skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've missed my favourite: Tagging groceries for automated billing.

I'm going to love walking out of a store without needing to wait in line for a cashier first.
The broad answer I'd surmise is boredom.

The solution: make it as fun as Call of Duty or Counter-Strike.

Problem: How do you make a website as fun as killing virtual terrorists? ... outside of having a website that let's you kill virtual terrorists.
I'm 118. I refuse to click the 60 and over category as those young whippersnappers are beneath me.
I am primarily a test automation engineer, but I have done some HTML/CSS work in the past. (For example, http://www.calliopetalent.com I did some updates for, adding some javascript, tables redesign, etc. to an old site originally built in the late 90's - personal references from there available on request.) Shoot me an email if you want to discuss further offline - FrankErdman2000@yahoo.com. I work full time but can squeeze some contract stuff in as well. :-)
Optimism, it seems, is in the genes
Caps Lock makes a great esc key...
I mentioned the same point but it isnt really the most important part of the site, obviously a number of people will be looking for firefox etc so it should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com

but this is mozilla.org, its about the community and the developers, .com is about the products
Acmeprints.com or brandxstore.com
I think you're missing two key points about YCombinator:

- YCombinator doesn't make you give the money back if your thing doesn't take off.

- YCombinator's isn't really giving you money. They're giving you influence and contacts. That's *huge* in this industry. The money is not really a factor.

All your program seems to offer would be a loan with a bad interest rate. As others in this thread have noted, that sounds like a bad investment from both sides.

Now if you could come up with something that actually modeled what YC does, but for individuals instead of companies, then that might be a good idea. "Here's 20k and a pile of help. Knock yourself out, but we get 6% of anything big that you do".
Aussie startups take on Manhattan
Www.sm-alexa.com
OWK 2009

Da ich 2008 so große Nachfrage hatte zum OWK. Deshalb biete ich auch im Jahr 2009 noch vor dem Sommerurlaub eine erneute Chance mich zu begleiten. Anmeldungen für 2009 an: info@sm-alexa.com

------------------

Since 2008, I had so much demand for OWK. Therefore, I offer even in 2009 before the summer vacation a renewed chance to accompany me. Registrations for 2009 to: info@sm-alexa.com
Agreed. It makes me wonder who he is lying to -- perhaps investors? Otherwise, why would there be any need to lie in the first place.

Plus, you can decline without being rude. For example, a lot of startups just arent set up to manage sales calls or leads, and to do so too early in your development might be more problematic than its worth trying. Especially, if you realistically expect the target to be only a mediocre one now, but a great one later. In this situation, and provided you can tell the person about your current development/business status, just thank them and let them know you are waiting for the right time.

Alternatively, you can always be vague without lying. "Thanks, I'll look into this". That doesnt imply any action, and it isnt deceitful either.
Like you, I'm worried about building something on a proprietary protocol. One company having control means they can arbitrarily deny you access if they don't want competition on a particular feature set, for example. Having said that, it hasn't stopped people building lots of Facebook and iPhone apps...

For what it's worth, I have a service that archives people's tweets and lets them export to CSV (for reference/searching/stats, whatever). I plan to make a little bit of money off it generating nicely-formatted PDFs of tweets and pushing them through to lulu.com to be sold as paperbacks - a lot of people seem keen on the idea. We'll see how it goes.
Enumerating a context-free language; introducing the Omega monad
They are not inherently bad. It's just a bad idea to have a header graphic take up half of the screen, pushing most of the content below the fold...
..."outside of having a website that let's you kill virtual terrorists"

Somwhere, someone gets a facebook developer account and and opens up vim.

You can make pretty much anything game-like: http://startup2startup.com/2009/01/09/jan29-amyjokim-shuffle...
And when you want to go against those 10 uses and any other possible uses...

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/static/r/f/i/RFID-Zapper...
A Scala Tutorial for Java Programmers [pdf]
>Straight forward question and I would like the opinion of HN: Can you build a successful product/service based on Twitter?

Absolutely, look at Summize (now Twitter Search) and Friendfeed who has a large amount of data in the form of Tweets.

You also have the clients, eg Twhirl (purchased by Loic Le Meur) and Tweetdeck which is another format you could follow. I'm sure some iPhone apps that focus on Twitter do very well for themselves too.

There is still plenty of opportunity out there. I had an idea for something that wasn't a part of the API last year (I emailed Alex asking if it was due anytime and he said it was on the list). I just checked the API now and it seems like its there, so I may give it a go soon.

Honestly though, I'd say start with small ambitions on scalable infrastructure (eg AWS) and grow from there. You'll know if you hit a chord as stuff spreads through Twitter like wildfire.

