skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're missing how clever this is. #skittles is the #1 trending topic on search.twitter.com

What is the value of being the #1 trending topic on twitter?
Will they sell more skittles because people read about it on twitter?
I somehow doubt it...

If you're at all plugged in, you can't get away from this.

About 99.6% of internet users beg to disagree (that's the percentage of users who don't have a twitter account). Now, as an exercise, try to extrapolate the total reach of this campaign in terms of real world sales.

I don't think it's earth-shattering, either, but what does that have to do with anything?

Well, when I posted my comment the thread was full of people praising this mashup like the second coming. I just wondered if I missed something essential, but apparently this is just a similar effect to the twitter phenomena. - Lots of buzz and little substance.
I thought these "very intelligent" Chinese students wanted to know how to start businesses. Then I read this line:

"How can I get that job? How can I get a high-paying job in investment banking now?"

How disappointing. It seems that these "very, very goal-directed" dudes are more interested in a cushy job at some shiny office than in doing new things, cool things.
I learned that college excels at helping people hook up with cofounders -- I hadn't thought of that is such clear terms before today (and I immediately stole the idea and commented with it!) Since I am in search of a cofounder, now I will begin thinking about using college as an avenue to do that. Not life changing, just yet, but it made a difference.

Others have pointed out learning things from the conversation, including the person who posted the article.

For you, perhaps, it seems like old hat and re-hash, and it has that faint whiff for me too, but every now and then a little glimmer of light shines through. That's why longer posts are usually better than short ones -- you're more likely to stumble on an area that nobody has thought about if you try to be thorough.

I know how you feel, though (I think). I get the same burnt-out feeling when I see yet another article on git, or piracy, or CSS vs non-CSS, or functional vs. imperative, etc.

Heck, if you think about it, there's a lot of topics where we're mostly just talking past each other. That's kind of my point: people get emotionally entangled with the weirdest stuff. Instead of trying to generically categorize it, I just accept it as a natural part of human interaction. If had a magic list of topics to avoid that would be nice, but unrealistic.
It's a matter of taste, but I think less money would be good for games and bad for films. Most of the movies I really like were at least somewhat expensive to make.
Wait a minute! Media disinformation campaign? So you are saying that there never existed a camp in Guantanamo Bay where the prisoners waited eight years without right to trial, placed in Cuba to avoid U.S. constitutional law? I've never used the word Nazi in an argument, so I won't start now, but it's really difficult.
I am selling online, and I am not even American, and I never been in America before!

Apply for Employr identification no., and then apply for PayPal Payments pro. It will cost you around $30/mo.

Also you can have it hosted on Yahoo! stores/ small business - which is invented by PG - former known as viaweb :D

I think this is a good, fast and reliable solution for you.
The sad state of Detroit: outlook falls with home prices
Ask HN: What's your homepage? 
It looks like Google is going to insist on adding more and more garbage to the once fantastic iGoogle. Since they are adding things that I can't easily get rid of, I'm in the market for a new home page.

What do you guys use for your homepage? (Even if the answer is your startup's web site, I'm interested!)
Evan Williams Predicts That “Normal People” Will Use Twitter In Five Years
You're focusing way too much on the concept of killing here. That's why I downvoted you. You said nothing useful, and attempted an over-the-top conceit to express yourself. As somebody who values content over outrage, and as a writer who thought your conceit was poorly-written, I downvoted you.

The thing is that the "mission statement" is wrong. This is indeed so confusing that you are unable to clearly state the _real_ problem and added value although it is "so incredibly evident".

You're talking in circles. Stop that. Nobody likes it. The mission statement isn't "wrong", it says exactly what its goal is.

Killing may be familiar to you, as well as down voting. Not in my place.

Your place? Hacker News? Your life?

Look. I can respect people who disagree with me. I can even respect people who mangle the English language with every statement they make. What you're saying is both garbled and wrong. State yourself clearly and I'll address the points you make.
Interesting, but why did the author restrict the discussion to PC games? I would expect to see some mention of Portal's interface, and of adventure games for the Wii.
I think movies are at the tail-end of the curve. Production costs are falling, but they still haven't fallen far enough that good movies can be made by lots of people.
Lower your burn, move to Detroit and buy a house for 2-3 months SF rent.
Do what I did - go to college, and spend every free minute working on your project. If you find college doesn't work for you, you'll have a great thing to rebound with.
My homepage is set to http://keyboardr.com/, but I rarely hit the button to go there; my browser starts with a blank page
Problem is, the houses are that cheap for good reason.
Now is a very ripe time for disruptive innovation in the e-learning space. This is especially true as the raw stuff of learning - think video lectures, wikis, forums - is increasingly accessible for free, while college tuition rates keep rising.

