skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The networking dialogs in control panel, especially setting up wireless, were a nightmare worse than any phone tree. Also, my wife's laptop locked up so bad that she had to take the battery out to shut it down. After a week of doing this every day, she got a MacBook Air.
The tendency of robotics news to be tinted with the Terminator story arc is very bad for the industry.

I have never read a story from Wired about robotics that didn't mention Terminator. That's just lazy writing. Engadget it pretty bad too.
Unless, of course, the article is actually quite good.
I had a friend once who was a professional blogger, though she lived in Costa Rica to reduce her cost of living and made most of her revenue through affiliate links to online casinos before the US started cracking down on gambling. Now that there's been a crackdown, blogging is less fun to her. She's become addicted to Twitter and found other work.
While the tone is sarcastic and downvoted, I somewhat agree with this poster. Maybe if this article were written six+ months ago, before the ad market tanked, this would have been a much more interesting topic.
Could you replace your image buttons by text buttons (or at least better image buttons). The buttons I see on my 15-inch monitor running ff3/ubuntu are really ugly)
For regular Image Search. Among images matching the search query, those central in the image-similarity graph are probably more relevant.
UserAgent and IP don't tell you who the person is.
They can be useful (capable of doing useful things), but very poor at communicating their abilities (poorly designed interfaces). Part of the gut feeling that a design is beautiful comes from it communicating well, not sending a cluttered or confusing impression. What does the feeling that a design is ugly tell you?

A lot of programmers spend so much time dealing with problems in the "plumbing" (functional) level that they neglect interface, so in effect, using the program is like plugging together wires and hoses in a box full of moving gears and grease. Unix pipes are great for getting stuff done, but a lot of people don't want to deal with things at that level.
Hi! A bit of time ago, a guy asked for a listing of everyone's startup on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=568951

So here it is! On Sunday I spent a few hours hacking together a wiki thing in Rails from scratch. A few things that need to be fixed, but otherwise, hope it's useful for you.

* Not restricted to YC. Any HN people can submit/edit.

(this comment used to be about how our VPS exploded and started OOMing.)
And the Air starts at 1799$ whereas most most netbooks have base configurations of ~400$.
Consumer broadband pricing has a lot more to do with last mile costs than in a datacenter.
This is very closely along the lines of what I have been thinking a lot about lately regarding investing. You are basically betting that a company will not go bankrupt (when the stock is worthless..). The rest of the price fluctuations are just people's opinions. If I buy stock in companies I know nothing about, how can I possibly predict how well they are doing against the competition and why they are not going to go bankrupt.

I think there is a place in an investment bank for quantitative analysis, but not for the regular investor. Most of the formulas they give are pretty shoddy anyway.

When I have money to invest I will probably buy a big ol' index fund, which is like betting on the US economy, which will (hopefully) always be doing well. I might also then invest in a few companies that I know, understand, and really like.
It was a slow news day so they dug through the 'meh' folder of their tips :)
Study finds
`most people who are likely to buy music want to download it quickly, too' or perhaps
`people who don't know how to download music aren't likely to do anything with the music at all'

The set of people buying music often, and people downloading are too much overlapped just because of the vast popularity of both buying and downloading to find any meaningful correlation between the sets. IMnsHO.
What sort of advantages does this have over hacking a Wii Remote?

You can type - it picks up the movement of tendons in the palm and back of your hand and tracks how your fingers are moving.
It always seemed like fair use to me
Those things you put on your hands just look lame

The newer prototypes look more technical, less medical, and generally better.
Ask HN: Releasing your business plan into the public?
I'm currently taking a part in a student business plan contest where the best 3 plans chosen by a jury will get a symbolic funding and I have a doubt I need you to help me with.

I was asked to give a version (even though it can be the version the jury will get) of my plan for release to the public. At that moment it occurred to me I was so obsessed with development of my idea that I missed to notice that jury apparently won't be signing any NDAs so that's got me a little bit worried.

Probably the only good thing here is that I'm at least aware that my business plan contains a non-revolutionary idea that isn't worth much. In a sense that if somebody had all the ingredients to pull of the plan they wouldn't really need me all that much me at that point. And from a point of view of somebody looking for an investor I get it that I shouldn't expect a big stake in the business if I come up with just this idea.