In fact, given this trait of Twitter, I'd suggest its a perfect protocol to build/iterate upon as you get almost instant feedback on whether you're going the right way.
Wow. This really brings back the Blake Ross interview from Founders at Work, where he was talking about how the Mozilla developers and designers just plain didn't understand Real People. His descriptions of the crazy design ideas those guys were coming up with read like they were critiquing the designs in this article. It's actually spooky.

The funny thing is, this was the reason that FireFox forked from Mozilla in the first place, and the reason why it became popular with regular people. Now it's back as the main branch of Mozilla, and it looks like the Crazy Communist Dinosaur team is back at the helm.

It's fascinating to watch.
Have we given up too quickly on non-overlapping window GUIs?
Given the success of Exposé, perhaps we have given up too early on non-overlapping window GUIs?

For example, suppose you combine the automatic layout of Exposé with different zoom levels and win 7's dock. Could that provide something workable that would do away with overlapping windows?

You could provide Exposé on a per app level as well. Just click the app's icon and you will see all its open windows all on the screen at once with no overlap.

If you want to see a certain subset of windows on the screen at once, just click on all of those in the subset to zoom in to only those windows, again with no overlap.
Yes, but I would hate to be the guy forced to tag all the oranges. or steaks. or heads of lettuce.

Obviously, I'm being a little facetious. I love the idea of walking in and out on credit (although the privacy implications bother me), but I still havent figured out a way that they can do fresh produce without completely revamping how it is sold. I suppose you could go to an honor system where people bag and then print label/rfit sticker.
I generally agree or fail to disagree with most of your post, but on the particular topic of progressive taxation, it's not fair to simply dismiss it as "10 wolves and a sheep": marginal utility is at play.

With all goods, the more of it you have, the less valuable it is. Individuals allocate goods to satisfy their most critical needs first. Ipso facto, the first unit of the good is worth the most, the second unit less so, and so on until the final unit is worth the least.

And money is simply a good, more fungible but otherwise no different than any other. The greatest utility of money is achieved by providing the necessities of life: food, drinking water, shelter. The next greatest utility is achieved by providing the basic comforts of life: showering water, clean laundry, furniture. After that comes longer-term goals, and so on (roughly mirroring Maslow's hierarchy of needs).

Now imagine two people, A and B, who earn $20,000/year and $80,000/year respectively. It's more unethical to take $200 from A than it is to take $800 from B. Why? While taking money from either one should be minimized (or preferably eliminated), in all likelihood A's $200 was going to meet a more critical need than B's $800.

As an argument ad absurdum, imagine that instead of taking away a flat percentage (1% of annual income for both), a flat absolute amount were taken instead ($500). The total amount taken would be the same, but now it would be evenly divided among both A and B, regardless of income. This would be the most fair arrangement of all, would it not? If a progressive tax is less fair than a flat percentage tax, then surely a flat percentage tax is less fair than a flat absolute tax. The flat percentage tax is still "punishing" B for making more money than A, when instead it "should" treat them equally and not care what their incomes are.

Clearly, though, this line of thinking is absurd, because A will be harmed disproportionately. Whereas taking $200 from A might prevent A from paying the electric bill, taking $500 from A might instead prevent A from paying the rent. The result is that, relative to the flat percentage tax, A has lost the fulfillment of a more critical need, while B has gained the fulfillment of a more minor need.
Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?
It sounds like you're talking about tiling windows managers.

http://awesome.naquadah.org/
http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/
http://xmonad.org/

or am I just confused?
Golly - more teenagers than 40+ (as of 7:30 PDT).
Gapminder.org - For a fact based world view.
Why allow window overlap at all in mac/win?
I run Eclipse, format to 120 char line wrap, and spend most of my time with eclipse showing three columns: project/file navigator - main code window - class outline and task list. So I LOVE having a widescreen laptop. Makes me much more productive.
Exposé has an "application windows" mode. Aside from the LRU bit, this sounds a lot like what you're after...
Absolutely not!

Social networks might be the new instant messenger. Email is a service that interoperates between networks that almost everyone has. Social networks, like many instant messenger networks, are services that are closed to those who haven't signed up with a specific service and try to corner the market through exclusion.
Do they not understand the irony of making website mockups for a browser vendor solely as giant images in Photoshop?
s/Mozilla/Mozilla's website/

Not as advertised.
It's RDF all over again.

I wonder what's going to happen when you try to have actually dense data. I can't wait to download a 40gb fMRI file in RDF or whatever.
This is one reason why learning either vi or emacs key mappings and then using those in your IDE of choice is a vital skill. With these under your belt, your hands should just about never have to leave the home row on the keyboard and you can forget about where the freakin Home key is.
Actually, look at what you're saying. When did I mention anything about race? I am saying that I don't think this would work on a massive scale because it would destabilize ecosystems, but when used in smaller areas that wouldn't be a risk.

