skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"niche" is simply shorthand for "niche market" IMO [1]. So it very much is a market and not a demographic. Without delving into a battle of semantics, I don't think either of these posts referred to a demographic of "people who are employed as dog walkers" ... I read them as the niche market of "people who own dog walking businesses."

I cannot answer all those questions about dog walking business owners because I am not one nor do I have insider knowledge about that business.

>> Do they care about being better dog walkers, saving time or money?

I'll go out on a limb here and say "YES", if you own a dog walking business, you care about saving time or money (or making more money).

That being said, I can answer all those questions about other niches (photographers, hackers, restaurant owners, churches, etc.) because I either am one or know that market. So, that gives me a pretty good starting point for identifying needs, doing deeper research, and then creating a product that meets those needs and that niche market is willing to pay for.

That is, in my opinion, what both posts were saying (in different ways).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market
Facebook hiring monetization principle
I like Twitter's roof!
The winner/leader has their logo shown above the team that's trailing, although I will add some highlighting of the final score.
Its funny they do this after the IPO.
Good time to recall that up until 2012, it was legal for Congressmen to trade stocks based on inside information they received carrying out their duties.
Show HN: NoChan, Realtime Board in node.js
Windows 8: The rumours that just weren’t true
What Microsoft's IE and North Korea Have in Common
You seem to have been around (here at least) for a while... is there a story here, or are you just cutting off your nose to spite your face?

EDIT: Removed leading "Honestly?". Am serious if an experience led to this.
I don't know about you, but there was a limit to how how bad my parents could make me feel through non-abusive consequences. There was always an emotional weighing of the impulse to misbehave versus the punishment that would follow. As with most children, the deprivation of privileges my parents could inflict on me was generally severe enough to outweigh the emotions that drove me misbehave, but when a kid's impulses are too strong, I imagine his feelings of rage and defiance can outweigh any non-abusive punishment a his parents can inflict. These days such a kid is destined for an institution, even though a few beatings might make him a functional member of society.

That said, I think it's for the best that physical abuse is criminalized, because I don't think human beings can be trusted to use it judiciously. Like you pointed out, when accepted, it is used inappropriately and destructively much more often than it is used appropriately (hey, just like guns.) However, one consequence of giving up corporal punishment is that some (very small) subset of kids will be deprived of punishment that could have set them on a better course, and in the end society will resort to violence to control them, violence carried out lawfully via the justice system.
Can someone paste the content of this article elsewhere? *.torproject.org is blocked as proxy avoidance where I work.
Dedicated server from various vendors are probably so much cheaper than the GAE or AWS. We should have just started with AWS and then stayed on AWS or transfer to one of these dedicated server since our traffic was pretty steady. Just a suggestions for others who are looking into this. Don't build your business around google!
Thank you. The clarity of your explanation has inspired me to try this.
Learning Should Be Your Top 2013 New Year’s Resolution
As we get closer to the New Year, the ritual of making resolutions begins and we all flock to the usual patterns: we want to to eat healthier, work out more, get promoted, or spend more time with our kids and family. These are with no doubt worthwhile goals, but I’d like to pose an important challenge for founders: Make learning and development your key resolution in 2013.
Go homeschoolers! I love it (coming from someone who was homeschooled for most of K-12.)
Because if you push the envelope and make a phone that's substantially more advanced than the competition, you drive demand for your components since the competition needs them to make a competitive phone.
Service. Most of the details are withheld for privacy reasons, but what worked for one person with severe clinical depression - to the extent that she lived in the government mental hospital on constant suicide watch - could work for you also. She volunteered to help (after putting it off for years), and her attitude and depression vanished over a short period of time. This is one person's tale, and may not work for you.
Clickable Links
Online SMS Android App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fauzism.on...

Online SMS Website http://sms.fauzism.com

App Code on Github https://github.com/spicavigo/onlinesms_android

Server Code on Github https://github.com/spicavigo/onlinesms_server

First blog post http://fauzism.com/post/37587975976/once-upon-a-saturday

Second blog post http://fauzism.com/post/38055171351/life-of-fy
Hacking Design: Using HTML and CSS instead of Photoshop
I'm glad you posted this for clarification, but I thought your original thread was fairly clear (hopefully my reply there made sense too).

FWIW, I don't think it was wrong to post that question here. You just never know what kind of response questions like that will get.

