skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I really don't understand the point. Can you explain to me several different user cases for your site? How many people out there do you think will want to use your sleep.fm?

Why does an alarm clock have to be a social networking site? This seems to be a rather utilitarian thing that works perfectly fine via the multiple alarm clocks I already own. All of my friends would use a service like this to mess with me, if I gave them privileges to wake me up. I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to abuse it if the roles were reversed.
I remember seeing it in one of your comments Paul. Am I mistaken?
Just out of curiosity: do you use speech recognition software, or do your fingers just naturally tend to type "armature" instead of "amateur"?
Interesting article about Slashdot and CmdrTaco
7 Steps to Closing Big Sales
Here are 7 steps that will help increase your sales results.
I'd be interested to hear why as well.

I find it's invaluable as you can have a web browser on one side and your code on the other.
This was 10 years ago. Has it happened now? I doubt it.
Thanks so much for taking time to do a thorough write up of our product!

"nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors"... This is exactly the experience we want people to have when they use Bountii. Shoppers shouldn't have to spend 12 hours figuring out whether to give nearly $1000 to a vendor like Jepago (2/10 rating on resellerratings.com), when they can pay the same amount or less for the same product from a top retailer like Newegg.

Based on your feedback and others, we are working to make ZIP code entry more prominent, as it's something everyone should be using everytime they visit Bountii.

-John
Interesting that the 51st most popular site on the internet cannot be sold for even a few million bucks, despite repeated attempts. pg has said YC (and the vast majority of other investors) wouldn't fund a porn venture, not due to any ethical qualms, but because there is no good exit option, and I guess this is pretty solid proof of that.
Your site is slow.
How does it deal with different time zones?
I really, really like the design.
Thanks! We'll definitely post our launch here.
Looks really sexy.
Ask him to run trav (tree-fold) on the code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32766
I can never spell amateur right so I copied and pasted my text into open office then somehow proceeded to pick the wrong word to replace my mispelling.
Visually, this site shouts "Web 2.0!!!" like no other. Going from the simple, clean layout of Hacker News to that was jarring. I suggest you drop at least one standard Web 2.0 design element. Personally, I'd lose the reflections and tone down the drop shadows.

It's also not clear to me what this product actually does. That may be because I don't have a background in marketing and don't know the jargon very well, but it might also be that your content reads like marketing fluff. In 150 words or fewer, what does this service do?
Sleep.FM is introducing a new form of communication that further enhances our always connected digital society. The always connected generation enjoys IM, Voip, Email, Social Networking, Twitter, text messaging, chat rooms, lifecasting and now they can start off their mornings providing each other with personal greetings, pertinent information or having fun with one another through alarm clock messaging.

Yes, this definitely can be used for practical jokes(which some may enjoy and others not, but either way it's something both parties will talk about). Practical jokes aside, we have used Sleep.FM' Social Alarm Clock to send...

- Happy Birthday alarm messages
- Messages detailing an important meeting has moved to an earlier time
- My colleague's cousin in Iraq being awakened by his kids alarm messages
- My friends(newlyweds) who have different sleep schedules
waking each other up

The Social Alarm Clock has been wrapped around a modern concept(a social network), one that allows users to regulate who sends them alarm messages, as well as upload alarm message to their Sleep.FM friends. As a social network there more ways to monetize users, as if you look at lone applications like Skype and Twitter they are challenged in this regards!
The stuff at SomaFM and dj dusty's Afternoon Nap help get me in the zone.

http://somafm.com/

http://www.downtempo.org/
The alarm clock time is set by the time on your computer.
I will resist the urge to submit every chapter
He just got a five-year, $10 million, grant to look for it. Charles Simonyi is looking for it. And I know of a group who, after 12 years of research, has recently found it. I think you'll hear more soon.
Pike's comment at the beginning of the Markovified text is brilliant:

> For those unfamiliar with M. Baudrillard's work, the thesis of the essay is, in a nutshell, that reality is indistinguishable from good simulation.
float precision issues make me nervous (although it's probably ok here), not to mention log() is kind of expensive compared to bit shifting

why not just something like

def fn(n):
ret=1;
while ret < n: ret <<= 1;
return ret

(news.yc/browsers mangle whitespace; proper formatting is left as an exercise to the reader)
Now that I think about it....this concept may be better suited as a facebook application. I think the high-schoolers may have fun waking each other up for school.
Open Social API docs are online
Excellent find! I really miss the core concepts behind the original facebook. It could have been so much more if Zuckerberg had chosen to expand vertically instead of horizontally.
Just a thought, but why not implement a clustering algorithm to disambiguate products in the search results? Suffix tree clustering should get you pretty close...

