skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ditto. I spent 60 seconds trying to figure that out and left.

The only advantage over flickr I can see is that it's free - but even that is apparently only for alpha.
Placeholder: comment posted on or about January 16th, 2009 (+/- timezones). I am obliged to attempt to claim this idea with a time stamp because of some employment submissions I've made recently; this post could be considered demonstrable ability to have good ideas.

Searching for this "basic idea tag cloud" doesn't really seem to result in any previously dated articles/comments/tweets with these ideas written as such regarding how Twitter can be monetized and sustain. However, there have been quite a few after:

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135016

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134954

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/outside-voices-small-business/20...

I was simply finding it interesting that the ReadWriteWeb article's idea was monetizing Twitter by selling off friends . . . reminiscent of the whole "sacrificing facebook friends for a Whopper," thing awhile ago. But my ideas are better. :) 04 March 2009
If you want your photos on Facebook, divvyshot is the best way to get them there, as well as the best way for Facebook users to receive them, but I'm not sure how much of the functionality is in beta/secret.
I am really new to Twitter, forced on by some friends. In all honesty, I feel yow. I am going to force myself to use it for a week. Perhaps we need to migrate away from the web based portal to the site? I am going to try a more power app.
Maybe I will figure it out, right now it is just noise.
Ask PG: how about using this model for HN monetization?
www.ligertail.com

hybrid of digg and adwords.

if you have something to share, you can see the analytics for each piece of content and the spot it occupies. based on that data you can choose to place your content anywhere on the site - bidding against others.

once submitted, the community votes on the content's quality.

in theory, the system can be applied to any entity with traffic (hn, digg, facebook, ny times, google).
What pirated software do you all use?
Using evolving images for image compression: 256x256 image in 1k
Hilariously right now I want to watch Daily Show and Colbert from yesterday, a full 24 hours after it aired, and it's not there yet.
As much as I hate to answer this, its true.
I buy the software that I use a lot, but as a startup, I end up doing a million different things and sometimes I need a piece of software that is too damn expensive (over a hundred dollars).

I just cannot justify buying one of these if I am only going to use it to modify a few files and then leave it on the shelf for 10 months. If I there was a pay-per-use or pay-per-day, then that might be a different story.
Have you tried TweetDeck? The 'group' by searching feature is pretty good.

Also, the other suggested solution is to consider using different twitter accounts for different groups of people...
Gifted Kid: Is It a Cheetah?
Thanks. Besides being great for my mind, can I compile an assembly in F# and include it in my .NET application? And if so, do you have any real world examples of this being useful?
Not at all. I mean, here I am talking about the same thing.
Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately what I'm seeing is that each time they submit it's with a (somewhat) different IP address. For a given link, they might be all within 173.x.y.z, but if I ban 173.*, won't there be legitimate IP addresses in that range?
Checking a publicly-available URL blacklist is a good idea, thanks!

I may well end up adding a captcha of some sort. However, that effectively means I can't have a public "create a DecentURL" API call like I do now -- they'd have to sign up and have an API key or something. That's a bit of a bummer.
Honestly, I think it's a design issue. Interaction design, not visual design (the site's very pretty) because the answer to your question is right there on the home page, it's just nowhere near prominent enough to grab your attention in the 10 seconds you mentioned.

"No account needed!

It couldn't be easier! You can share photos with friends and family right now!"

You can tell it's important because it's repeated again directly below, with a minor change in wording:

"
Share your photos NOW - No account needed!
"

That's actually huge, I'm guessing it's even the main feature that sold YC on accepting them (to me, "photo sharing made stupid simple" = "no account needed") especially considering that trend in recent YC startups like posterous.

Actually, posterous is a great example, go look at their home page, the super prominent crossed out "make an account" line at the top of the page gets across the point really nicely.
Great work, the site truly looks excellent. I love the ability to keep a group updated, with pictures, in realtime.
Mathematician and computer scientist Jacob "Jack" Schwartz dead at 79
Vision - Reality = Creative Tension
Consider adding captcha on the signup, to prevent automation!