However, the key phrase there is "disruptive innovation". Perhaps you may be able to serve the lower end of the market, such as tutors and individual students, schools be damned. And once you do manage to get some traction, you're likely to have a lot more success down the road with institutions.

The preeminent scholar in the field of disruptive innovation has actually just published a book specifically about education:

http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation...

I've been reading it in the last few days and publishing some of my favorite passages to my blog:

http://bit.ly/mad82
Throwing away working code
But in Mail, the Trash button makes you confirm the deletion. You'd have to accidentally press the 'Trash' button, and then accidentally press the 'Delete Message' button too (which is bright red and a whole inch away from the Home button).
Hey dude, a hacker over here. Too bad about the hacker bailing on your hackhouse, are you having open hacking tryouts so I can hack your gibson before hacking my way into your heart? I'm hacker@hacksalot.hack; hack back at me if you want to get together & hack!

Happy Hacking!
As a TA forced to use such systems for course management, I agree that they are ugly and inefficient.

Unfortunately, I believe the leader in this market has sued a bunch of competitors for "patent-infringement."
My home page is set to http://www.sfu.ca/ -- my undergraduate university's website. It sounds crazy, but this actually turns out to be quite useful: I very rarely go to that website deliberately, but having it as my home page means that any interesting news is likely to catch my eye in the fraction of a second between opening the browser and going to whichever website I actually wanted to look at.
Android: Using And Overiding A Webkit View
Claim the sites you’ve worked on.
If you actually examine the legal issues in depth, it's way more complicated and nuanced that what you imply; that simplifies the problem to the point of falsehood. Something that the Obama administration has actually flat-out said (or "admitted", if you prefer), albeit not to anywhere near the media blitz of the accusations, when they said they need a year to look at the issues involved with closure, because it's not a simple, obvious problem after all.

As a for instance... why would "avoiding US constitutional law" matter when it doesn't cover the detainees anyhow, as the Constitution only really covers citizens? You might be able to spin an argument about penumbric emanations or build an ethical argument of some kind out of that, but you certainly aren't going to get a straightforward argument out of the actual text of the constitution. There's been a lot of very careless assumptions about what the US Constitution and the Geneva convention contain tossed around on this issue, and on the whole I've found the debate almost entirely disconnected from reality in these past years.

You are free to "not like it" or think it is immoral, but its actual illegality is way murkier than the disinformation campaign has conveyed, to the point that it may not be actually illegal at all. Moreover, the moral and ethical issues haven't gotten a fair hearing either as the conditions have been routinely grossly misrepresented, to the point that almost universally when somebody actually goes there and visits it they expressed surprised at the way it really was. I totally believe that there are those who would consider the reality immoral or unpleasant, but very few people are actually operating off of a realistic view of the problem.

The real takeaway is that the situation is complicated, and when somebody says "the situation is complicated" and you have a hard time resisting calling that person a Nazi... hello! Wake up! That's a sign you're running on propaganda, not rational thought.
Chinese Students: 'We like how you guys were making money, and profiting immensely without benefit to others, how did you do that?'

Wharton Profs: 'Yeah, we've found that does not work so well.. at least for the last few months. I guess if you do not want to provide value to others you could figure out a good way to steal.. that has worked before'

Chinese students, to each other: 'Thanks for nothing..'

Wharton Profs, to each other: 'They seem to have the notion that because all of our students are making huge iBanking bonuses, we can tell them how to make a fortune without delivering any kind of value. Surely they could not have learned that from us?'
My homepage is Netvibes.com straight to my feeds and hours of procastination...
I haven't seen this before. It's pretty cool (and fast!).
Nielsen's site certainly accomplishes its goal, but what the goal is, in my opinion, is more subtle and complex than simply the conveyance of information.

I would suggest that Nielsen's site, by virtue of the fact it is a site about usability, makes the reader question the decisions of Nielsen's site carefully. In turn, this promotes dialog on what effective design is.

Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch as I am no expert on usability, but I couldn't help noticing my mind wander and wonder at the title of his site, why is the 'use' in red? Why did he choose the "stickies" colors? Why in that order? And so on.
That's terrible. Those researchers should be able to get visas easily.

However, I disagree with the notion that we should solve this problem by just awarding more visas. Doesn't it strike you as strange (and genuinely horrible) that universities can't get visas while outsourcing companies are gobbling up these visas by the tens of thousands? Doesn't it strike you as strange that Microsoft claims it can't bring in super high paid developers because we've hit the visa cap, yet some of these visas have been going to firms that pay the "critical worker that couldn't be found in the US" $12/hr? (sorry, no cite on that, I heard it in an interview with Ron Hira, a professor of public policy... I'll try to dig it up).

The H1B lobby loves the example you gave, because they get to claim that the H1B detractors are "opposed to letting researchers into the US for innovative collaborations." Uh, no. We've taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million H1B workers into the US (the dept of labor doesn't keep exact numbers). Maybe one of these visas could have gone to the researcher, rather than some average dude who read the Oracle manual?