Also, I apologize for not adding more ideas (been traveling). Drop me an email and I can share more.
Does no one remember when iOS had a zero day exploit which allowed root access when visiting a site with a PDF using a certain font? The one that took Apple five months to fix?
Probably a licensing program that benefits those who build only Windows devices. There are very clever ways to do it and, I'm sure, Microsoft has clever lawyers.
Statistics - referral spam
I have a website efneo.com and I see that I have lots of visits from http://news.ycombinator.com/ domain. Are they real? 5000 in a day? I doubt it; it seems to be rather created by a bot. Can you explain it? If this is Your bot making my statistics false, than please change the app behaviour.
That's a little subtle if you don't know to look for it. I'm on a iPhone, though. I don't know if there's a desktop version where it's more obvious.
As much as we techies would like it, there isn't a mass market for stock Android devices. Most people don't care.
The email notification would be a bit of an antifeature, since it would enable flamewars.
Why the downvote? The up/down or a 0-10 scale is a UX choice in the voting mechanism, but I am not sure how that is a major differentiator.

Feedback: Since your intention is to recommend relevant items you might want to optimize the referrer experience. It took a lot of clicks to go selecting a list to accessing the relevant content. E.g it took me 3 clicks to find http://www.listnerd.com/item/savant-1, and then I gave up on finding the artists music or a link to it on that page. On bagcheck it takes 1 click to access the relevant referral link.
If you're asking about the backend (and how the summaries are generated), probably not, at least for now.
The frontend, on the other hand, doesn't have much to it.
Obviously, if you want to live as a simple cog there's no one stopping you. :)
They can't live without Microsoft. Windows machines are 99% of their business.
You may do have a point there. :)
I don't have the bandwidth available, but I'm willing to ship a Raspberry Pi to someone who does.

Someone should start the TorPiDo project :P
[fun] cats = cat : cats
Other than the military and the police, there aren't a lot of people who have lots of money to spend on "continuous surveillance".
Evening School of Erlang - San Francisco January 2013
What is it?
The Evening School of Erlang is a series of Erlang classes designed to bring together developers interested in programming in Erlang as well as making a career switch to Erlang along with companies who are looking to recruit bright developers and architects all across the U.S.<p>How does it work?
The Evening School of Erlang consists of evening classes which are conducted twice a week over a four week period. The classes include exercises which allow participants to put the theory into practice and these are automatically tested and assessed using the Erlang e-learning feedback tool.
At the end of the four weeks, participants will be able to take the Erlang Foundation certification exam at no additional cost. This will validate to future employers their knowledge of the Erlang language. These courses are intended to be held in cities around the U.S. and Canada to cater to local people and will be conducted by local Erlang experts.<p>Topics:
-Introduction
-Basic Erlang
-Sequential Programming
-Concurrent Programming
-Process Design Patterns
-Process Error Handling
-Code Updating
-Records and Funs
-ETS tables
-Distributed Programming
-Advanced Constructs
-Ports and Sockets
-Style and Efficiency<p>Where are the courses?
The Evening School of Erlang is scheduled in NextSpace Union Square, San Francisco from the 8th of Jan’ 2013 to the 30th Jan’2013.
It will be scheduled in San Jose and Pasadena for mid Feb’ 2013 and Santa Monica for mid Mar’2013. Subsequently it will be rolled out to various cities across the US and Canada.

To register for the Evening School of Erlang, please visit, http://esoesf.eventbrite.com/
I had a 5" display Dell Streak and really liked it, actually. I didn't consider it that underpowered at all, as the article claims. It actually had a cell modem in it, which was rarer in tablets of the day, especially minis. It replaced my phone, and I don't like carrying a separate tablet, and I loved reading on the big screen.

The medium density class for what was high end phone resolution, though, did make software look bad on it often, however. Developers don't often test at that combination.

That said, you can't compare it to modern devices. It was the same size as a 7" display device would be today. There's a certain size above which you are out of the mainstream phone market and into the loss leading, lower numbers tablet market. It didn't have the huge marketing budget Samsung and Apple has either. Heck, marketing for it was even below Google Nexus levels, and I see signs for those around SF regularly.
Sure. But what would drive the sales of these devices?

They would be just another 'vanilla Android' in a sea of 'vanilla Androids'.
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. I suppose you're trying to refute the notion that computing is related to mathematics because of this one trivial and somewhat strange example you bring up, which I suppose is to mean that you think this is really the only thing in computer science that resembles mathematics. I would just say that that is pretty odd.
I think it was featured as an article on the front page, which would have driven a lot of traffic to your site (both from regular "real" visitors, and from scrapers etc.)

The original submission was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4926541 so you'd see that as the referer
A lot of parents (and employers) come up with consequences that are not really logically tied to behavior. Often, they just try to "punish", which fails with a lot of kids, or even backfires. My oldest son has (among other things) a high tolerance for physical pain (and, as an adult, a red beard, when red hair is a trait known to be tied to high pain threshold). He could be quite difficult as a child, both because he didn't much care when his risky behaviors hurt and spanking was pretty pointless. But when designed right, consequences did work. Punishment did not.
Yup. There has to be some sort of control in any system (even a few anarchists agree on that).