But talking with private investors is one thing.
What are your thoughts about giving your business plan to the public?
That's why I qualified with "most" and "virtually." I haven't actually done the math, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work out to something like >90% of the total energy for a long trip going into frictional losses. Consider any vehicle: the amount of the total energy that goes into generating actual motion is roughly proportional to the time it takes to accelerate to your final cruising speed, at which point all of the energy input goes into overcoming friction.
Related to that, had no idea there were less than 400k programmers. I guess when you are surrounded by them all day it seems like the profession is more common.
True, but last miles costs are primarily fixed, not marginal.
No, but then this is a list of startups founded by HNers :)
If anything, exposing your business plan will allow others to give you feedback on it. You'll get to hear wonderful things like "your plan sucks, you need to x and y or you'll never succeed, etc...". Hope you have a tough skin and can take criticism.

Seriously though, unless it is a really innovative idea that will revolutionize the world, then it's probably best to let others in on it. Who knows, maybe you'll get some positive feedback too. It may also prevent you from wasting time on something that won't work or just isn't feasible or may have already been done exactly how you want to do it.
My initial read was a quick one on my phone, so I went back to make sure I wasn't wrong....

"This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth."

- Just a noisy opinion, in my opinion.

"All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story."

- Nice job fitting in another baseless stance around a fact simply to legitimize said opinion by proximity. Conveniently left unsaid is the fact that the "twenty-four-hour news channels" he holds up on a pedestal are themselves 24-hour opinion channels. Have you ever stayed home from work for a day and watched CNN or Fox News?

"Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed."

- Again, assigning a label ("sensationalism") to blogs as if it didn't exist before blogs did. National Enquirer-type rags aside, all the major news channels before the internet have been perfecting this art for the past couple of decades.

The author is not presenting an unbiased report of facts. He is presenting his own viewpoint DISGUISED as a neutral report.

This report, coming from a "reputable" source like the WSJ is a great example of why the democratization of the publishing business is good for the public. There may be a lot of fluff out there, as he states, but the good stuff rises to the top.
Interesting that "proper" is different from "faster/better/more directly"

I know what you mean, its just kind of sad that this is the case.
Great link! Thanks!
So if the 'Add Startup' button isn't responding should I just hit refresh over and over again? ;)
Don't worry about it. Most #s in the business plan are usually made up so noone really takes them that seriously.

The business plan is mostly there for you, to think through things
Computer science in JavaScript: Doubly-linked lists
and I got to take a picture with him :) !
Right now you can't make a device with decent text input without a fuillsize keyboard. With this, you could. Laptops, tablets, netbooks, smartphones, handheld gaming devices could all be improved with this, if it's as good as it looks like it could be. What makes it worthy of a fan club - it's a great solution to a real problem.
This implies that design is a zero sum game where you can have either beautiful or useful. This is not the case and never was.
Thanks for your input. I know one should expose a business plan for feedback from others and I was about to do that, mainly to friends who I trust could give me as objective opinion as possible. It's just that I never thought of releasing it to the whole public, nor have I heard anyone do that before but then again, I don't have any experience with that kind of stuff, so it might as well be an ordinary thing.
Mistakes Made When Designing Logos
I've read that it has problems with your hands covering up its view of parts of the keyboard so it struggles with accuracy from that. Also, it needs to stand and balance (would it fall over on a train? Could you use it in a car on your knee?). Also it forces you into the traditional keyboard posture and fixed size which the senseboard does not.

All in all, it's a solution for the same problem, but not a very good one, IMHO. (But yes, it does exist and can be bought right now).
Wow... what wiki and VPS and settings? That's pretty bad.
I built the wiki from scratch.

There was a rogue ruby script that was running for no apparent reason, taking up all the server resources.
You honestly think friends would give you an objective opinion? Giving it to friends is a pretty much guaranteed way to get biased results
Why clone Neanderthals? It would be like winning the war in 'Starship Troopers', then cloning the bugs because it was so much fun fighting them the first time, we just had to have another go at it. That is just stupid. Our ancestors beat these guys 25,000 years ago. I say let the victory stand. There will plenty of other struggles to be had no doubt, maybe even the insects of 'Starship Troopers'! :-)
Oracle+Sun= IBM killer or Sun killer?
And, in many places, come with established infrastructure or at least predictable project models.

Not much risk involved.
Yea, from a talk with a local business angel I found out the business plan intended for investors does not have to be as detailed as I would think it should. For example, you don't really have to write how you'd solve a problem, just acknowledge you know it exists and you know how to deal with it. I have to be honest and say I was a bit surprised and somewhat relieved with that realization.
SF Mayor Gavin Newsom Tweets His Way Into The Race For California Governor
This is pretty cool. The only problem is that the graphs are slightly unconventional, so people may be put off by them at first.

They may seem less intuitive than other graphs, but it's probably more a matter of familiarity. We understand other graphs so well in part because we've been exposed to them so thoroughly.
Lack of feedback may be a big problem; fingers have no muscles in them, only tendons, so the movement of your fingers could (I imagine) be accurately sensed from tendons in your palm and the back of your hand.