This program is in desperate need of a fix, no question about that. But to me, fixing it by just removing the cap, or setting an extremely high cap, is unacceptable. I don't need a fire hose to blow out my birthday candles.
Yep, thats the one. Thanks mixmax!
RCTiger.com: Real-time, Real-live Tank Warfare
congrats to the Twilio team -- fantastic progress!
Seems like a different spin on the ill-fated iwantsandy.com
Let us know if you need help. contact@slinkset.com
If your goal is to simply set up a merchant account, you don't need to register a corp/LLC. You can just go to your local city hall and obtain a DBA (doing business as). The DBA will allow you to open a bank account, which in turn will allow you to open a merchant account.

Long-term, I would advise to register an umbrella corp/LLC and obtain a DBA for each of your websites. In my experience, most banks do not understand that a single company can operate multiple domain names so eventually you end up with multiple corporations and LLCs just so that you can maintain multiple merchant accounts. DBAs are a much simpler and cheaper way to get around this.

The main benefit of this setup is that you can still do offline work (e.g. consulting) where you live. Since you are required to foreign-quality in every state you do business in, it wouldn't help you to incorporate in Vermont if you have local clients in another state - you'd just be doubling your paperwork, yearly filing fees, taxes, etc.
Aaah, 关系. :)
Cheetos!
Evan Williams Predicts That "Normal People" Will Use Twitter In Five Years
It's nice to see such a rational comparison of languages. So often, I see blogs written by people who only understand one language and blindly compare its' elegant solutions to arcane versions in another language because they don't understand the other enough to recognize their blunder. This post, on the other hand, is written by somebody with a strong understanding of both languages and how to approach the same problem with two different hats.

So, rather than another "Lisp rocks, Java sucks" post, we get to read a intellectually sound argument. Refreshing.
That's what I was thinking while I was reading the original post. Datamapper solves the problem awesome, provided you think the schema should be driven based on the generated model properties instead of magically defined in the schema and automatically mapped.

Datamapper migrations are perfect since they focus on one time runnable data migrations, or a bulk schema per release, instead of having a huge chain of tiny schema tweaks that can go back and forward.
Okay, you have a hypothesis. It seems a little unlikely, but I agree that it could be true.

Now, let's get to the proof side of things. What evidence makes you think this is a good explanation for the range of phenomena that you see? What else does it explain? Why can we discount other explanations, etc.
Yup I actually love it. It's clean, simple and fast. But somehow I just tend to use the browser's builtin search thingie. I've never been a "homepage" kind of person, I guess :-)
I will just give a simple example:
Apple released iPhone and it was a tremendous hit all over the world. All other phone companies tried to copy it...outcome...not as successful.
Reason: because these companies do not have the vision, passion, dedication for the product. So even if someone takes your idea it does not mean they will be able to deliver it better.

Au Contraire: Google produced a better search engine to other present at the time of launch like Alta Vista and Lycos.

To summarise, if you have an original idea executed nicely customers would come to you.
Schuldenberatung - Weg mit den Schulden
John Resig - JavaScript Library Loading Speed
I didn't get that they wanted a "cushy job in a shiny office".

I got that they wanted access to positions that would give them a reasonable chance of making tens of millions per year.
I have a website about games, in Portuguese (mostly brazilian visitors), which I haven't updated in like a year.

Internet Explorer 60.88%
Firefox 34.87%
Chrome 2.54%
Opera 1.23%
Safari 0.28%

Very few people here have Macs and iPhones :)
Im actually in the process of working on a site for this at the moment, theres a couple of sites already up and running but in my opinion still much more work needed to offer a compelling all in solution

Hopefully I will be back here in a month or so to demo it!
What Dying Business Has Survived By Raising Prices On An Inferior Product?
I suppose the proximity sensor that turns off the screen when the phone is pressed against your ear during a call is supposed to prevent this from happening (though the proximity sensor itself is definitely not problem-free).
Now is the Best Time to Start a Business
Yeah, I agree with you. Given the great talent in the Asian region we're sitting on a people gold mine. Also given the already short-supply of housing it would invigorate the property sector as well.

But I don't think the media and public would respond well to it with companies like pacific brands and the mining companies laying of so many in the last few weeks. It's probably best if the government doesn't rock the boat on immigration, lest we get a public reaction against it.
How do you think Steve Ballmer got where he is today?
Netbooks -- Who buys them?
I got into a discussion with a coworker last night about netbooks. He made a few assertions that I had a tough time disagreeing with. First, he asked coworkers (4 or 5 of them) if they knew anyone with a netbook. Most people didn't even know what a netbook was, and offered up a friend or relative who owned a Kindle instead (This may well warrant a separate discussion of its own). Of the rest of us, we came up with two netbook owners. Two. Of the people surveyed, there was very little to desire to own a netbook. I would rate these coworkers as fairly tech-savvy. I don't mean to pass this off as any sort of factual representation of the market, but I think it begs the question:

Who are the big buyers for netbooks in your opinion?

