skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feedback from posting my couch for rent:

#Street: Just the street or the number and the street? I'm guessing you want number and street because you ask for apartment number. (Added upon completion: The listing doesn't display number, but the map has the point correct. I like the choices you make on what to display and how; I didn't like being confused on what to enter.)

#City and ZIP: Just ZIP and lookup City/State or ask for all three: City, State, and ZIP. Don't do things that are different just to be different.

#Room Type: Is my Living Room a Shared Room? Probably, but don't make me think, I'm drinking. Perhaps add a few options to the drop down.

#Name of Space: Why only 15 characters? I can't fit "Pull-Out Sofabed" there.

#Availability: The calendars are confusing. I wanted to test by just listing it for the weekend. Perhaps your default should be "never available" instead of "always available", then have me chose days. To make the weekend the availability takes three time frames.

Here's my listing: http://airbnb.com/airbeds/show/5703

I know you ABNB people are here on HN and I want to talk to you. E-mail me or I'll get the TicketStumbler guys to stab you. That is all.
JPEG2K is a terrible format that, in practice, often comes out worse than JPEG. This is partly because wavelets are terrible from a psychovisual standpoint, but also because the format is just badly designed; Snow, a similar wavelet format, trashes it completely even when using the exact same wavelet transform.

Also, wavelets are not at all "provably optimal." The only "provably optimal" transform is the KLT, and even that isn't really, since in practice overcomplete transforms tend to have better compression efficiency than complete ones, at the cost of turning compression from a simple O(nlog(n)) frequency transform into an NP-complete problem of matching pursuits.
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I've come to expect no less from Michael Lewis.
Usually in a Flickr pool.
Yeah, I kind of felt the same way. One would have a hard time selling bioinformatics. One would have a much easier time selling information derived from bioinformatics. A very important point to be made indeed, especially since most of the bioinformatics packages and software I use are free (and I would love to keep it that way!). In fact, the open source community is vital to the field; otherwise everyone would just keep having to re-invent the wheel.

Just to keep everyone up to date, I talked to a few professors this afternoon about grad school. The condensed version of what they said is that given my major, I can choose to research in a field that applies bioinformatics (i.e. evolution, molecular biology, etc), or I can study bioinformatics itself (making better tools, optimizing algorithms, etc).
A Tale Of Two Studies On File Sharing...
Creating Multiple Streams Of Income Into Your Business
If you are a small business owner then you are probably familiar with this reality: Chasing customers. Also known as - Living from client to client.
Take control lyrics by Amerie
Tethering Your Kindle 2
Well, if I did go forward with the start-up, I know I'd be able to get PhDs on board (mostly because I am best friends with a few). I'd be happy to do so if it guaranteed funding (I know, but then again, a start-up can never expect to get guaranteed funding). But then again, a lot depends on the product one is trying to sell and the way its pitched, right?
Yeah, cperciva, I read the "Summer 2009 Funding" post and raise the question.

YC, I am a bit confused with the sentences:

"$5000 + $5000n is not a lot, but it turns out to be enough. It will cover at least 4 months' living expenses, and that is enough time to build something nontrivial."

After 4 months, what milestone should the team arrives so that you judge the project is promising? should I prove the business model is correct in the 4 months?
Good VC firms generate positive returns from more than half of their companies. Even the average VC generates positive returns from 1/3. This is from a large sample: http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2008/09/vc-backed-s...

Bad VC firms, on the other hand, can achieve 100% failure rate. It's not some throw of the dice, it's about (a) choosing the right investments, and (b) making them succeed. If they're telling you that it's normal for the vast majority of their investments to fail, find a better place for your money (and don't taken money from them either.)
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Anytime I tell someone about twitter and they say "oh, it's like a web site that just does Facebook status? lol why would I use that?" I feel like Facebook just gained more ground.
You can (and certainly should) do everything to protect yourself and you still might get screwed. Going into business with someone is giving them your trust. If you can't do that then you can't have a partner.
congrats sam!
Francisco's (of 280 North, YC W08) FOWA presentation
A lot of people say things like this about social software and seemed bothered that they don't understand how they would use it. But it's probably ok if they never do, or at least wait until the use seems obvious.

You almost never hear people talk this way about non-social software. Two years ago, I knew about Quickbooks, didn't use it, and was unconcerned. Now I run a small business, my accountant prefers our books in this program, and I'm happy to use it.