Also, can users email their photos, even if they are not registered?
This reminded me of the utterly absurd "Pepsi Gravitational Field" marketing document being passed around a while back... except that it isn't a joke.

Remember when reading this that somebody did in fact get paid to write it.
what do you do if this is your superior ?
What funding do you really need? Living with your parents takes care of all your biggest expenses. All you have to do is write code. And you have plenty of time to learn how to write code if you don't know how to.
OpenDNS already allows you to block sqatting sites (or any from a few different categories) via dns. http://www.opendns.com/solutions/homenetwork/parental/

"parked domains" is on that list.
Allow email addresses to contain a plus. It's something a lot of gmail users like to do.
Nvidia may make x86 CPUs? Good for them. Good for consumers. And good for Intel.
One acronym: OSS

Use OSS for as much as possible!
A little YC easter egg: If you keep refreshing until you get to the little girl's birthday photos, you'll notice all of the names are of the YC principals + baby George.

Nice touch.
Pong, ahh. I almost wish I had been born sooner so I could have watched computers become mainstream.
Twitter's Endgame: Search is Chat?
Will searches yield conversations?
Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays
It's drag and drop from the finder to the "Mini Divvy" app. Then it does some sort of synchronization to everywhere that's registered interest in that "event".

Not sure what the use cases are, and whether it justifies a whole other app, but it's an interesting spin on sharing. You don't just get notified of something, you just get the file.
Add to the fact that the you want to recoup the price you paid for the device in cheaper books. I bet that that would incentivize myself 200% towards buying more books.
Next Silicon Valley is emerging in India
My TechNet subscription gets me Windows and Office for practically nothing. That alone is huge. Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, etc., is free. VirtualBox or VMWare Server, also free.

My OS X came from the Bay. I will buy a copy of Snow Leopard eventually.
Here's how I grok Twitter. Others may have a different opinion:

A few years ago, I was working on some contracts that had me regularly traveling. Plenty of friends couldn't quite be bothered to keep track of where I was at any given day, so I started using my IM status line to show where I was and what I happened to be doing. And this was useful among the group of us. When I started using Twitter, I used it the same way: letting people who care (might not be the world) know where I was and what I was working on.

Now I use Twitter not only for quick "what I'm doing" updates, but also for quick "what I just read" or "what I'm wondering about" updates. They're the sort of comments and thoughts that aren't worth a blog post, but are still worth talking about. For example: yesterday I spent a few minutes looking at ways to combine my IRC and Jabber clients and maybe Twitter too. So I wrote a few tweets about it. That night I was out at a tech social event and some friends commented about the tweets, sparking some interesting conversation.

When I'm paying attention to other people's tweets (which isn't all that often), I'm surprised how much I learn about breaking news events, tech or otherwise.

I don't use Twitter's website much at all and I can't stand any tweets being "pushed" to me. I use Moodblast (for mac) to send tweets since it also updates my Facebook, Skype and GTalk status. If it weren't that simple, I wouldn't do it. I still don't have a solution I like for reading other people's tweets. I like reading them on my iPhone using Twitterific, but I don't do that very often. I'm leaning towards using a Twitter Jabber or Twitter IRC bot so that it fits within the tools I already use.

So that's how I use Twitter.
Not only do I not use any, but in thinking about this question I realized that the only client apps I care about are Firefox and the shell. Everything else I use is online. If there was a way to get a shell in Firefox (which there probably is, somehow) I would be fine with a computer that only ran one app. Which means Andreessen's vision has now happened; at least for n = 1.

Desktop sw companies are about to discover a variant of Wilde's remark: the only thing worse than being pirated is not being pirated.
I like the simplicity, but I'm not yet sold on posting event photos here instead of Facebook. Maybe the ToS would be a deciding factor. Speaking of which, what are the ToS, especially with regard to content rights?