Do you think the current economic client plays to the advantage of the netbook market, or is there a significant disadvantage insofar as netbooks are perceived as luxury items-- a little brother to your existing laptop?

Do you own one? Do you want one? Why or why not?
Twitter Conversation Stream Blog/Website Widget
It's experimental, but it's fast and it works. So we're throwing it out there to see if anyone finds it useful.

Mark.
Great news for the Twilio team! This is a big vote of confidence in the company and their product offering.
Deploying Merb with Vlad
Unfortunately, people are often short-sighted when it comes to the use of their money. In earlier days, there were influences of culture and religion that were stronger than economic forces, and provided stability for a civilization. Today, these influences are mostly ignored in favor of money.
Hmm,

Actually, I suspect you need to redo a particular program design an infinite number of times to get it perfect. That said, if you are going to accomplish something, you need to hold onto that imperfect thing you just finished at some point and use it - or equivalently let go of the thing and let the company use it...

Unlike art, programmers can't get hung up on perfection. Rather than being artists, programmers are artisans (producing thing with perhaps beautiful craftmanship but still forced on the use of those things)
> Everyone knows someone with a story about some horrible entry into the US.

Everyone knows someone who has a friend who knew the guy who tried to dry his poodle in the microwave.

I'm not saying that Immigration and/or Homeland Security is great, but the rumor-mongering is unjustified.

> the problem is that it can happen at all and they're not screw-ups, it's policy.

And you know this because....

> I am an Australian citizen from birth

Ah, Australia. I know a Stanford CS PhD student who was put through hell by the Australian equivalent of US Immigration/Homeland Security because she wanted to visit a guy who she met while he was in the US. They were concerned that she might want to stay, contaminate the gene pool, or somesuch. (She's pretty and white, so they weren't applying any sort of appearance standard.)

Really. I actually know her. And, you should have paid her to emmigrate because she is seriously talented. And yes, she was seriously pissed.

Nevertheless, I don't get hysterical about it. I'm looking forward to diving the Great Barrier Reef in a couple of years.

> If I want to enter the US I face being photographed and my fingerprints taken like a common criminal.

I don't know how things are in Australia, but we can't identify criminals and the like without actually checking. (For some reason, they don't mention that in their visa application.)

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try?
Except the US has lower standards of living, a worse education system, a terrible human rights record, really high obesity levels, and more poverty than many other counties.

No wonder they are leaving... there's many better places to live:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Most_Livable_Cities

They also might be scared of being put in jail... with the US having 1 out of 100 people in jail... a massive percentage of them being non-white. The highest level of incarceration in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States
"I then suggested that perhaps they might work for companies that made things. Actual things."

Honestly, has anyone ever seen a better description of our problems right now?
A commendable effort and idea. Thanks for posting here.

Genetic intellectual property will be an issue for years it seems. Economic pressures will hopefully force openness and innovation. Patent law needs to catch up in biology as much as it has been in software.

This is directly related to open sourcing your medical records really, since medical records of the future will necessarily contain oodles of genetic information.
Author here! I enjoyed Zack and Wiki on the Wii, and some of the adventure game titles on the DS like Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, and I've referenced some of those in my other writings about adventure games. My main reason for focusing on PC games and older titles was that that seemed to be where the majority of interface evolution and changes took place. Zack and Wiki is an entertaining concept, but the interface is primarily point and click with some supplementary controls using the motion sensing of the controller and all the buttons the wiimote allows for... similarly with the DS adventure titles, it treats the touch screen as a point and tap world.

As for portal, drawing the lines between adventure games and other genres can be fuzzy. Bringing games into real-time 3D is a much more significant shift than bringing a game from a text adventure to a graphic adventure. While there are definitely many types of games which involve puzzles, I prefer to define Adventure Games as being based around solving abstract puzzles that aren't dependent upon a real-time engine.
Business Plan Competitions and startup creation
Chinese e-cigs gain ground amid safety concerns
This says something very interesting about bureaucracy when the supposed "most powerful man in the world" is having such difficulty sending an email.

I really hope that they not only fix the problems here, but fix the problems that caused the problems in the first place.
I just bought one to try use as a little brother to my existing laptop. I spends several hours during the day away from the office but with the ability to do work (coffee shops, etc). I thought that instead of lugging my primary workstation around, I could use the netbook. Jury's still out since it's only been a few days, but the smaller keyboard does affect my productivity/typing speed.
Ive been visiting this site for a while...were not alone!

http://pleasefixtheiphone.com/

The lack of Multimedia messaging on apparently the worlds most advanced phone is my biggest gripe.