This isn't 4chan.
This is bizarre. He's naming it after... another company's building?

I didn't understand it until the article explained it. And I really ought to have gotten it.

Definitely trying to hard.
No sane person would use a fullscreen laptop, unless perhaps their ONLY task was programming. Even then, it makes more sense to me to have my vim window take up half the screen and something else relevant, say a browser, take up the other half. Fullscreen is dead, please don't try to bring it back.
The Ghost of a Codebase Past
And how is this news?
Looks like an ad to me...
About a week of planning/writing and 2 weeks of recording screencasts ... all side/extra time, though
Way before Harry Potter, there was Polgara the Sorceress and her mother Poledra. While both of them could be said to have played second fiddle to the preeminent Belgarath, there was no doubt that their power was of the same nature as that of his. There was also Sephrenia and her goddess Aphrael, but then I guess David Eddings wasn't as popular as J.K. Rowling is.
Software Testing - Off the Trails
hmm.. Can you see anyone else's name on their though? I see my name on Traditional - but the other 2 spots on that are blank - and all 3 spots on Time Attack and Garbage are saying "Empty"
What would be really informative is a graph of the historical price per memory size for both spinning and solid-state harddrives... anyone come across anything like that?
More nuanced, video featuring Dr Carol Craig

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/video/c/confidenceandselfesteem...
Plymouth web design 
Plymouth Web Design from Plymouth Web Designers. Graphic, Brochure, Site Optimisation for Exeter, Torquay, Devon, Cornwall.
i've had success with designoutpost.com
I ran into a couple of the guys from AT&T here. They said that they didn't anticipate how many iPhones would be at the conference.

They showed me the emails they sent back and forth with John Donovan (AT&T CTO) about the issue, and said they worked like mad to increase capacity.

(BTW, according to the sig files in his emails, looks like John Donovan is on an iPhone.)
The most interesting part of this for me is watching Hans Rosling walk through a lot of the data. I first saw it as a TED talk, but you can watch them at the gapminder website:

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/
Wow. I'm pretty underwhelmed by these designs.

IMO all the concepts are giving too much emphasis on big slick graphics and too little on content. I was still left asking "what's your point?" and "am I on a band's website?"

I like that in the current design the focus is on the products. I wish they'd maintain that and use the emphasis on products as the starting point for the redesign.

More people care about Mozilla's products than the idea of open-source.
>it should be easy for them to go to the right site: mozilla.com

Theoretically, yeah. But see, a lot of people know mozilla is a non-profit. And thus, must automatically type mozilla.org instead of .com. IMO the two should show the same site.

Of course they must have more solid data and hopefully they are using it to make their decisions.
I will go a step further and say the people who think git should "scale" are wrong. The reason being that there are real tradeoffs that would need to be made. The vast majority of software projects should not be forced to use an inferior SCM just so that the few really large projects can be supported.

It's unfortunate that those people are forced to use Perforce... there's definitely a need for a "scalable" SCM, but git should not be it.
what hosted solution do u suggest for digital products? and what's your email id?
Have you considered filtering Twitter posts to add more content to your site? And what about votes for each of the posts?

Your site looks like a great alternative news source but I found it too hard to find useful information relating to specific geographic locations (the map feature didn't work for me.)

A less cluttered UI would also be great. (Eg Alltop.com)
Because some people really like it. I always feel claustrophobic in tiling window managers, for example.

There is a significant geek population that likes tiling WMs. More power to 'em. But I think the general public probably like the freedom to overlap windows as they see fit.
how many times does it need to be said? there is no spam on twitter. you just unfollow. (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/02/09/a_twitter_d...)
This is a point worth making louder, I think. If you don't like your keyboard, change it! The symbols on the keycaps are only suggestions, not mandates.

Usually, the best counterargument against this point is that you want to be able to use anybody's keyboard, and I will concede in practice that can be an issue. But when it comes to the outer bit of a laptop keyboard, you've already lost that point anyhow, since it seems as if no two laptops are the same. (It's not true, of course, but it seems that way.) So, go nuts on the remapping.

The downside there is that there may not be an acceptable remapping. If you don't like the PgUp/PgDn on the side, as shown in the picture, there may not be anything you'd like. I had a laptop with that layout and truthfully I preferred it to the one I have now, which has the standard layout of Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn, but has them with half-height keys in the upper right. I preferred the full-sized PgUp and PgDn keys on the side. Give the default layout a chance, you might be surprised.
Is there a usability advantage to overlapping windows?
Hi Steve, have you met Steve?
Why does it not surprise me that Britain wants to tag prisoners?
Unfollow doesn't help with @reply and search/hashtag spam.
Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on whether Twitter can save the news
The chips could be inserted automatically by machine when the product is being assembled at the manufacturers expense. I could see Home Depot or a similar big box company, who have quite a bit of influence over manufacturers, making that a requirement.

