skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
does anyone here have a background that could tell us if this is legit or just a snazzy interpretation to noisy data?
Mark Cuban: Understanding Big Bonuses & The Coming Options Scandals
That only works for your own login, no?
The audience today was one of the most encouraging signs I've seen that the recession is not going to shut down the startup world. Not just the number of people, but the degree of interest they had. You could not have told there was anything amiss with the economy if you didn't already know.
Incorporating intelligence is the hard part.
So the news has been mentioned in here before and that means we are done? Swoopo is still running and scamming people. I guess we stay quiet until this become big and the victims are every where. Only then we'd start complaining, just like Madoff or pyramid scheme....

Do something, People!!
Pretty sad..
Acoustic guitar lessons | fingerstyle guitar lessons
Learning guitar by using online guitar tutorials is a fantastic way to start playing guitar. These online guitar courses have one big advantage compared to learning from a guitar teacher...they are always available! Now, there are definitely many things that you can learn from a real guitar teacher that you can't learn from an online guitar course, but for those times when you just want to take your guitar skills even further these courses fill a much needed place.
We're hoping the leaking of the list comes as a real blow to the government's "clean feed" censorship plans. The list already includes legal poker sites, and the websites of a tourism operator and a dentist.

All this censorship nonsense really makes me ashamed to be Australian.
Nokia E75 Short Review
Ah,

So Subliminal Seduction does work, after all.

Actually, Tor Norrestranders describes in his book The User Illusion how suggestibility by images has been well know to psychology more or less forever BUT how after a movie company began using automated suggestion machines in theaters, the psychology profession essentially suppressed its belief in the power suggestion because this possibility made the profession extremely sinister to the average person.
So far people have identified the following in the list

- Ordinary porn sites (thehun, xtube) including one that is operated from Australia (abbywinters)

- All of the major poker sites

- Betting exchange Betfair which operates legally in Australia

- A dentist and a dog kennel

I hope this finally kills the filtering project.
I learn a lot about SSD's from Storage Search

http://www.storagesearch.com
Where is the number to call when it's down? Not down for everyone--that's a different problem--down for you: say if you get "locked out."
JavaScript has some great runtimes; V8 and Tracemonkey are very fast. The standard library is also fine, you probably only dislike the W3C DOM. Pretty much everyone agrees that that is one of the worst APIs ever designed, and that's why it's been replaced (or rather, hidden) by things like jQuery.
Wattvision sounds cool, but I'd be worried about their business model since PG&E are replacing their meters with digital ones that report back to PG&E. I seem to remember hearing that they are rolling out a similar service, too.
Still doesn't need to have a price.

If a homeless man comes in an order a coffe, and pays one cent, the owner will remember his face. Next time, the owner might refuse the service.

Or if he orders a coffe, then another, and the most expensive sandwich, I think the owner will ask if he has some money to pay.

If the novelty wears off, he can start charging people again, and maybe retain some costumers who just went there to check if the no-price thing was true.
its a dollar auction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

the concept has been around for a long time. swoopo isn't the first, and won't be the last.
As other people have stated making a multiplayer game is a whole different kettle of fish. However if recurring revenue is what you're after then perhaps episodic content is more your thing.

Something like the recent Sam n Max releases.
Diminished Value Auto Appraisal Experts
Diminished value automobile appraisals. Get a fair insurance settlement for diminished value or total loss claims.
some of those are obvious, but the Ad Planner was an interesting trick...
Thanks, I didn't go through all of it, but I really enjoyed the back story on OCZ. It's great that they would fix their firmware and work with this guy to build a better product. I like seeing that business is really done like that outside of the small local businesses.
Maybe someone running somekind of website where donations are accepted could run this experiment: Put on your sign-up/logout or download page a donate feature, and pictures of you next to your children/pets/dependent whatever, or a picture of your old car/tv and some text saying "I'm looking for money to replace this", etc.

I think physical proximity is a factor, but the emotions involved are more like "I can't screw the guy" and "I should help the guy" or "I should be a good person and do this", so if you can make these feelings emerge...
I strongly believe it's a valuable resource, especially for web 2.0 companies. You can read my review here:

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-cu...

And how it fits in with agile development here:

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/03/combining-...
Dear HN: I made a library to let you add a Google-Suggest like search to your site easily
Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again?

I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an unsolved problem?

Hey, here's an unsolved problem for you: endless signups everywhere - every single person who owns a computer will tell you that they're fucking tired of logging into gmail or yahoo mail or whatever, and "remember me" checkboxes work only for a little while. But sharing a photo online? I never heard anyone complaining: we all have multiple "Share!!!" buttons staring at us in iPhoto, Picasa, Vista, whatever and we don't give a flying fuck.