But maybe moving over a keyboard requires feeling the keys in order to do so consistently.
The Company-Customer Pact
Twitter Applications can now use Tipjoy API with Twitter OAuth credentials
Any time I see a science related headline with words like "revolutionize", "cure for cancer", "breakthrough", and similar absolutes my eyes get all-a-rolling. I've never understood why so many PIs sign on to University PR overhyping their science (which in many cases is really good science). I wonder if PCR ever got this kind of hype? Good, useful, science will end up being well known when it becomes general consensus without the need for fancy headlines
Turnitin's user agreement requires students to sign over all rights to their work: "You hereby grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, archive and otherwise use in connection with its Services".

This court case is actually about clickwrap agreements, not fair use. Though the courts spent a fair amount of time blathering about fair use, the clickwrap agreement was already decisive. The only reason that the fair use argument was even mentioned was because one of the plaintiffs "hacked" the system, using a password not intended for him and (apparently) not agreeing to the clickwrap agreement.

There's actually a really ugly line of reasoning in the cases about making contracts with minors. The minors were required to use Turnitin (sign over their copyright in their papers for free) by their schools. Since Turnitin didn't coerce them (the schools did), it's not a contract of adhesion. Since they received some consideration from it (the ability to graduate from their schools!), they cannot escape from the contract due to their being minors. SO: as a business owner, if you can get schools to require that students do X which benefits you, they have no hope of escaping from it legally, even if X is grossly unfair to the students.

Let's consider: how much would Stephen King's/Madonna's/Oprah Winfrey's/Barack Obama's student papers be worth today? We don't know, because no one required them to use an archiving service that could sell them later on. But in just a few years, some people from the Turnitin.com generation will be reaching superstardom, and Turnitin can sell copies of their student papers to all comers. I suspect that the value of selling specific student papers will far exceed all other revenues ever realized by Turnitin.
The page is not loading some images, and loads others very slowly, which makes it difficult to see the phenomenon described in the post.

Might want to bookmark this and check it out later, after the HN traffic surge has died down.
Oh god .. are we now going to get an endless flow of 'Future of Sun Technology X unclear under Oracle' articles?

Sigh :-)
Many entrepreneurs have a fear of sharing their new venture ideas with others and I think this is a big mistake. First, it's very unlikely that someone will take your idea and implement. Other people rarely share the same passion for the idea as the originator of the idea. Second, even if someone does take the idea and runs with it (which is very unlikely) they will implement the concept in a fundamentally different way, given all the changes that usually take place from formulating a venture idea to commercializing. Third, the more people you share the venture idea with (a) the more constructive feedback you will get to make improvements to your idea, (b) the more you can practice and tweak your pitch, (c) the greater chance you will find great people to work with, etc.

In short, I suggest sharing your venture idea with as many people as possible. Build a quick prototype and get it into the hands of users for user feedback. If you do have a secret sauce, which affords you a competitive advantage (e.g., Google's PageRank algorithm before it was patented), then you might want to keep this small piece of the plan secret until you can erect other barriers to imitation.

Good luck with your venture!
> Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music.

10 times more likely to pay for music they've acquired, or 10 times more likely to buy music, period? More explicit data is needed. Example: The pirates acquire 10000 songs; pay for 100 of them (1%). The non-pirates acquire 10 songs, pay for 10 (100%). "The pirates have paid for ten times as many as the non pirates."

But the results can swing the other way: Example: The pirates acquire 100 songs, pay for 1 of them (same 1%). Non-pirates acquire 10, pay for 10 (same 100%). Suddenly: "The non-pirates have paid for ten times as many as the pirates."

So, simply by getting more pirate respondents to participate in your study, you can manipulate the result increasingly in favour of piracy.

We need to see the data to be able to determine whether they really corroborate the conclusion.
This will be very useful. Thanks for setting it up.
Don't send the like link to # -- it jumps you to the top of the page and you lose your place.
Sticker Printing
I was about to make the same point, only not is so much detail.

If the schools REQUIRE students to submit their papers in order to receive a grade, the binding agreement might not as well be there, since the students have no choice but to agree.

Why didn't the students' lawyers focus on this point?
I think the tables he chose were examples of bad table design rather than anything inherently wrong with using tables per se. It would have been more insightful had a better table example been used followed by a the new representation with the exact same data. This would have made it easier to assess the relative strengths of each approach.

I don't know the data very well, but I think the table could be improved by doing the following:

Remove the columns with only one value and make part of the header or footer.