Are there any product search engines which do this yet? I know froogle doesn't, but proper disambiguation seems like it could be a killer feature if done right.
You could use that approach in Java...

public int roundUpToPowerOfTwo(int i) {
return 1 << (int)(Math.ceil(Math.log(i)/Math.log(2)));
}

...but the first approach that occurred to this Java coder was instead...

public int roundUpToPowerOfTwo(int i) {
int rounded = 1;
while(rounded<i) rounded <<= 1;
return rounded;
}
facebook in last 3 years gone from a milion dollar valuation to 15 billion.

Google has its grudge against Facebook, microsoft has invested and created a high valuation and facebook potentially launching a ad service with better user preference knowledge than its old adsense platform

facebook is growing and has a mindshare of top 16-30 year olds, the youth whom every advertiser targets.

Facebook app development is not easy, no ajax, fancy UI for now, but as a innovator and a great developers dveloping facebook and facebook apps they can overcome those.

if google had to team with up everybody to compete against facebook and facebook application developers then facebook has been able to achieve what it intended to.

but over time expect opensocial to add other API besides current widgetting capabilities as they dont want to look like a cheap imitation.

also I suspect google would be writing some intermediate code for interfacing developer apps with other opensocial sites.

most of this communication would be via REST and JSON

for developers and development companies like ours we would put our bets on apps/sites which give us better revenues and development oppurtunities. we would continue with facebook apps and may port some to opensocial if demand exists
Dissecting Marc Andreesen's elevator pitch for Ning
I'm sorry, and I really hope I'm not the first person to tell you this, but I just don't think this is a very good idea. I just can't see why anyone would ever want to use a Social Alarm Clock. I don't like waking up anyways, being Social isn't going to make it better. If there is one time when I am fine having absolutely no social interaction, it is in the 10 seconds a day when I wake up. I don't want to do any of the things your site allows me to do. It doesn't seem like very many other people here want to either.

I think there are some ways you could adapt this to be more viable but in its current form it just really isn't going to work. If you want to go forward with this idea, I would recommend widget'izing it, this is one function that would be more useful integrated into an existing social network.

Also, I don't think very many people have a computer sitting next to them to use as an alarm clock.
I had to scroll horizontally, and the text input boxes are not exactly in the surrounding block.

I am using Safari 3.
hi

thanks... it is not compatible for MAC yet.
It's like!.. a cellphone.
Perhaps learning from Facebook's mistakes... looks like the only thing open to non-partner developers so far is the Orkut sandbox, and even that requires approval. sigh...
I tried it and it made my neck hurt. I prefer a virtual desktop if I want multiple workspaces. Why move your head when you can make the screen move for you?
I'm flattered and amused in the same time that this is a rip-off of ideas from an anonymous post I've made a few weeks back on news.yc:

http://jottit.com/88ta6/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60326
What's really nice about it is that it provides persistence capabilities as well. So you can utilize Google's server infrastructure to save your application data. I believe this makes it so much easier to scale.
OiNK (Alan Ellis) is looking for a job
Funny thread! :)

I guess the thing here is that bit operators are not really "in you face" in Java. If you are programming in assembler, or even C, bits will be what you know. Programming at a higher level, you may not be that aware of bit functions and how to use them in real life. You should, but many are not.

The second approach by gojomo here is neat and effective and works directly at the bits instead of bloating with creating Strings and other objects for this simple task. So it's not the fault of the tool, it about the abstraction level people are thinking in.
MIT replacing Scheme with Python for Intro CS class
I think it's fine that Google spearheads this effort, but there's too much Googleness on all of it. Basing parts of it on their existing APIs doesn't seem like wise re-use, it just seems lazy, and a truly half-assed commitment to creating something really open. Google should have taken the path of being a totally neutral steward. Instead they erred on the side of making this an open version of The Orkurt Platform.
Leapin' Leopard? Not Really
I think continuations is an advantage if you don't use ajax.
When you use Ajax, continuations in a web framework aren't needed. This has been my experience with the last two web applications I've written using CL and UCW.
Microsoft Doesn't Care How Much Facebook is Worth
To format code, add a whole bunch of returns and then indent 4-5 spaces

(5 returns and 6 spaces later
whitespace does what I want)

I think it's supposed to be 4 and 4, but I had some issues once and since then I just pile on returns and spaces until I get bored.
private messages to other users
Very interesting! Do you have some source / link for this?
Oh, please, can anybody correct the title? It's "Fields medalist", not "Field's medalist".
I think those ideas are pretty much floating around these days, so I wouldn't automatically assume that they were ripped off your jottit article.
Report from the front: launch of Opensocial
Wal-Mart Sells $199 Linux Computer
Dot-con job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride
IPCC Scientist's Nobel Moment: No developing catastrophe nor human activity cause
Thanks VentureHacks!! Just one question: I haven't raised $44 Million or sold my previous companies for $4.2 and $1.6 Billion. Would this weaken my pitch at all? ;)
There really is no excuse to build anything that takes a great deal of time. There is not a shortage of good, simple ideas. You are forfeiting many of the advantages of being an internet company if you are building something that can't be prototyped in weeks rather than months.
Tanked my back button as soon as I tried to back out of the first page.