I think the reason this comes up with social software is because we don't have a good vocabulary for talking about our social needs. When Twitter was just getting started, a lot more people would say that they didn't get it and that it had no value, even though empirically some people were clearly getting value.
Yet another exciting business opportunity
Very cool, event-based photo sharing with easy group sharing is a good idea. Two quick suggestions -- you shouldn't have to give a name to each photo you upload, and you should look at the exif data for the image orientation so pictures don't display sideways.
Google's Schmidt: I Didn't Diss Twitter
If you notice, they state that you can spend the money that they will be giving you however you want. After 4 months, it is not YC that will be judging you. It will completely depend on where you want the company to go, if anywhere at all. If you are looking for VC funding, then your measure of success is whether or not you find it. If you are just aiming to grow slowly and naturally, then your measure of success will be a slow burn rate and a clear road to ramen profitability.
In Sweden we have three grades: fail, pass, and pass with distinction. I rather like it as I don't believe it's meaningful to try to distinguish hundreds of different grades.

Engineers have one more grade than the rest of us: fail, 3, 4, 5
UIWebView has a JavaScript interpreter built in...
I'm glad that Google has decided to go the route of expandable ads that only expand when CLICKED on, as opposed to on mouseover like most expandable ads, which make me, as a guy who worked on an advertising startup, understand why people block ads.

Good choice, and adds a lot of credit to the new feature.
After such a long reply, I almost feel guilty not giving something back.

That gradient is awful ... With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.

The gradient is not the greatest, sure. I don't agree that gradients are a design element that can apparently only be used with the precision of a laser though. I have previously included gradients on a design just because I felt like it. Sometimes the best designs come from what you feel like adding, that's what makes a portion of it art. The design in question turned out fine and was complimented by friends and strangers alike. I do agree that you need to be careful if the gradient is going to sit behind actual content, but do not think that there is some kind of unbreakable design rule that states that gradients cannot sit behind actual content. I don't like when the end of a gradient does not blend fluidly into the background colour however, that does look cheap.

The other design criticisms you mention are coming from your own subjective taste. Nothing wrong with that, but I won't comment on this subjective opinion.

The points you make about the site seemingly highlighting the money over the music I think are valid... From my point of view being a person with no connection to managing the site whatsoever. But I suspect I would feel differently otherwise.

Perhaps if I used the site more, I would be more annoyed with it, but visiting a few times and just clicking around, I don't seem to have as much of a problem with it as you do. But at the same time, I haven't bought any music... Maybe that says something too.
To be clear, I made no reference to religion. And I agree with her too.
i'm one of the lucky few hosting a few sites (not live yet) on the heroku platform and i can say that it's the best deployment experience i've ever had (prior to heroku i hosted my old startup on engineyard). literally all you need to do is a git push and your app is live in the cloud. i will speak more about scaling when i have an app that needs it, but for now the ease of deployment has got me hooked.
Twitter is useful to me in a few ways -

1. Using Twinkle on my iPhone I can see Tweets from around me within a certain radius. When a major windstorm blew through Cincinnati and 1,000,000 people lost power, I was able to use Twinkle to get updates on where there was and where there was not power in real time. I knew there was power 2 miles away, I knew there was power in certain areas, I knew where to go for a Starbucks.

2. I follow my friends and I can stay up to date with 60 people without much effort. I can reply when I see fit, but not feel bad if I don't reply (which is different than an instant message, where if I don't reply I am an asshole).

3. I have about 800 followers and that continues to grow - if I have a question about something or want a quick opinion I can "ask Twitter" and get about 15-30 responses in less than an hour.

4. Real time search. It is incredible. It helped break the news of the Flight 1549 crash in the Hudson. It shows what popular topics are (it's obvious on an Apple keynote day, but what was going on yesterday? Twitter gives me a really good idea).
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Skype Adds 'Visible Voice Mail' 
Skype is teaming with SpinVox to send transcribed voice mail messages to a user's mobile phone. The company dubs this "visible voice mail," in which voice mails left on a user's voice-over-IP account can be converted to written messages.
Only software I really really had to buy was Flash, since I was using it heavily in my UI. At around 700 euro it was a really painful purchase to make. Luckily for everything else I've been able to use open source, or stuff that comes with Leopard.
Evolutionary biology explanation of depression
Summary: people get depressed because their lives suck.
Strange as it may seem...

1. Not everyone uses a mac (and OSX is hardly free).

2. Not everyone uses Textmate (and very cheap is relative).

3. What the hell is Omnigraffle?

Point being, not everyone uses the same set of software as you...or maybe it's just late and I'm grumpy :)
The startup I work for does not. 60% of our desktops are Linux, the rest Mac OSX or XP which are legal. Our work is primarily in Eclipse or Emacs, our servers all run Debian our phones are Asterix. We use OpenOffice/NeoOffice as much as possible. We probably have a few copies of MS Office legally, but the only major software license we have is Solidworks.
Corporate Layoffs Subsiding Substantially
I'm interested in what can be done to raise the level of abstraction (and consistency) without giving up the spreadsheet UI

The formatting of your comment reminded me of one of the many reasons I actively avoid Excel and other Microsoft products - those "helpful" agents. The ones that always pop up when I least expect and offer suggestions that are never useful.