To further your/my/our point(s), you can read Bruce Schneier's latest "Crypto-Gram Newsletter" (https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1212.html). He rephrases the problem with a feudal/serf paradygm, which is quite appropriate imo.
So, this seems like a rediscovery of the need for DNS?

e: f,b.
Given that terrorists are very rare then the P(A|B) using your terminology (where A = terrorist and B= bad record) will be very low.
But for for a fixed P(A) and P(B) then the higher
the value there is for P(B|A) the higher the value of P(A|B) will be.
If you have an enornmous haystack to search it's more efficient to look first where you're most likely to find needles.
So you are postulating a world where more people compete for a fixed set of goods and services? Sounds like a Malthusian nightmare.

Of course, in this world price goes up but quantity remains flat (in gross terms, not per capita). Real GDP per capita drops even if inflation drives up nominal GDP per capita.
I thought that the recent sales of the Nexus {4,7,10} showed exactly the opposite. There is still the possibility that the supply of those devices has been short on purpose, but I haven't seen anything reliable to back that claim up.

Most people want Vanilla devices and we techies want everybody else to have Vanilla Android devices because it reduces the amount of fragmentation we have to deal with when building things. Additionally I have literally never seen OEM additions in mobile or desktop computing make something better for the end-user and everybody should just get over with it.
> The only not-regrettable outcome of that, for me, was that I learned that self-identifying as "INTJ" was a stupid thing to do.

Are you sure you're an INTJ? If so, why was it stupid?
This is a pet project I have been working on occasionally for quite some time.
It's actually a chat where users can share files in realtime: file stream is available for every users of a room as soon as the upload starts. This allow some cool features such as movie streaming!

nochan.fr is currently running on 3 medium servers (hope it will handle the load)

Sources can be found at: https://github.com/Tug/nochan

Feedback is appreciated :)
I think you are misreading the intent of my post. I was very clear about the fact that only a professional can help him. The extended questionnaire is rethorical. It is there to highlight the fact that a lot needs to be known before anyone can truly help him. I'm not sure where I told him to go have kids. I simply listed a few things that are known to be effective in changing one's focus away from potentially dark places.

With regards to seeing a new therapist. If this were my own son I'd take him to two or three. Just like there are lousy engineers there are lousy doctors. You never know.
Jonathan's Space Report (http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html) is an exhaustive accounting of human activity in space (manned or unmanned), with a focus on recent launches. Released every few weeks. Back issues run to 1989 and continue to the present day.

Emily Lakdawalla writes some very good explanations of space science for the Planetary Society - very accessible, but with more detail and intelligence (IMHO) than you get from other media outlets.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/
It is subtle, and I don't know how to improve on it other than highlighting, which involves changes I don't want to make with the site live on a Sunday afternoon.
> But then at least that should have been written on the page.

As of this comment,

#12 is I would use this language for a web project.
#14 is I know many other people who use this language.
#16 is I learned this language early in my career as a programmer.
#17 is This is a mainstream language.
Netflix gives up on streaming, doubles down on DVDs.
Are you dedicated to staying in Athens? Or are you just figuring that no one will be willing to pay for you to come to the US/UK/whereever. Because if it's the latter, I think you would be surprised.
Why do we need to remember that?
I can't offer any useful tips on motivating yourself for a personal project, but I have to say that your attention to detail on visual design is amazing!
> The spontaneous rise of the Ron Paul Revolution during the 2008 Presidential Election cycle signaled a renewed belief in the American values of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Yeah, except for the fact that basically no one voted for him.
Have you considered Google's Summer of Code? https://code.google.com/soc/
He shouldn't leave his current therapist, just look for a new one if the current one isn't helping. He should only leave once he has found someone else who can do a better job.
DNS is basically for resolving the hostnames. You may recall that it originally evolved from a file containing all the hostnames on the Internet that people downloaded periodically.

Resolution of service names is a different matter. The authors of the Internet have solved it in a cheap-and-ugly way by introducing well-known ports. Unfortunately, the problem wasn't solved in a systematic manner since.
The profits from Samsung mobile business are something like 20x those from their electronic component division.
does it work to do this in the morning after waking up?
It really feels like the product first anti-pattern. The first thing you should think about if you want to create a serious business is "Who is my market? What am I selling? Why would they want to buy it?". You don't have to have a boring answer to those questions, you just need an answer.
I don't follow your logic. If it is the components that are the key to making a superior phone, there would be demand for those components even if Samsung didn't make a competing phone with them, unless you are assuming that all of the other phone makers would overlook the opportunity to beat out their competitors by refusing to use components that would allow them to make superior phones.
There was an old dinosaur pc game from the '90s that has since open sourced. He started from there, but opened each audio file in some application that allowed him to modify each. Some needed truncating, others attenuation, increased amplitude, etc. It was fun watching him mess with the analog signals. There was also a hard limit of media total filesize.
What is the most scientifically sound, evidence-based conceptual framework for uncovering one's strengths and weaknesses? Is there anything at all with good science behind it?
(I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice.)

