skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am in a heavy brainstorming phase as of late, thinking and mulling over various "idea areas" that pertain to my domain, software I would use, etc. Not really a set process though...

But much to my delight a few days ago, I was with a friend and we were talking about a service we both use, and some of the utility it lacks. I said "Oh man, I wish somebody would make that! Why has nobody done that?" He then asked, "Why don't you make that? You told me you were trying to think of a good project."

Duh. So, like many things, sometimes the ideas come to you when you aren't mining for them, and the people around you can help point out the obvious.

(The particular idea wasn't that exciting, but it was a real surprise that such an obvious improvement to something I use a lot didn't surface while I purposefully mined for ideas).
I think most men know that there are phrases that can be said in a locker room that wouldn't endear you to the average women, but that doesn't really reflect on women at all.

There are certainly always exceptions, but unless you're a fairly tame guy or friends with fairly non-typical women, locker-room talk usually won't go over well.

My comment wasn't in anyway meant to be demeaning to women.
How many people from the services do you know who have gone on to well paying non-Defense jobs? I get the impression that the enlisted route you describe is very often a lifelong commitment to the defense industry.

In case you didn't know, working for a large defense contractor is very different from most of the "real world."
well, right out of the gate -- i tried making an account and it lets me request an API key. i have absolutely no clue what i want to do with the API key, but to obtain one, it requires me to enter in some committed data.

the lack of API key requests might be due to the fact that someone should probably have an idea they want to work on before they request one. otherwise, i'd have one now.
Overall, I would say no. I think a developer who spends more time actually developing is better off than one who only studies about the theories of Computer Science and doesn't really ever apply the knowledge they acquired.

That's not to say Computer Science is useless, but your time in college is better spent doing more than the minimum requirements for school (doing homework and passing tests). Otherwise, you'll have a harder time trying to get "work experience" with your first job after graduation when you could have given yourself plenty of experience with your own projects.
And the rationale used that Android and WinMo have viruses is a link to a site that seems to sell a product so you can remotely wipe or locate your lost or stolen phone, and doesn't seem to be related to viruses at all. Pretty weak. But that sounds like it could be a useful product for a highly portable device like a phone -- where's a version of the iPhone?
Cast your vote in our Web Madness Tournament - Top 16 Tech Companies to Work for in 2009
Unfortunately there's no mention of what it would take to produce anything more than a tabletop curiosity. It says, "After two to three weeks, the team found a small number of 'triple tracks' in the plastic..." How many is a small number? How much energy does that represent compared to the amount pumped in as electricity?

From reading the abstract on SpringerLink, I guess 9.6 MeV is released per neutron. At that neutron energy, about 650 billion neutrons per second would have to be released to produce a single watt, assuming perfect conversion. Is that reasonable? That seems high to me, but I'm not a physicist.

Without more information, it's a stretch to say this "revives hopes for cold fusion". Without being able to read the paper, it seems that the authors have avoided such claims. I guess "Evidence of Energetic Neutrons" wasn't the headline new Scientist needed. [Edit:typo]
This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking, why would IE8 make a dent in firefox if it doesn't make a dent in IE6/7 I mean really those are the people who use IE browsers, not the majority of the firefox crowd.
the economics "nobel" is not a real Nobel. it's a bogus prize. just saying. see here -> http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/nobel_by_association_be...
The scam uses email, so there is a very low cost to send. Newspapers have estimated that good scammers can get a response rate of .1% to .2%, which is pretty low.

And some people have this expectation that they can get rich quickly with little work. I know people like that. So breaking a law in a way that doesn't appear to hurt anyone just helps convince those people that there is a good reason for being offered so much money for so little work.
We just today dropped approval on API key requests -- so they're instant, but we do still require some info (product name/description). We note in the how to enter area of the contest page to just put "API contest entry" in the description field when applying for an API key, but do you think that is still too great a barrier to entry?
Arrington does homework, Techstars and Dreamit provide written responses
The "corporate ladder" analogy is broken, because the ladder is tree shaped. It's statistically impossible to climb tree shaped ladders, because they get exponentially smaller at the top, and there are too many levels. "Climb the corporate n-ary tree" would be a better analogy, for large values of n, and large tree height. It should be obvious to computer scientists, via pigeonhole arguments, why this isn't statistically feasible.

In any case, it's probably easier to find loopholes, like startups, or being an early arrival to an industry, or starting at a smaller company that inflates later, or tunneling your way between points in the corporate topology, by switching from one company to another, if you're ambitious. But betting against statistics never pays.
One of the interesting things that has happened lately is a drop in gold imports to India.

The price has gotten so high, that India would rather become a net seller of gold.