I'm going to chime in and say that this doesn't seem like a very good idea. Of all the things to cram into the social trend, waking me up seems like the worst. I cannot see any reason to let my friends wake me up, or for that matter anything other than my cell phone alarm clock.

Others have suggested a FB app, but even that seems like something I would never use. Just my two cents.
WANTED: Guerilla Marketing Techniques for www.Share-House.com.au (no matter how crazy)
The back button problem is on the main splash page. It looks like you are doing some kind of javascript redirection. So there are actually two entries in history. When you go back one page in history, it jumps forward again.

Incidentally, there have been several related products in recent years. Someone (maybe Sharper Image?) was selling an alarm clock that supported downloadable alarm sounds. I don't remember exactly, but I think it worked like those digital picture frames. That's not to say that you couldn't do it better. But I think your biggest issue may be that most people don't sleep next to their computer.
ok, but how many online to-do lists does the world need? assuming you're a hacker, if your 'good, simple idea' is easy to develop, expect to get your ass kicked by someone smarter than you in business and marketing who can pay a few code monkeys to pump it out.

good hackers get leverage and sustainable competitive advantage by solving hard problems, or at least creating software that is difficult to write. saying it's not worth building anything that takes time doesn't make any sense.
Google buys Share House vertical search
With Google buying out local vertical search www.Share-House.com.au, could this be the start of google trying to be VC even to the very small?
How to teach a Bayesian spam filter to play chess
Crazy. This article is three and a half years old, and it already looks like something from the early half of "Our Dumb Century," especially when it's sometimes spelled as "face book."
Cleantech incubators thrive in Israel
Yahoo has an API, which google no longer does. +1 for Yahoo.
Set Ion's mod key to super (aka the windows key) and everything starts playing nicely :p
...I think what they are attempting is closer to "extortion" than mere selling.
Imperium: Google's March Towards Becoming America's Biggest Company
Google Opens OpenSocial Site And Provides Orkut Support
Ordering information: how about a new language based on Bayesian abstractions?
"OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs...."

That's great. I can do all the programming work, the users can do all the work of setting up their social network, and Google can keep all of our data for us. Gee. What a deal.
The price filter isn't always good enough though. For instance, searching for "laser printer" brings up printers and cartridges, but on the low end of the price scale the prices are similar. Could you improve the search so that adding "-cartridge" eliminates cartridge results?

Really nice product search engine though. I got great results for the Nokia N800.
What are the bit operators in Common Lisp? My google-fu fails me...
From homeless to billionaire
Did Google bluff Microsoft into over paying for Facebook?
How about teaching it how to do ADDITION?

This would be a better experiment because (1) it is simpler and faster, (2) the feedback is unambiguous, (3) the ability to add is verifiable.

Essentially you supply it with all sums of all pairs of numbers from 0 to 99 and then see if it can compute 100+100.
Smartest thing anyone has said today about Open Social?
Title comes from Marc Andreessen referring to this article
Here is a mediocre lisper and an advanced lisper's take on the question (edit: and also another lisper's take, too):

http://lispy.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/my-solution-to-the-rou...
Baltimore. Biophysics.
OpenSocial makes the web better (Official Google Blog)
Just to throw out an idea, why not track historical prices and graph them in the same manner that finance websites graph stock prices? People do this all the time, but don't really have a tool for it. Seems like it would be fun, and (if it caught on) would result in an awful lot of repeat visitors.