Bug: the Java upload applet won't load for me.
Arrrrgh! Registration doesn't allow + in email address.
I'd be similarly ashamed about the way Java UIs tends to look. GTK bindings or bust I always say.
OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems
Donate that dollar to charity and deduct it, you're below the cap, easy enough; you're right though, it is stupid.
Typically, incompressible flow is valid in gases for Mach numbers less than 0.3, so this is relevant for automotive aerodynamics and wind turbines, but not for turboprops, jet engines, compressors, gas turbines, and most airplanes.

It may be extensible, though
Live broadcast here tomorrow? http://www.justin.tv/angelconf
These things (video games, word processors, sequels) were available, but they weren't common. You can go out and buy a tank today if you want (http://www.tanksforsale.co.uk/), but tanks aren't something the average American would own.
The shell is kind of just a launcher for additional programs though. So seems only fair that you count the other local programs you run (maybe just ssh?).
Obligatory linkage: http://www.linuxalt.com/
280 North’s Atlas Bridges The Gap Between Web Apps And Native iPhone Applications
Keep in mind that when you're fitting a compression algorithm so close to the test cases, what you're really doing is pushing data from the test cases into the compression algorithm. For instance, prior knowledge that blurs are important gets pushed into the algorithm.

This is why when testing compression algorithms against each other you usually weigh the total of the code and the compressed versions of some common corpora which is large relative to what you expect code sizes to be.

If you don't do this, I mean, you can do lossless compression of the Mona Lisa into one bit while remaining able to display any other JPG. Check bits of input. If first bit is 1, then decompress into the Mona Lisa. If first bit is 0, the rest of the stream is a JPG, interpret as normal.

Still, I'm of the opinion that it remains an outrageously good tech demo for GAs. (Visual, easily described task, results anyone can appreciate, etc.)
Sure, party pictures are one thing, and facebook handles those quite well. I don't believe Divvyshot stands to take that market from facebook. That said, if you've ever travelled overseas, it's likely you've had friends and family ask for your photos... and facebook just doesn't cut it with that use case IMHO.
The—what is it that Merlin Mann calls him, the Webcock?—is quickly mutating on our internet. No longer is he simply knocking on the doors of the internet, asking for 30 seconds of your time. Now he does this. He writes a long, mildly controversial blog post as an opinion piece, disagreeing with someone else on the basis of well-traveled platitudes like worth and eyeballs and valuations—you know, the things that only professional-marketing-consultants-cum-bloggers-cum-entrepreneurs ever, EVER talk about—but every inch of his fucking copy is riddled with self-serving spam like that. He's the grown-up version of the Techcrunch commenter who says 'It's very interesting. I am glad that you wrote about this. I have also made a web app using SMS perhaps you would find it interesting kill kill kill kill kill kill'

Nothing invalidates an opinion faster than a plug.
Just to be clear: you can't justify buying the software, but you can justify stealing it.
You are displaying people's email addresses? And you say you don't like spam?! Shame on you. I'm already weary giving divvyshot my email address, and now divvyshot is passing it on to every other registered user. And of course I couldn't tell that it was going to do that ahead of time b/c I had to log in to see that feature.

(Looks like you can prevent the display of your email address by entering a display name in your profile, but that is not obvious at all.)
Macheist's Genius Twitter Marketing
Wow, great idea. They're going to cause their followers to explode overnight which will convert to future sales for them from the Twitter account. Genius.
With all due respect, I think "I need" is a weak excuse.

We'd probably all agree that copyright law is a terrible mess. Still, I don't think that justifies deciding that you get to take what you want and then pay if you like the license terms.
Yes, true. I use the standard Unix utils. Sounds weird to call them desktop apps though. They feel more like part of the OS.

I think of the desktop as something that got put on top of Unix in OSX, and terminal windows as holes in it.
Orkut Unblocked
Unblock Orkut using this fantastic Orkut proxy site. Tell your friends about this great unblock Orkut proxy site
Python, Linux (Ubuntu), darcs (source code control), apache, mysql, php, subscriptions to MSDN and Apple Dev. (allmydata.org)
There seems to be a difference of opinion about this: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22next+silicon+valley%22
> What other economic activities would be a good fit for an educated population willing to take risks?