Kind of an interesting dynamic.
10 Ways to Make Better CEOs
You'd be amazed at how far being polite can get you in life in general, let alone business.
well, i'm just pointing out that i wanted to request one without having any concept for a product. no clue what it would do or what i would call it. just want to have a key so that i could experiment and see what i can do with it.

you're basically saying, we want you to play around with our API, but you're not allowed to play around with it.
I think you couldn't give up on markets even if you wanted to. You can pretend there are no markets, ala communism, but you can not eliminate markets unless you invent a limitless supply of energy.
They just come naturally, pop into my head when I identify a problem and corresponding solution.

I would be much more interested in learning how those hear take concepts beyond the idea phase and properly begin execution.

A collection of great start up ideas is not as good as one original start up idea that is properly executed.
You'd have issues with our favourite browser trying to do it in CSS exclusively. I'd go for javascript for the next few years at least.
4 Hour Liveblog: Website development with Django and Pinax
I've never done this before: consider this entirely speculation. However, I'd probably use relative positioning. This is speculation - I haven't opened Coda to try this - but perhaps make each top button a div that reveals its child content when it's being hovered over. That way, there's no confusion over where the drop-down menu's going to appear. It might be a little tricky fitting the things that appear under the drop-down menu, but since relative positioning allows for overlaps, I'd say that this would be a fairly simple issue. Drop-downs in CSS aren't particularly difficult: they just get more complex the more children you add.
Who doesn't know? Well, my five-year-old is fascinated by these commercials. Of course, he doesn't have any gold to sell, but still...

Actually, I've used it as a good learning experience for him. "Don't believe everything you see on television." Now he wants to make his own TV commercial to warn others!
> No, but people's DESIRE for gold can change quite quickly.

Whether or not people's desire for gold and PGMs change or not - they will still desire products that use PGMs (e.g. catalytic converters). Gold has some awesome properties.

Also - the desire for gold is 1000's of years old. Until women will be happy with a plastic engagement ring gold will remain valuable.

> Why did housing prices crash over the last year? Was it because so many houses were created in 12 months? No, it was because people's estimation of the value of houses went down, due to new and better information.

I thought it was because loans were given too easily (i.e. too much money in circulation).

> Gold is certainly not immune to such effects.

The reason why some people prefer gold as a store of value is because the government can't use inflation to rob you of your money. Inflation occurs always when the government prints more money and it serves as a hidden taxation. In the course of history a lot of governments printed money in order to finance its numerous social experiments (Germany, Zimbabwe, etc...)

The problems in Zimbabwe could have been averted if the government was forced to back their currency (partially) by gold.

Whether or not gold should be used as a medium of exchange is up to debate. The bigger question is: What gives you confidence in the value of a dollar?*

* substitute dollar with your local currency of choice (pound, Australian dollar, Euro, Zim dollar, rand, etc...)
You could use relative positioning, and if need be, serve an alternate stylesheet through conditional comments.
Seven Minute Abs - A/B testing in 7 minutes (rails)
Twitter is on the verge of eating Google for breakfast, here's why
In many environments, executing refactorings of your code also refactors your tests. (VisualWorks using the Refactoring Browser.) This squashes one of the author's objections.
should be possible by reading the browser's cookies for each of those sites, assuming the user is using autologin. but i suspect publishers might be reluctant to take away buttons for potential bookmarkers just in case they don't use autologin.
This is great idea but I'm not sure that this implementation is really going to work.
There's sort of a chicken and egg problem for us: the service has more utility for users the more integrating partners we have / the more people who are hooking into our API. And for developers, the service becomes more useful the more users we have (for the most part -- there are some value propositions for some sites where they get utility by pushing data to us, rather than just pulling).

We're working on addressing that by actively pitching to potential integrating partners. But essentially, DandyID is a platform for data portability for social sites. Using our API sites can let users sync their profile and identity graph information across multiple web sites.

We're also working on our user messaging. The "learn more" page on dandyid.org will be replaced soon with something more detailed explaining the benefits to users. :)

--

EDIT: Looks like you added to your post while I was replying. :) To address your other points: Those are really good points, thanks for the feedback. I think the original ideas was not to allow non-users to utilize the API (guess on my part as I wasn't with the company when that decision was made), but perhaps that's a non-issue. Most developers will need to sign up to test what they're making anyway.

As for the other, it's a semantics issue. I guess "Get an API key" (which is what the API application form page actually says), would be better? APIs are granted automatically and instantly (a change we recently implemented)... except for cases when people want to push data back to us, then they need to be white listed on our end, so need to contact us.
More info on "the deal".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/business/21bank.html?_r=1&...
I don't get the point. The only time a blank tab opens is when you're typing in a URL or search phrase, at which point your eyes are on the chrome anyway. If the Cognitive Shield has any perceptible load time, it's not worth it. Granted, at least it doesn't look like an error message like IE7's default blank tab.
Turning gold into cash should be the last thing people do.