And how about millions of people screaming in pain who sit in front of their half-dead Windows machines, overloaded with spyware, malware, bloated slow registry and 8174 useless "services" running in background, slowing everything down, showing marketing messages from Logitech and overall ruining their everyday experience? Who's smart enough to solve that mess in 3 months?

Those obvious, screaming-in-your-face issues remain unsolved because they are HARD and, therefore, fall into a problematic category of problems that work against conventional "release often, release early" wisdom. After all, it seems like sending 140 characters to a list of subscribers can pass as a billion dollar technology, why bother with stupid Windows users?

Actually I believe that great, ambitious ideas are very, very rare and are, by far, the most important ingredient for a true innovation, for a true sustainable business. Great idea, more than anything else, separates Googles, Microsofts and Yahoos from thousands of tiny "widget" startups, focused on minimal coding and fastest time-to-flip, created and sold-or-died within two years, leaving everybody but the founders with nothing but lesser quality of personal lives, which makes their "change the world with us" hiring songs look kinda hilarious.

Ideas are priceless. If you are a programmer and you aren't "plugged" into the bubble money, a great idea is your only chance. Crappy-idea-great-execution companies are usually examples of networking/salesmanship skills, something programmers aren't terribly good at.

In the end, not a single YC-funded startup can compete with something like Mongrel, a one-man non-commercial effort which, when measured in value it brought into this world, or how much people wanted it, is what defines wealth, according to PG's own writings. I've been following YC-backed companies for more than 2 years and not a single one produced something I wanted. Come on, I am a computer-savvy, technology-loving, ad-blocking geek with a huge PC-per-capita ratio and a hefty tech gadget/software monthly budget, how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?
Your analogies don't work. With drugs, producing and using them are crimes. The intent and act of viewing Child Porn is the same - producing or using the produce is the crime.

If someone downloads Child Porn, or knowingly copies it from somewhere, this could be giving someone the idea that they better keep producing it.
100% NECESSARY panelist: Kjerstin Erickson and her Radical Transparency. FORGE runs as lean as it gets... 70,00 refugees served by over 50 projects (that the refugees themselves develop) with only 3 US staff and a teeny tiny budget... she's brilliant and commands the attention of a crowd.

http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/forging-ahead/archive/2009/0...

(called the LEANEST startup NGO there is)

http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2008/12/forge-final-report
I thought it absolutely enjoyable in an entirely non-zombie way. I loved the movie as it was great fun, exciting action, and gore abounds, but, I do not consider it the type of super-personal 'zombie film' that I love so much.

In fact, for two excellent types of such super-personal films that predate the modern zombie film (1968,) look at Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957, though he's best known for Serpico). Both include small groups of people completely reliant upon each other to make it (to a verdict, or to just survive.)

That said, I also absolutely love Robert Rodriguez and his style of "grab the camera, we're about to make a movie!"-filmmaking. I think he's able to relate his energy in a way that usually takes AAA directing (I'd categorize his style as one of 'potential' over 'polish,' but he's also capable of selling what he's doing to the viewer, two characteristics that work amazingly in tandem, at least for me.)

So, what did I think? In short, I absolutely loved it, but I didn't mention it because I don't think it fits in with what I love about zombies.
I made it hoping that sites like HN would use it because it's just a simple copy-paste operation. Making a good search engine is not easy and even reddit which has its own search gets a lot of flak for poor results. I've tested this for many sites and it works pretty well, considering that it's just Google results with a filter for "site:foo.com." The fact that it's ajax makes it easy to try out different keywords quickly.

If anyone has suggestions on improving or extending this library, I'm all ears.
The Lie of The Four Hour Work Week.
I find the title highly sensational and misleading. Of course it was hacked in seconds given a prepared exploit, I would be shocked if it took the computer longer than that to execute the exploit code.
Is there any video coverage of the event?
You've no argument from me about IntelliJ being a better IDE. But remember when Eclipse first came out. In my recollection, it set a new bar for Java UI slickness.

This is key. Open Source often fail to reach a certain level of polish unless they find some way to receive corporate funding.
i don't think you've been here long enough to know how this site works.

if somebody submits off-topic or spammy links, they will be killed. if somebody starts acting like a jerk, their account will be killed. it doesn't really matter what the average hn user thinks about it, they will be killed anyway.

the editors are very ruthless about this. it doesn't matter how many unruly users come here, they will either abide by the rules or they will be banned, period.
more Pashto (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pbt) than Arabic (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=arb) there's less than 10 million Pashto speakers in the world (about 8M are in Afghanistan) vs. 250M++ for Arabic.
Rare Fossil Octopuses Found
I have a NEC w/ a solid state HD. It was dying under Vista - couldn't even load an image file in less than 10 seconds. Think about it - a miniscule 40kb jpeg would take 10 seconds to load.

