send cover letters / resumes to jobs@reelsurfer.com.

Keep applications brief; we want small resumes with relevant experience and lots of links. Short, super-personalized cover letters are encouraged.
I didn't claim I could. Take your trolling elsewhere.
Markets (and decisions in general) are hugely influenced by emotions. We are far far away from having anything scientific of much practical importance in these areas. Anyone deluding oneself with an idea of a rational market is well, delusional.
I'd like to see an even simpler solution to this problem, to better target the aging market. Rather than an App and 'radar', have a base unit and give the pad a noise / ringtone. Many portable handset phones have this solution - push a button on the base and the handset under the couch cushion beeps.

The central paradox of losing your glasses is that if you need glasses you can't see well enough to find them.
Yep, my bad, I didn't notice you were sucking the site up and hosting it yourself, I thought you found a crafty way to service dropbox through the OS over the users local port. My mistake.

Great idea and good luck.
Yes, please stay in California.
Have you seen Bravo's reality show 'Startups of Silicon Valley'? You'll want to cry.
They also get 55% on success for A-rated companies, which is also pretty good. It's not quite 60%, but it's very close, and considering how much above 60% they get on predicting failures, I think that shows a fairly high accuracy of prediction.
Good ideas and bad ideas
I'm pretty sure the speakers were still there when we left.
When null is not enough: an option type for C#
It doesn't matter if it's just hysteria as long as the media frenzy does happen. Voter and societal outrage rarely follows logic.
Finally, MapFragment for Android
The question in your example for ChilledLime is completely appropriate on Quora. There's nothing preventing a question from soliciting personal viewpoints.
It seems that for every post I read about someone's awesome project there are 5-6 people saying "Your idea sucks, why'd you waste your time"

Guys, do yourself a favor and don't post these comments. You're not sharing any profound insights, you're just compensating for some insecurity you have.

In OP's case, I don't especially think he cares whether you thought his idea was the next Google. I base this on the fact that: A.) The site is already mature and B.) title says "my side project for over a year" -- so like, 1 year later, your negative comment is going to change his mind? Yeah, I doubt it.

If you put a year of effort into a nice webapp like OPs, you will have users, and people will enjoy your service. Also, this site is very impressive, and makes a good portfolio piece for sure.

I don't know if anyone is maybe getting the wrong idea. Personally, I don't click Show HN and then pretend to be PG interviewing the guy for a seed round. I click Show HN's to see cool stuff.

If you like it, then try it, use it, whatever. But if you don't have anything constructive to say, then you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.
Natalie Jeremijenko made the one at PARC in 1995 as an artist in residence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jeremijenko#Live_Wire_....