So should taking a 30% loan three days before your paycheck arrives, but there's a whole industry built on that.
Tata Nano - Worlds Cheapest Car - In Production For $2000
>> Gold has been money for thousand of years for good reason

Only if you consider "because it's shiny" to be a good reason. That's the historical basis for gold being valuable - it looks good (according to the tastes of medieval royalty) when made into a crown/necklace, is easy to form into a nice shape, and is relatively scarce based on our current technology. There's noting innate in gold that makes it more or less valuable as a currency than any other resource that exhibits scarcity.

What we consider valuable changes with the times - go back two thousand years and change and you'll see that the most valuable items tended to be exotic rocks, salt, and certain types of dye.
Personally, I'm interested in fusion even if it can't be used to generate power (for instance, I liked the article about building your own fusion reactor using electrostatic confinement, which obviously eats far more power than it produces.)
Lots of interesting ideas in the talk. I think the biggest thing stopping companies (and even startups) from experimenting is some measure of success. As soon as you find something that's sort of working, it is hard to continuously experiment with any other products and features, but that is sorta the key here. Don't fall into that trap.

Keep innovating, because that's what people are expecting from you, otherwise there's no difference between the 800lb gorilla in the room and you.

Also, if you keep challenging the people you're working with to come up with new and interesting ideas, they're going to be much happier.
Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy
jQuery Plugins That Utilize Google APIs
The 'home' link in the top left corner is hard to read due to the font colour on the background colour. Red on a dark background is bad.

When first landing on your site, I have no idea what I'm looking at. It's just random boxes with unrelated text, I guess once you have a userbase this won't matter as people will know what's what, until then, you'll need to make it more obvious why I'm looking at your page, then you need to give me a reason to stay.

You also need to explain that clicking "next n" shows you children of the current parent comment. It's just not obvious. Don't make me think.

Reading your description, this sounds like something that is just not useful. I just don't see this working in any way that will bring money in, or even attract a community.

Honestly, yet another 'web2.0' pointless app that will die due to lack of funds or users. Sorry to come accross as being harsh, but I'm trying to be honest. You should use your python skills for something that actually provides 'real' value.

Don't be too put off by me though, I'm not exactly what you'd call an 'early adopter'.
I don't have a degree. Hasn't been a problem for getting work.

Instead of spending 4 years on a degree, spend 1 year learning just as much or more on your own, and then spend 3 months creating a couple good demos, an interesting resume, researching some companies you want to work at, and writing some good cover letters when applying.
Count me as one from the 'services' that has gone on to well paying non-defense job(s). But you are correct in that it doesn't happen often. At least not without getting a degree somewhere along the line.
I think the best compliment I can pay Aza Raskin is that whenever I look at one of his designs, I know immediately that it's his. He's got a focus for circular designs combined with an emphasis on minimal displays that convey a lot that's a signature look in my mind.

This stuff he's doing for Mozilla thrills me. It's great to see him working with a huge company.
I have seen many people comment about angel investing, and this is a valuable perspective. In particular I was happy to see him comment on the percentage of ownership to look for.
Earthcomber Drops Patent Lawsuit Against TechCrunch, Loopt
This is pretty subjective, but the green/white text on black makes it unreadable for me.

I have a 'zap colors' bookmarklet that fixes it for me, but you may want to consider whether the color choice (albeit cute) is most effective.
Chrome's tab-selection of top pages is a lot more useful to keyboard-centric users... anytime I have to move my hand to the mouse is time from my life I'll never get back!

A certain improvement would be to, instead of hitting tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-return, I could just hit alt-5...
Agreed, head over to http://newmogul.com if you're interested in this stuff.
Honestly, I don't even agree with me. That comment came out wrong. What I meant to say was that I feel it is obtuse to say something like "you will probably have a hard time with Ruby if you have a hard time with this goofy book."
Here is a link to some good advice:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/attracting-deve.ht...
Zeebo Announces Console Launch, 'Gaming for the Next Billion'
The mission is to make it possible to click some easy links without the visual clutter that other browsers' start pages give.

Have you not seen Speed Dial/Chrome/Top Sites? Because this is the exact same functionality as those other ones, and none of them have perceptive load times. Firefox is playing catch-up here: it's not giving anything particularly new.
Knowing Aza this will very likely support keyboard navigation. Aza's a stickler about having things ultra-accessible.
My fiancee is Sri Lankan, I'm Arab. Sup cousin! :-)
Cognitive Shield for the Firefox New Tab
No weighting? I guess I should fork it.
Clean up Reddit with Greasemonkey
"I don't think that Mongrel is maintained anymore."