Whatever path you decide to take on your quest for abstraction, please don't pursue that particular route. That way lies madness.
GE's Augmented Reality Page
There are other ways to prevent automation (JS) -- captcha is like one of the most damaging ways of fighting it, and it will always lower your conversion rate significantly.

When you're starting out, lower conversion is a death sentence.

My take: solve problems like this when you have to, not before.
Pretty cool! You can see it in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkqtklABgGQ
All science is chemistry, the rest is just shit falling.
Facebook. You can tag your friends and they will be notified. That's a huge advantage, because not only the tagged person comes to see but also her nosy friends.
If it was a crappy article, it wouldn't have made it to #3 on HN. I wouldn't have clicked on a link with this title in any other context.
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No need, they have a full people directory:

http://nl.netlog.com/go/directory/ (Holland & Belgium, change subdomain for diff areas)
Hey Sachin, thanks for the comments. The street address is hidden until the host accepts the reservation. I think the other things you have pointed out need to be better optimized. We will be expanding the 15 character limit and updating the calendar, for example. Thank you for posting your room. More feedback is welcome.
It's unlikely that users will notice it, I personally don't care if a site uses affiliate IDs, after all it's not like it gonna cost me a deal. Sites like fatwallet.com is a great example.
The art of throwing JavaScript errors
Kindle for iPhone vs. Kindle 2: A Comparison Chart
Stimulus: A history of folly
Switched from Capistrano to (Python) Fabric
MemcacheQ - http://memcachedb.org/memcacheq/
We are mostly on FOSS and we don't have Windows. Thus the question of Pirated Software don't really arise. Mac software that we've to buy are few and so we can afford them easily.
Or they could do some actual work and charge me 20p for it! Why charge less for more data? There must be a reason.
UTF is variable width; it'll use 8 bits/char if it can, and only use 16 bits if it has to.
For what I need, all commercial alternatives are worse. Some considerably worse. Why would I waste time even downloading them from the net?
A hacker perspective:

Don't shopping.com and pricegrabber.com already do this? There's definitely some indicative GET variable names in the URLs that this is going on.

When I was working on retail websites, you'd have to provide a feed listing all the products to some of these places and you'd either pay them based on closed sales (classic affiliate program) or on how much traffic they drove to the site.

After working that end of retail, I tried setting up a few product clearing house websites that took affiliate feed data and attempted to do what you describe, but I got burned out on it from having to deal with the data. Even from places like LinkShare and Commission Junction, the data feeds you can get with lists of products are quite atrocious: low quality like you wouldn't believe, inconsistent formatting, lack of even full product names in some cases, really crappy pictures of the products (and then there are licensing issues with how you use the pictures or the data). Many affiliate programs target people who are attracted to get-rich-quick schemes and are not technically inclinded, so feeds are often an afterthought. It's not designed for anything other than just dumping the data straight onto a web page in order to increase pagerank and be search engine food. You can't really do much true data correlation (finding similar products to be able to do decent price comparisons for example), in an automated fashion. It's easier if you can cut a deal direclty with the merchants and dictate the data format and quality, but it's an uphill battle, as most already have affiliate programs that have been operating fine for years, thank you very much, and don't have the man power to dedicate to cleaning up their data or feeds. Most can be received in some kind of character delimited format (the smart ones use use tabs, | is popular, as is improperly quoted CSV), the XML is barely better as it's not in anyone interest to be compatible with any else's feeds because most merchants don't want their products mixed with their competitors.

There's services like GoldenCAN (goldencan.com), which are supposed to make this kind of stuff easier, but it's still hit and miss.

I encourage you to make a go at it, because I still think it could be very lucrative, but having to code yet _another_ exception and deal with ever increasing corner cases in the data was not something I relished. But, like many things, it's not as easy as it looks.
Thanks, unfortunately I wont be applying this round, but I'm sure you will be seeing our application next round.
Facebook without a doubt. It's what everyone does, and while it's slightly broken because all the albums for one event aren't linked, it's not a huge problem. It's something that would be nice for Facebook to fix, but isn't major. At least that's my opinion as a user.
I suppose you can host the parties now!
Why?

The HELP system (renamed from HECS just for the hell of a 'fitting' acronym) in Australia works great.
I haven't used pirated software in pretty much my entire adult life, though I was pretty involved in the warez scene when I was a kid and ran a Commodore 64 BBS. It would never cross my mind to use pirated software today.