Solving the engineering challenges on sub-sea high voltage DC power transmission would be a worthy goal. Iceland has vast geothermal power reserves. CO2 permit trading would be a nice complimentary business, though I suspect it could get a little out of hand...
Oh this is totally going to end up as a huge venture capital fad. 5 years? 20 years? Hard to say exactly when.

After that, it's totally going to hit the world like a sack of bricks.
I can't sign up!
Please increase the email address' field to 50 charachters, so I would be able to sign up!

Thanks!
You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very interesting: http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls).

The Java applet also seems to hang firefox for me (Ubuntu 8.10 x64). I don't have another 64bit linux machine handy, so I can't tell if it's something particular to my setup though.
I've been using the plugin for a few weeks. It doesn't often come into effect (I don't misspell that often), but it is nice to have when I do!
Very cool algorithm demo. How well would this compare to a very extreme JPEG compression?

Also, I'm not an image compression expert, but I wonder if you could use this technique as a pre-pass before a more standard image compression algorithm to improve the overall results. In other words, maybe subtract the image created using the polygons from the original image and then compress the result using JPEG (or something else more suitable?).
Most of the software we use is produced by small shops, is open source, or is SaaS. A lot of big name software simply does more than we need it to (price isn't usually an issue).
In Biotech or Bioinfo industry, real work is done only by PhD or Masters. So, if you want to enter the industry, go to graduate school.

I am not sure how easy would it be to start a biotech startup at your stage because biotech startups require a lot of funding to get started. However, you can always start a bioinformatics startup which is akin the web/software startups. But even with Bioinfo startups, it is hard to monetize because the culture of open source bioinfo tools is quite prevelant in academia and industry.
Y Combinator’s Divvyshot Launches Dead Simple Group Photo Sharing
Not just no, but hell no. I sell software for money, and I will shut down before I steal from somebody else in the same business.

When I need commercial software, I either pay the money for it or I do without. There are great options for doing without these days: much of what you really need is OSS, and if you absolutely have to have something, well, you're a programmer and gcc is free last time I checked. Get writing, chum.

If you're thinking "But it would take me, like, a thousand man-years to make something as good as Photoshop", well, there is always the "Sell your labor to someone, use it to buy the ridiculously-less-expensive-than-one-thousand-man-years product" option.
> Top marginal rate is 35% now.

There's a surtax that puts it at 39+.

> The SSI stops after 105k (or so),

Today.

> Phaseout deductions never _increase_ marginal tax rates, so also immaterial.

Phaseouts affect the amount of income taxed and thus affect the amount of taxes due for a given increase in income. Suppose that earning $1k more costs me $300 in deductions due to phaseouts. The result is that my AGI has gone up by $1.3k. Assuming no bracket change, the taxes owed because of that $1k increase is 1.3x the bracket rate.

Let's put some numbers on it. Suppose that the tax rate for that bracket is 10%. That's $100 for the $1k and $30 for the $300 for a total of $130 owed. Do you really want to argue that the marginal rate for that $1k is not 13%?

I also left out sales taxes. Their effect depends on what the mix of goods purchased (at least some food is tax free in most jurisdictions while gas, tobacco, and booze isn't) and the average tax rate up to that point.

For a state like CA, with sales taxes typically over 8% and soon to be 9%, that can add another 3-5% to the marginal tax burden.
Looking on the bright side, at least it isn't clearly worse than flickr. It can improve.
In my experience it was a lot of java infrastructure work that was very far removed from biology. It was the same sort of thing that one would do at a bank or insurance company.

The pay was fine, but lower than other industries. I think this is because of the high percentage of academics in the field. PhDs in the sciences have worked for $17,000 a year for so long that $60,000 a year seems like a king's ransom.
Thailand Songkran Festival 2009: World's Biggest Water Fight in Songkran Thailand
Here's my 10 second review: Firefox crashed trying to load the JVM for this. I'm not sure if I want to re-visit the site.
`+` doesn't work in emails.