I switched to Ubuntu and most of my problems went away.
>Confidentiality provisions will not protect a company from a former employee betting against their positions, only from having them disclose information.

Right. Like current AIG employees aren't already helping others do this right this second. Great post otherwise.
I agree that security shouldn't be a last-minute thought, but those are terrible examples!

If you're prototyping, think at a higher level, and prototype with native language objects, or if you need to use a DB, use an ORM. Writing raw SQL is only fast the first time, and then you're no better than assembly-coding your database.

For string encoding, just take out non-alphanumeric characters, unless you're dealing specifically with non-English, and then expand your target audience once you can do it safely. Most blogs, for example, don't deal with i18n in urls; they just convert any non-alphanumerics (include spaces) to hyphens, which is safe and easy. Again, that's a simple regexp: in Ruby, .gsub(/[^0-9a-z]/,'-') . If non-Anglophones sign up in droves, you have a massive user base, which is motivational inertia enough.
About a year. I guess you guys are right as long as you keep doing it seo becomes easier.
Any startup should consider itself blessed to compete with PG&E. (And if Wattvision's tech is superior, the big utilities are far more likely to become customers than competitors.)
Did you give them instructions with screenshots on how to do it?

Anyway, just send you an email with my UUID. Happy to support a fellow developer.
'Smart drug' Modafinil an addiction risk, study finds
"Under existing laws the ACMA blacklist includes URLs relating to child sexual abuse, rape, incest, bestiality, sexual violence and detailed instruction in crime," Senator Conroy said.

No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list.

That's a red herring. Leaking the list merely informs people about what is being banned. It does not compromise "cyber safety" since it does not unban the sites on the list.
That doesn't relate at all to anything I've said, nor does it reinforce your point in the slightest. Your powers of misinterpretation are astounding and I hope that in the future you will refrain from commenting anywhere on anything.
Wow. AnandTech has always been great, but this was especially well-written and informative. If you think 31 pages is too long, well, it's worth it. The article gives really good technical explanations of how SSDs work and how they compare to disk drives, tells about an interesting back-and-forth with OCZ (a Taiwanese SSD manufacturer), and gives you the info you need to make an SSD purchasing decision. And it's a shining example of tech journalism at its best (which we rarely see).
Imperative computation in F# (I.) - Returning results from a function
Microsoft's Future Vision Montage Video
U.S. Migration Falls Sharply
Has anyone worked out how long 10,000 erases works out to in a server or workstation "typical" environment? I expect developers to reach it sooner than non-developers...?
What kind of communication app worth cracking would not run primarily on Windows machines? That's practically a prerequisite to widespread use.
SXSW 2009: A Half-Dozen Things I Learned
Wonder if/when they will allow direct modification of input URLs... That would be nice.
Leads to the question, what took FF/IE so long?

They surely tested them all ahead of time, so why did anything take any longer than a few seconds?
Huh, I watch Hulu on my projector. I kind of thought that was the whole point?
Really a cool project - I'd love it for HN to use this.
There is also existing competition that does some REALLY cool things (like Tendril, http://www.tendrilinc.com/)
FWIW, daily mark-to-market as a way of valuing long term assets was the rule before the great depression, was suspended under FDR, and reintroduced during the Bush admin (I think during the Enron reaction).

Mark-to-market is attractive, but does it necessarily make sense? Suppose that I have an apartment building that is throwing off enough cash to meet my obligations. Is it worth nothing on a day when no one offers to buy it? Is it worth nothing on a day when no one offers to buy "comparables"?
How to turn your iPod into an iPhone
Yeah, wasn't aware that was possible - wicked cool.
Nicely done. I had been thinking of adding search to my site for a while -- maybe I'll adapt this to Prototype and start an A/B test this weekend.
Site was down for a bit, should be back up now!
Do people normally twitter asynchronously, writing them down with pencil and paper, or jotting notes on their hands, saving them up until they get to a computer so they spend the proper amount of time composing rich, yet dense, prose taking those 140 characters beyond their regular limit?
The Google ad planner is really cool. Interestingly it doesn't display data for google-owned sites such as google.com, blogger.com and orkut.com.
My "crap app" got rejected for being of "minimal functionality" even though it duplicates the functionality of a physical device found in many restrooms in Japan, so it seems Apple is indiscriminately applying their policies regardless of application quality, leading to some making it through and others not. Case in point:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/03/16/apple-rejects-free-...