I use approximately 90% Open Source software, and the remainder is bought and paid for (though often quite old...the last Microsoft Office version I bought was Office '97, though I haven't had a call to use Office in 5 years, at least). I also buy the cheapest version of stuff. Like I have Vista Home Basic on my dual booting PC, since I spend maybe one afternoon per week in Windows, and never doing anything complicated.

So, no. I don't use pirated software. Even when I worked in an office that had full MSDN subscriptions for everyone, I used almost no proprietary software anyway, so I'm certainly not going out of my way to dig up pirated copies of the stuff. My workflow is simply built around Open Source tools.
People like your mom may use computers differently than people like me, but the difference isn't random. It's more of a time-shift. E.g. I start using desktop computers in 1980, they're ubiquitous 15 year later; I start using email in 1985, it's ubiquitous 15 years later; I get a t1 in 1996, broadband is ubiquitous 15 years later; etc.

That's why the adapted Wilde quote applies. I didn't say desktop sw will instantly disappear, just inexorably.
C'mon RTFA for once. Gah.
I also was confused by the street thing, and reached the same conclusion as you (that is, since I was being asked for my apartment number, my street number was likely desired as well).
1. Linux comes free with every Internet.

2. vim or emacs is the best, and it's very free.

3. There is no 3.

FTFY
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How does reading on a 3" screen compare to reading to 6"? Personally, I had a Sony Clié a few years ago with a small screen (2.5" I guess) and I didn't have lots of problems reading technical docs from it. But then, they were mostly ASCII text and the Clié could reflow the text to fit the screen. Does the same thing happen on the iPhone or the Kindle?
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"Recently, HomeAway, a popular vacation rental site, raised $250 million in a venture round and was valued at more than $1 billion."

$250 million for a similar site? What am I missing? It's just so hard to fathom why a web startup would need so much money.
Oh God, anything but that. Sorry about the sucky formatting.

I think you're on to something here, actually. The great advances in the first generation of desktop apps were done by the early 1990s. Instead of making the tools more powerful by evolving the core concepts, MS (and other vendors) piled on feature after feature and gimmick after gimmick (like those "agents"). Now they have bloated monsters that can't be evolved any which way. It reminds me of programs that are heaps of special cases piled one on top of the other with no thought for how to effectively generalize (nor would it be surprising if that's just what these particular applications are). MS are now so hamstrung by this legacy that perhaps a window of opportunity for real innovation in the space has finally opened.
Summary: Silly, foolish, naive young Icelanders who obviously couldn't play in the big leagues with the trained financial professionals, lost billions and billions of dollars loaned to them by... um...
Build a REST Web server with the Restlet framework
Europe’s banks face a $2 trillion dollar shortage
Yes, I do steal. :)
Blockbuster and how I almost became the kingpin of cable
I don't think picking a username and password is that big a hurdle for most people.
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Digital Hologram Technology with Smart Grid (video)
IMHO engineers find it difficult to identify and extract the common processes because every part is slightly different and complex and usually requires its own judgement calls to be made about how to deal with it. This leads naturally to everyone doing things their own way and therefore using the most flexible and cheap tool there is...Excel.

This touches on one of my pet theories. Spreadsheets were remarkably successful because they never require you to express a model abstractly (i.e. they never require you to write the formulas up front and plug in data later - which is the way that programming languages work). You're always dealing with concrete numbers. It's example-driven. I believe that this is one of the reasons why the spreadsheet is the computing tool of choice for non-programmers. Good programmers "get" abstraction; most non-programmers don't.

The trouble is that when you need to make many variations on the same theme ("every part is slightly different"), the only facility provided by the spreadsheet is copy/paste. Now you can modify Examples 1 thru N to your heart's content, but you've lost any link between the stuff that's common to them all. There's lots of research showing that this kind of spreadsheet development leads to billions of dollars in errors every year. Basically, imagine programming where you have no subroutines and nothing but copy/paste. We know what a mess that would be, the minute you tried to do anything complex.

I believe an improvement would be to allow a spreadsheet to clone ranges from another spreadsheet, thus inheriting their data and formulas, but preserving the linkage back to the original. You can override things in the clone to make the parts different that need to be different. But anything that you haven't overridden (or added yourself) is a live copy of the thing you cloned. That means if you change the master, the copies get updated. In fact, you haven't actually copied anything - you're just referring back. The system would be better able to trace the true dependencies of a sheet, and users would still be able to base new work on old examples.

Since you've struggled with these issues, I'd like to hear your thoughts.
True Confessions of an iPhone Developer - Bullshit Review Sites