Depression is not one illness with one cause and one method of treatment.

Our knowledge of mental illness is pretty poor.

Since depression can be a fatal illness (and even when not fatal it can be debilitating and lead to awful life outcomes) we need to be careful when offering advice.

> The best medicine for depression is to imagine you were not depressed, think of what you would do, then do it. Even if it doesn't feel quite right, keep moving.

I say this as politely and gently as I can: this is terrible advice for many people. I'm not suggesting that people with depression should be cocooned and protected from everything; that's often harmful. But we need to remember that many people with depression have distorted thinking, and thus asking them to focus on what they would be like if they didn't have depression could cause them very great harm.

> Therapy can be helpful, but it can also be debilitating by causing you to identify with your depression.

I agree that some therapies are terrible. Non-specific counselling is usually awful and does nothing to help, and can make things worse. But some therapy really does work for some people, effectively curing them or giving them techniques to deal with the illness when it strikes.

Notably, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has good evidence for its effectiveness.

We're still muddling along with pharmacology - there are a raft of different SSRIs / SNRIs / NASAs / etc, and then tricyclics, and then MAOIs. There's some evidence of effectiveness, many people report remarkable changes. But still, we don't know how these meds work, and we don't know how to find better meds.

And some people will not find relief even with good therapy provided by skilled therapists, or with medication, and so they might try one of the more extreme treatments. ECT is still used. It's very different now from the portrayals in popular media (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is set in 1963) - people are sedated and it's used much less often. I've met a few people who've had it. Some of them loved it and welcomed it, and were keen for the treatment to continue. Others didn't like it, and opted out of further treatments.

If you have depression, and you find something that works for you, that's great. And it's great that you share that information with other people. But please put disclaimers on it. "This is something I tried. I think it worked for me." And please don't make declarations of efficacy unless you have decent research to back it up.
I've posted this here before, but a joke project I've been working on has seen some success with QR codes... it is a toilet based social network though...stalltalk.info.
Thanks.

I've shortlinked the apk at http://bit.ly/exynosfix to allow easier downloading on the phone itself.
I meant to clarify, he's taking the intermediate web development course through udacity.
Chrome extension for end-to-end email encryption
So why doesn't this exist yet? Obviously Google wouldn't "like" it because then they couldn't mine our email for determining which ads to show us ... but presumably they wouldn't block such a thing, or would they?

It's striking that for web browsing this was taken care of (essentially) eons ago, but for email (a much older system) an "it just works" or "comes built-in" solution doesn't exist yet... at least not for the masses.
Probably because the camera service was still running and has already opened the file before you change the permissions. Changing permissions doesn't affect existing file descriptors.
hahaha I think that was one of the first links I read on HN. That's even better now.
Except when I am offline for a minute, then I have to do some digging. Are you aware of this news.ycombinator.com/best though? I find it helpful
I'm with you on the 'some', I should have been more careful with the wording there.

Yes, there are indeed lots of smart people who find this crap abhorrent and who will work to resist it. But I don't think they're the majority. Not even close. Individuals such as Phil Zimmerman are making a real difference.

But money is a powerful motivator. Lots of people will do very stupid things when offered enough money. Governments print money. Nationalism is another such powerful motivator. Press the combined buttons of nationalism and piles of cash and a lot of people will start seeing things your way.

The NSA is currently the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, and that probably makes them the largest employer of mathematicians planet wide.

There are lots of counterparts of the NSA in other countries. And those mathematicians are not too upset about not being able to publish their results, so I'm thinking there is something to counterbalance that, such as abundant financial compensation.

For now this is an unbalanced situation.
Your site needs a 'Pleases & Sparkles' button.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155927/if-it-pleases-a...
Design, hardware features, reliability, customer service, branding, price. You know. Like every other industry.
When Using !important is The Right Choice
Is there a great advantage over standard shell commands, besides being in Ruby? For example, the following rule:

rule 'Trash old temporary files' do
dir('~/Outbox/*.tmp.*').each do |p|
trash(p) if 1.week.since?(modified_at(p))
end
end

can be replaced with:

#Trash old temporary files
find ~/Outbox/ -iname '*.tmp.*' -mtime +7 -exec mv {} ~/.Trash \;

The maid script may be more readable if you don't know 'find', but on the other hand, this has only one line.