I would hardly call this as having "minimal functionality". Yet Apple thinks so. But neither I nor Apple should have that call beyond apps that are illegal, overly resource intensive or malicious. The market should be able to decide. This behavior hinders development across the board, especially when you have no insight into why an app is rejected or what it will take to get it approved. Will Shipley has a great post on his blog about this very issue:

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/09/iphone-app-store-let-mark...
iTunes TV is insanely expensive, for instance I recently watched Heroes on Hulu (I had to borrow a few episodes when I fell behind because NBC "didn't want me watching" the show on a channel that made them money). Total cost to me for casual TV viewing: $0 and a few targeted adds that I liked.

iTunes wants $37.99 for a DRM'ed season, and I would need to buy three of them for $113.97. This is an absolute deal breaker, I would never buy anything that expensive with non-broken DRM on it. Actually, I take that back, I would never pay much more than about $10/season for a reasonably well produced but overall forgettable television show.

So, basically, the idea of charging for television content per show isn't going to happen unless everyone abruptly cancels their cable service tomorrow and inexplicably spends the exact same amount on TV shows al-a-carte while somehow maintaining their casual television viewing habits that make it such a golden advertising medium.
Since Greenspan wasn't a decision maker wrt regulation, it's unclear why his opinion on regulation is any more relevant than his opinion on bubblegum. It's particularly interesting that his opinion is thought more important than the actions of congress critters who actually had a role in regulation.

I note that Dodd, Obama, Sen. Clinton, and Kerry all received significant donations from AIG and other investment houses and oversaw their regulation. Barney Franks was particularly vehement in telling us that Fannie and Freddie were perfectly safe and didn't need any regulation. (Which reminds me, Fannie and Freddie announced significant bonuses recently.)

Yet, we're talking about Greenspan.

The fact remains that there was significant regulation of AIG's biz. Any argument which starts from the assumption that there wasn't is fatally flawed.
>> Come on, I am a computer-savvy, technology-loving, ad-blocking geek with a huge PC-per-capita ratio and a hefty tech gadget/software monthly budget, how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?

Dropbox is one that immediately comes to mind that has solved a very hard problem that I pay for.

Also keep in mind that these startups are 10 weeks old and are at most 3 people. Sometimes solving hard problems takes time. Sometimes it's the byproducts of the original idea that end up solving a really hard problem (such as a new web server).
> I'm an Apple-user

Would you mind clicking this link...
I came to post the exact same thing. The familiar government cry of 'won't someone think of the children'.

I note with interest the mention of the Federal Police (like FBI for US residents) looking into it. Just what is the AFP going to do if someone obtains the information from a foreign location, and then posts it on a non-Australian website? Send them a threatening letter?

The beauty of the internet is that it continues to evade politicians attempts to regulate, control and tax. You need a totalitarian state to gain complete control, and even that is very porous.
Microsoft Releases IE 8 to Combat Rival Browsers
As for not "hard problems," there's nothing disreputable about completing an achievable unit of concrete work for your own edification and profit. Maybe hard problems are hard because they don't fit into anyone's idea of an "achievable unit of concrete work." So, earning experience and capital by solving smaller problems to create tools which may help solve bigger problems is a respectable and intelligent approach to solving hard problems. On the contrary, in my experience, an obsession with a "great ambitious idea" without an obsession for solving an innumerate small, immediate problems which arise from that great idea is the "most important ingredient" for non-productive, self-deluded thrash.

As for YC companies: I pay for Wufoo and Dropbox. I also like Virtualmin, but I have yet to purchase a paid subscription. I will when I deploy my next intra-company web application since I can then claim that I outsourced tech support. Then, I can blame Joe to my coworkers when there are problems with the server. >:) The free blame is worth the extra few dollars a month.

I understand the burnout from the constant cheerleading in the push press. So, unsubscribe from the news. If something is important, you'll learn about it in a few weeks by word of mouth or when you search for it to learn something specifically.

However, while the "same old share, sync, discover, publish stuff" seems trite to us in technology, it is still a miracle of technology from a historical perspective. I mean: wow, you can send any information anywhere anytime immediately for nearly free. I don't think the applications for that deep magic could be fully exploited yet.
The technical term is "flight to quality" and it's actually an indicator of economic hard times.
presumably...
Unless you're using 'intelligence' to mean something other than what the article means by it, incorporating intelligence is not the hard part.
a large number of YC companies have thousands to millions of users who love them.

flickr was not the first sharing photos website by far. youtube wasn't the first video online. and your example, yahoo and google. yahoo was an online list of interesting webpages, hand edited. google was another search engine.

yes yahoo grew up to be a portal, and google showed us search means great ads. but they hardly did it in three months.

[edit]

oh yeah, and yahoo is burning out. and google is still only making money in one way (ok plus search appliance last i heard).