...of course, it would be trivially easy for google to reproduce that.
It's the Data, Stupid
Business Users Love Their BlackBerrys More Than Any Other Smartphone, Study Says
Ranking of business-handheld-user satisfaction is based on factors like ease of use, form factor and battery life.
Compile time evaluation in Haskell
Cellphones team up to become smart CCTV swarm
Taiwanese to soon use mobile phones for subway, shopping
Everex to launch Linux NOTEBOOKS under $300 next year
Facebook: Google's Cutting Us!
Good Luck To All YC Interviewees This Weekend!
You're all champs and let us know how it went!
Adobe better give up on their web version of photoshop then...
Lightning quick isn't hard if you just put everything in RAM, and RAM is so cheep these days.
Travis, I know the guys who made ComicVine. You should talk to one of them before you fully launch, they had a really tough time getting this to flip and it's still running, but it's really important that you partner with some comic book companies because no one wants to buy you (because they just see you as a threat), according to one of the founders of ComicVine.
I generally looked for keywords in a Lexis-Nexis search, Google search, and then just looked around for anyone who was doing what we were already doing.
Napster - Music Subsciptions Are Overrated
The conclusion as I understand it is:
Since reversing climate change is a hard and expensive process, we should give up trying.
The original author is actually wrong..especially using his chess analogy. Incremental improvements will get you nowhere.
The best way to raise your chess game is to play against people who are faaar better than you. Do this for one week, and you will find yourself crushing your [former] peers.

Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)
I think there's something there, but probably not in its current form, as rms says. I think it's probably misleading to call it an alarm clock, since people associate it with waking up. Yeah, unless you're hot, I don't want you waking me up. Reminders might be a better metaphor.

I have a friend who doesn't keep track of anything, and relies on his girlfriend to tell him when to do what. Whether this is a good way to go about a relationship is debatable, I can see how you'd set alarms for people to do something because it's important to you, rather than the person executing it. Say like, "pick up groceries at 5pm", but send it at 5pm so he has no excuse not to remember.

Happy birthdays wishes. "hey how did the date go?" messages right after your friend's date. "how did that pitch go?" messages after your colleague got devoured by VC's. What's in common is that you sent the message at the time you remembered, and they received it at a time when it's relevant to them, while you might be out golfing at the time. You can seem thoughtful at the moment it's relevant to the receiver of the alarm message, and when it's convenient to you.

Or you can send messages to your future self (say 5 years later), so you'd get messages from your past self saying, "this is what I want to do by the time I'm your age. Have you done them yet?" Or you send friends messages later on saying "I was really mad that you ate my ice cream last sat, but I was too shy to say anything at the time."

I think it's probably worth exploring what you can do with asynchronous messages that don't get delivered immediately, cuz that's essentially what it is. Limiting it to just messages you can send for waking is limiting, but perhaps not as easy to sell to people otherwise.

While widgetizing it is one way to go, I think this best fits on a mobile app of some sort. Mobile devices are seen as personal extensions of self. This sort of thing falls under that category.
"...I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see..."
Wal-Mart has a notebook for $348 with 1 gigabyte of ram and Windows. Sell the Windows Vista COA on eBay and install Linux on the notebook.

http://holiday.ri-walmart.com/?section=secret&utm_source...
Bug Labs - Open Source Hardware: A very awesome moddable handheld
Facebook VC: No Rush For More $, Would Work W/Google
The 15 Dumbest Apple Predictions Of All Time
Become a Del.icio.us Power User
News.YC meetup: San Francisco, Saturday, November 10, 2007
So how about another unofficial News YC entrepreneurial meetup in San Francisco?

This time we'll piggy back on SuperHappyDevHouse. The organizers were nice enough to accommodate a sub-meeting for startup founders. So you get two-in-one: attend SHDH and at the same time have a dedicated room for startup entrepreneurs.

SHDH is the most awesomest developer meetup in the Bay Area (http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse21). And with more than 150 developers attending every month, the spectrum of interests is very wide. By singing up to the sub-meeting you reserve a spot in the cool entrepreneurs section :) And, it's easier to find people doing the startup thing like you.

At SHDH you get a really nice environment, free wifi, free snacks and drinks, and even a free dinner. It's simply a wonderful day to meet people. They do accept donations, though, to cover some of their costs.

If you're NOT doing a startup but still want to attend, SHDH is open for all. More info here:
http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse21

However, if:

1. You eat ramen at least twice a week :)

2. Your startup is everything you do. Or you're in the process of making it so.

3. You have a product already or at least a demo.

Then:

1. Sign up here so I can send you updates.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=20982002600

2. On the event page post your news.yc username and a link to your startup (optional).

3. On the event day bring your laptop and be ready to show your product and get feedback.
Leopard early adopters suffer for the rest of us
Yahoo exec apologizes to U.S. lawmakers on China
What is it like to work at Google?
It seems to have the same drawback like all similar sites I've seen, s.a. Froogle, etc.

I search for Dell Inspiron Laptop and the first pages only contain batteries and accessories. I guess if you sort by price it will always happen like that. You'd either need to label products according to what category they actually are, or just throw out results that are clearly ridiculous: $5 for a laptop.