For the columns where nearly all of the values are identical, a light highlight on the different values followed by a slight graying of the common value would have worked.

A small space could have been added to the bottom of every fifth row to make it easier to track horizontally.

The far right columns could have been aligned so that the numbers on either side of slash lined up with the ones above or below.
5 Do or Die Tips For Demoing Your Product To Deliver Awesome Results
yeah i've used Atlas Software before ... http://www.atlassoft.com they are pretty good - and they have an office in Chicago so you don't have to deal directly with the outsourced team - give them a call at 312.419.1945
It's not as bad as you make it sound. There is no way for your "shocking fact" to be true, since definitionally people who have never downloaded anything have never paid to download anything either (people that pay for a download and for some reason never complete it notwithstanding). The ratio, therefore, would really be undefined, rather than 10:1.

The real inference, given what you say about the original article, is that people who obtain music online, whether by means of purchase or not, are ten times more likely to obtain music by means of purchase than those who never obtain music online. Certainly not as perhaps interesting a finding as the title, but neither as vapid as your summary.
Hmmmm - is this a good thing or a bad thing? PE firms aren't generally ones to step in and take over something like this, are they?
Not completely objective, no. Some I think would try really hard but I wouldn't expect them to be completely objective. I will definitely choose carefully the ones who I believe can give me the most objective opinion. And I said friends but these wouldn't necessarily have to be the closest friends, even mere acquaintances could suffice.

Can you suggest to whom I should then give my plan for an objective opinion, prior to talking with investors? Would giving it to someone who isn't a 'friend' guarantee a non-biased opinion? I'm not so sure. I'm thinking even complete strangers could have a biased opinion. That just depends from a person to person. I was thus hoping I could be able to choose the right people from the ones I know. And let me assure you, I'm not looking for somebody to tell me how good my plan is.
Thank you for you input.
Ubuntu and Mac OS X will, similar to UAC prompt you for your password to do certain things. This is not as easily disabled, especially on Ubuntu. UAC is Good and Wrong.
I would love to make a subreddit that auto-posted bb links and allowed unmoderated discussion of them. bb links are pretty good, but I agree that their human moderation is dumb and heavy-handed. I've always gotten stuck on how to programatically submit reddit posts.
Cached version: http://nfg.2y.net.nyud.net:8090/games/ntsc/visual.shtm
To be fair, this company is called Cyberdyne, which is the same name as the company behind Skynet in the Terminator films.
Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. And I knew about that fear but didn't know I still have it. Apparently jury and friends are only the first step towards getting rid of it.
Ask HN :Summer internship in php?
I am currently in my third year of CS (in India)Undergraduate degree and would like to work on a php project or similar.As this is the first time I am trying for a project outside college I would like to know whether there are any other alternatives to php which I should try.Also how does one get his first internship?
GSA contest results are in
In my school (a Swedish University) we sometimes have to turnin our papers via Urkund which is similar to TurnIn, although we don't sign anything in doing so. I read that I can opt-out of having my paper used outside of my local university though, I'm not sure why that would matter to me but at least that's something.

The main thing that worries me with outsourcing these types of things is that how could you defend yourself if the system finds you guilty of plagiarism when the source isn't open. It's not like false-positives can't happened and it seems perfectly reasonable that it should happened with an increasing rate as the system grows.

I've learned to use wikis, version control systems (which granted I should have been using prior to that anyways..) and other ways of keeping a history of how my work progresses so that if I at some point would have to defend myself I can actually show the entire process behind something and not just the finished product.

My biggest fear when it come to being accused of cheating is getting called out on the spot and then not being able to answer because my brain shuts down, like how many people curse themselves for not being able to answer job-interview engineering questions even though they knew the answer. Instant expulsion unless I guess you proclaim you are guilty and beg for your life, then maybe come of with a warning.
Very useful. Could you add a field for input of HN threads pertaining to each startup?
Original blog post about it (with comments) here: http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=580.
Welcome to HN's funny section, the lower section.
You think maybe you could track down and read the original before making inferences based on my vapid summary? I'm interested in whether you still think I'm off base here.
Fuck the foundries
The design is very elegant. Congratulations on a job well done. And thanks for this contribution to the community.
> I built the wiki from scratch.

This is open source and doesn't consume a lot of resources:

http://dedawiki.dedasys.com/

Your layout/css is definitely nicer, though. I'm not much of a UI guy.

Also, tags or some sort of classification might be interesting...
"...the notorious online bulletin board where hackers like to hang out." lol

But seriously - here's the fun part: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-ha...
I love your comment and I think it sheds light on the possible way a Neanderthal really would be treated if we did clone one.