TOS is scary.
Mashable, Disqus [YC S07] and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments
But even with Bioinfo startups, it is hard to monetize because the culture of open source bioinfo tools is quite prevelant in academia and industry.

I actually think it's harder to monetize because you have so few customers. If you make a bioinformatics tool, there's probably a few hundred potential companies that may need it, and probably only a few dozen of them are actually interested. Thus many of the tools become grant-funded open source projects because there's hardly anyone to sell to in the first place.

23andMe is interesting because they are the only bioinformatics startup I've heard of that also sells to consumers.
Just choose "show less" from the nice menu next to each item on hover
I strongly believe that having a grading system where a number of people need to have A for the grading system to be considered fair is harmful.
In the university I went to in France, exams are made so that the gaussian curve of results in centered around 60% (12/20 in the french way of counting) with grades under 40% considered to be failing grades.
Once you start having this kind of grading system, it forces the examinator to make the test hard and for that the best way is to have long tests (around 3-4 hours) where you have to apply the knowledge you gained on small projects (example a compilation exam where you have to work on a simplified subset of a natural language). Added to this, there was a healthy distrust of multiple choice questions and teachers who asked too much of them were considered by everyone as being lazy.

Contrast this with tests I took in the US at RIT where the questions were "When was the OpenGL committee founded?" (for a computer graphics class) or other such useless questions.

Homework was also different between both universities... In France, the graded homework were mostly medium to large size projects that took quite a few weeks to complete. In the Us, there was a much a higher number of busy work with small simple to do exercise that didn't really make student learn a lot (although I did have a few interesting homework projects so not everything was bad)...
IPhone gets Major League Baseball broadcasts. Be afraid, Sirius XM. Be very afraid.
Ask HN: Who is going to the O'Reilly E-Tech Conference?
I'm coming to the Bay Area March 7th - 14th to attend the O'Reilly E-Tech Conference. I'm an east coast guy, graduating from Penn State in May, and I'm looking to begin building my network out west. I'm working on a startup up in the social media analytics space, AM Analytics, and would be interested in meeting with anyone that's pursuing something similar.

http://en.oreilly.com/et2009
Would a shopping engine look bad if it added affiliate IDs to product URLs?
It's not unheard of to see a shopping engine use an affiliate program; Buzzillions.com lists Bizrate affiliate links in the right column of their homepage. Would a shopping engine without a CPC program be frowned-upon for adding affiliate IDs to product URLs?
You call it an alpha... did you want TechCrunch to cover it so soon:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot...
Come on, you can use only one application for you computer. Its name is Emacs :D (yes, Emacs can use to show images and play music. I would guess porting something like Gecko into would be possible. In that case, why bother a separate browser?)
Everything Microsoft. I am so damn tired of paying for Windows every time I buy a computer [I probably own about 10-15 copies of Windows by now], that I believe I'm entitled for everything Microsoft makes.

Why do I even care about Microsoft software? Because our customers do.

I also believe Adobe owes me Photoshop, a letter with apologies plus one of their programmers should become my personal bitch for a week - for all the damage they've done to me with flash and acrobat reader. Sadly, we bought a copy of CS3, because my partners didn't feel this way.
Summary of mobile/location based services in development
I was hoping that the bookmarks extension would be fixed to allow true, local, lightweight branching. Looks like I have to wait for a future fix.

The problem with bookmarks now is you can't selectively push from a bookmark (ie: only push the changes from one bookmark and not the others)
(over a hundred dollars)

You are literally the first consultant I have ever heard in my life who would mention a hundred dollars as if it were a lot of money.

Egads, man, you're a 1st world businessman, not a starving peasant in Africa. If it saves you an hour once a year it should be on the CC without you batting an eye. That's an extra hour of billable time and/or the prospect of more work because you're more efficient than the next guy, right?