I think Kirk Haines is looking after Mongrel now.
> you can not eliminate markets unless you invent a limitless supply of energy.

Even inventing a limitless supply of free energy would not eliminate markets because limitless free energy would not eliminate all scarcity.
What three variables is the tag cloud conveying by its tag sizes, and the tags' x and y locations?
"research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse"

Where would a beekeeper gain access to a gamma source?
What can you do for farmers and distributors?
We do image A/B testing in less than 5, with just javascript:

http://blog.mixpanel.com/2009/03/introducing-display-optimiz...

If you do use their a/b testing framework, you should consider logging data to mixpanel.com just because we do all the pretty graphs for you too =)
I imagine a fair number of people came here from Reddit, as I did, and I think this might interest some people. I came across this Greasemonkey script after months of frustration at the increasing clutter of Reddit. It makes the site a lot cleaner, visually, and easier to bear, as well.
plz do, that is exactly the kinda of community i'm looking to create with a simple example
The big flaw with this design (the initial circle), of course, is what if a site doesn't have a favicon?
ssh-copy-id is already part of OpenSSH, which is part of OS X / Linux. It also sets file and directory modes properly.
Thanks for all of your feedback (DandyID co-founder here). The product/url/description can be entered as "N/A" or whatever -- I'm adding this into the subtext of those fields right now. I'm also adding a link to the API documentation from the signup page. Appreciate these ideas!
Yeah, but what if we haven't gotten there yet? What if it was a side-project that we now know will turn into a startup but hasn't gotten to the stage of incorporation?

I may not say, "Oh, yeah, 20 years ago I signed something putting all my IP in the public domain if I die. We should incorporate now just in case something happens to me." I may not remember, especially if I'm hacking 12 hrs/day on the startup.
hmmm I wonder if we could hook in our platform mixpanel.com into your framework so there's a more robust solution to viewing the stats afterwords...

our ruby support is a bit weak.
Try to create something that is more valuable than your competition. Either go cheaper (difficult, in the shared hosting biz.) or provide some service above and beyond your competitors (I know of many successful hosting companies that targeted a certain kind of customer, for example, real-estate agents during the boom, and basically sold nice templates for their niche.)

Another thing I notice is that if you post good technical info about what you are doing, you get good links (and thus pagerank.) You need documentation anyhow, so cleaning it up and posting it online is like free advertising.

But what do I know. it's not like my hosting company is wildly successful, and I had what was once a unique product, Xen VPS hosting (I started before ec2, using Xen2 on NetBSD. Of course, I now have a whole lot of competition, and I don't have the cool provisioning systems they do.) and I still have a almost 2x price advantage over my nearest competitor. My biggest problem is credibility. I need to dedicate a weekend to web design, as my current website is inconsistent and out of date. (I have some technical issues, too... but after last weekend, I've cleaned most of those up. I will be writing up a thing on puppet this coming weekend. So embarrassing. I was aware of the problem, and policy was to fix it on all new servers, I just forgot to edit the config files in question. Yeah. moving to puppet.)

Still, my company is growing about as fast as I can get new infrastructure up (which isn't as fast as you'd think. I've got two other essentially full-time jobs.)
Hospitals, lacking some industrial use I'm unaware of.
> Whenever a group has a specific reason they need more time to decide, we've always given it to them

I read before that when you call teams with your offer, they have 5 minutes to accept. Did this change?

Also, I read that your offer is non-negotiable. Yet this advice says to try to negotiate. Did you change this also?

As for the Fleaflicker example, my understanding is he got an acquisition offer before you made your own offer, so it's not comparable to 99% of the other cases. If you do indeed now give teams reasonable amounts of time to decide and negotiate the YC investment terms, that's a significant improvement. Otherwise it sounds like you're doing the same thing you are condemning other seed funders for, with the excuse that "well, we decide last so it's okay for us to require an immediate decision and not negotiate," which seems disingenuous.
It's a natural consequence of uncertainty about the future. The idea that everything could change within a few years or a decade is now so prevalent that it affects everyone's medium-term planning, and heavily reinforces the future discount.
dm me on github and i'll send you my email if you have any questions.
The first sentence said it all really. The article was about giving up technology. The only remaining fact would be if they had a choice or not.
> 95% of Fortune 500 executives are not people who want intrinsically to run companies; they want the perks.

How about some evidence?

Note that reducing the pay doesn't reduce the status. If status is the only points, who's to say that folks won't continue to play the game?

> Hard jobs should pay more than easier ones, and high-ranking jobs should only be available to those with sufficient experience and knowledge

Who makes the call? Does the facebook kid have sufficient experience and knowledge? Did Bill Gates?

If we reduce pay, that money goes somewhere else. Where and why is that good? (Take pro-athletes as an example. If we limit their salaries, who gets the money?)