The cost might be a trade-off if customer satisfaction is boosted.

Although that might be impractical for grocery stores or smaller items (small fruit, nails, etc).
Diet without Hungry
Gapminder is going to be very painful to watch when the consequences of the current economic crisis start to be reflected in the data.
His ideas for the future of the web are vague at best, but the bottom line: the internet is only at its infancy.

In 10 years from now, the use cases and abilities of the internet are likely to be drastically different. His talk is just hinting at the ideas of whats yet to come.
How to Acquire an Elite College Education for Less Than $7000
It is also worth noting that Equal Rites was published 1-2 years after this speech. Was Prachett trying to gauge the reaction to his satire by explicitly stating it?
Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away
One of the biggest problems is teachers giving non-constructive criticism to students.

Back in elementary school, I remember a teacher telling me how bad I was in history, but in only a harsh manner. What happened to teachers being able to "make friends and influence people" while still being able to get a point across?
Writing Math on the Web
well I'm closer to 26 than 25 (2 more months) but I'm in denial over it...
And I want an ARM-based Apple laptop (for the OS) with a dedicated vector processor for all of that glorious parallel stuff, with no spinning anything (SSD implied), a running time on the order of days, a decent angles on the screen, etc.

I am prepared to pay the price.

Where's my laptop? Huh?

Same place my screen was for two years -- nowhere to be found. All I wanted was a 22'' wide IPS panel with a decent resolution and no bells.

We're a weird bunch. And no one manufacturer got our back with all of our weird requirements. Whining won't help.

Something is fundamentally broken with the free market model of doing business, that's what I think.
We had exactly the same problem several years ago. We had lots of bats in our attic of our vacation cottage. In an effort to lock them out, we effectively locked them in, and they started coming in to the house through openings from the attic to the main part of the house.
When did I mention anything about race?

When you mentioned malaria. Its a disease that white people don't get, largely because we eliminated it in our countries prior to getting religion on that environmentalism thing. After that, we collectively decided that while our kids were worth cracking a few eggs to make an omlette, African kids were not.

Take a look at this graph here, particularly the one in the top left corner:

http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/images/graphs/us_malaria_old_map....

That shaded land mass, 60% of the continental US? That used to be Malaria Country. In 2009, there isn't a spec of the US that is Malaria Country. The reason: we bombed the shit out of the mosquitoes, pure and simple, and we kept doing it until malaria wasn't a problem anymore. If there was a malaria flareup in a US suburb this year, we would do a bit of obligatory handwriting and then promptly bomb the shit out of it.

(You think we'd make white people put up with expensive, ineffective countermeasures like treated crib nets? I'd like to hear that planning meeting: "Well, we've run the numbers, and have decided that by spending a few million on bed nets, crib nets, and outdoor abatement programs, only about five of your kids, plus or minus three or so, will die in the next year due to malaria in our township. Remember to be really conscientious about putting up your nets -- not that they're going to save everyone, because they can't, but remembering the nets every night gives your child the maximum chance of survival until the school year starts. Why don't we just bomb the shit out of the bugs, you ask? Oh, well, we considered doing that but are concerned the local birdwatchers will be upset.")

Over a million African children died last year of malaria. Five hundred million people caught the disease. But when it is Africans dying, and not us, then we get all sorts of picky about how much ecological damage is being done.

(Incidentally, not much. But given the choice between 1 million Africans a year and Very Bad Environmental Things that presumably happened in the US between 1880 and 1950 when we were spraying DDT like it was going out of style, I think we have a moral imperative to choose Very Bad Environmental Things.)
Google acquired Trendalyzer (the flash-based dynamic graph visualization tool) from the Gapminder Foundation back in 2007. It will be interesting to see what Google will do with this technology. Perhaps a time-based animated Google Analytics with stats playback on many metrics,A/B tests axis. That would be neat to see the user flow on your website! Or simply for a flashier Google trends.
I replied to this on my blog:

http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/mar/15/twitter-spam/

A basic outline of my arguments:

Hypertweeting/Notification Overload: Unfollow

Hashtag spam: Same as real spam problem, just need selective aggregators that only follow certain people, or some sort of (bayesian?) filtering.

@reply spam: True, but could be solved by clients, and the rate limiting on the api means that you have a low chance of being spammed this way. Plus it's really easy to systematically catch.
Apple sued over ‘exploding’ iPod
Spam isn't Twitter's problem.
My immediate response is that yes, there is, because it preserves the physical feeling that I have. That is to say, my windows go where I want them to go. That's control that I like.

The other response is that there is because you can hide things you aren't using behind other windows. Right now, the 4 windows I have open wouldn't all fit on a single screen without overlapping.