skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* well maybe I could write a script to do this.
> Can't you be more positive?
* Make it generate a string from a template -
"How do you use $buzzword1 and $buzzword2 to do this?" -
and a dictionary of buzzwords.
> We were discussing you, not me.
* Then instead of apprenticing with Godin,
they can just run the script!
> Can you elaborate on that?
* Maybe expand it into an Eliza like program for
"strategic business consultation".
> Why the uncertain tone?
* Hey there's a startup idea! I think I'll apply to YC next time ;-)
> But you are not sure you you'll apply to YC next time; -)?
Rich People: Just Leave America
Apparently http://www.innomi.net
Architects need to better leverage virtualization
Tech Jobs Getting Zapped
Seems like an excellent idea, although some people might consider it a bit weird when you tell them about it.

It's funny how many things seem "weird" to "normal people" (try explaining to your non-entrepreneur friends that you went and practiced your pitch in Starbucks...), but are highly effective at actually getting results...
UN to pass law against critisizing religion
Could be useful to determine whether you are dreaming. :-)
Ask HN: Open source mobile ad server recommendations anyone ?
.or maybe an existing open source ad server which can be customized most easily for delivery mobile ads.
Well, even my co-founder thought it was a bit strange. But after the first day, he was hooked. It's like crowd-sourced business coaching - it might not be top notch but it's perfect for a bootstrapped startup's budget.
How did this crap make it to the front page? Digg's that-a-way.
Pretty funny stuff. Short and sweet.

More persuasive about gutting up and learning Ruby than the head-to-head debates I've slugged through.

—A novice.
Nonbinding resolution. The UN could pass one against gravity but it would have the same effect.
@ eru,
Brilliant!, upvoted!
I believe Haskell looks different. At least with heavy use of combinators my code looks more like Forth than Python. For me small functions tend to be even smaller in Haskell than Python.
I hope you didn't find any of the sarcastic implications to be persuasive in their own right...#9 is unadulterated BS. In any case, I'm happy to keep fanboys out of the PHP and Perl communities...we know our languages have profound flaws, but like Terry Chay said,

Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails [...] When I say that PHP is a ball of nails, basically, PHP is just this piece of shit that you just put together—put all the parts together—and you throw it against the wall and it fucking sticks.

Were the Ruby community equally humble about their language's shortcomings, the programming blogosphere would be a far less annoying place.

Or better, #8, comparing the brevity of two trivial snippets:

foo = {"zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3"}
bar = foo.keys.sort.slice(0,3)

As opposed to

$foo = array("zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3");
$keys = array_keys($foo);
sort($keys);
$bar = array_slice($keys, 0, 3);

Look, I can put stuff on one line too!

$foo = array("zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3");
$bar = array_slice(sort(array_keys($foo), 0, 3));

Other than a couple boilerplate "array" prefixes, the code is pretty much identical.
I came here to rant on the linkbaitism (?) of saying "Lang X is better than lang Y," but was instead pleasantly surprised to find lighthearted satire.
We should employ mturkers to transcribe videos. If only ten people pay like 5 cent for it, it should be viable given the low pay of mturkers. (Perhaps the content provider could also do this, as he profits from advertising and the transactions/coordination costs are much lower for this centralised solution.)
Installing MyDNS-NG & MyDNSConfig 3 On Debian Lenny
I think it's not all that bad, but it doesn't deserve the number 2 spot... there are better articles out there.
I am really digging this post not only for its goal of training to pitch, but that it stresses approaching random people in a friendly, non-intrusive manner. I know I don't do this enough and I'm sure others have issues with it.
"Were the Ruby community equally humble about their language's shortcomings,"

The ruby community and humble? the mind boggles ;-).

more seriously, in my opinion the ruby community is (mostly) sensible. Rails seems to attract all the fanboy cult ists. Sometimes this spills over into the ruby community.

If you see the latest kerfluffle over Twitter moving a bit of code from ruby to Scala most of the incoherent blabbering responses came from the rails crowd (e.g Obie Fernandez's response on his blog).
I don't know why people keep on trying to aggressively get rid of IE6, it will die of it's own accord anyway.

Even according to the W3c's web stats (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), who are probably early adoptors, IE6 has 17% market share. IE6 still has more than Opera, Safari, Chrome and IE8 put together.

I don't see that it makes any business sense to annoy a large section of your users, just to save a little bit of development time. I know for example in some internet cafes in Eygpt in December last year they were still using IE6 and no warning message is likely to fix that soon.

I say just fix your sites until it's 2-3% of the market, like when Netscape 4 died.
That's does not seem to contradict.
Why is every technology being declared Dead?
Love the starbucks idea. What my friends from U of Waterloo do is pitch the idea to a very open economics prof (L. Smith) that gives highly critical feedback (tone, speed, size of market place, range of execution).
Yes, thanks. Believing in what you sell always helps. But beyond that?

What is the best way to learn most effective selling and closing techniques?
And adjusted for currency. I checked off an answer one bucket lower because I bill in Canadian dollars, but I don't think most Canadians would think of that.
Exactly where do you live that $8000/week is "not so good"?
Madoff-type schemes are proliferating on YouTube
Nothing is dying. Its just becoming easier to use the right tool for the job and coordinate lots of different systems, making any one tool easy to get rid of if it doesn't suit.
Free Nokia Ringtones
There are also a few ways that you can get or create the ideal ring tone from something that you already have in terms of sound effects and/or music.
Not so good as it first sounded ;)
except, as always, for Giles Bowkett. he's awesome. a beacon of common sense and rationality who all Rails developers admire.
If a marketer or manager thrives in such an environment, there is a good chance they are mediocre at best.

Creative people keep banging against the limits corporate rules impose on them. Those who don't bang are not creative.
Free Nokia Ringtones
You might want to do a bit of ring tone shopping by looking around at other web sites that offer ring tones for sale for your particular cell phone that are compatible with your specific wireless carrier.
Half that may not be enough. Don't that you'll be in charge of all business expenses and more tax (if in the US, you'll have to pay an extra ~7 percent right off the bat to cover the half of social security your employer pays on your behalf).

Also, a lot more of your time will be taken up by non-billable hours.
Tumblr Power - 50 tumblelogs that will make your inspiration go nitro
I wish there was a "cancel your upvote" for those of us who vote first and then read the article afterwards :-) People like me might be part of the problem how this crap got to the first page.
One of the commenters on the site voiced exactly what I was thinking:

> The delivery is so dry that it almost comes off as serious. Very nice.

Humorous, and I imagine it's on the front page because it raked up 15 votes in an hour.

To anyone who thinks there is real advice here: you're wrong. I'm not saying one language is better than another, but PHP's advantages over Ruby are not these.
And do notation retains a lot of the typical "block of imperative code" appearance.
Live Lisp coding as art
Something like this?

http://www.fitbit.com/
No wonder they are suffering financially then. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the advertising industry generally but more with the people who do not trust the newspapers any longer and therefore do not read them.
I'm pretty confident that before YouTube, the average non-geek did not have a way to embed videos on their personal websites. YouTube solved a simple but not easy problem: how can you let the mainstream share videos and search for videos. The server-side FLV encoding from what I've read - was groundbreaking - most previous video sharing websites either required a specific format/codec that required anyone who wanted to view it to install the codec and/or viewer.

YouTube democratized online video. The founders may have been at the right place at the right time with the right execution. However, do not discount the fact that YouTube's founders came from PayPal. I'll try to find the link later but in an interview one of the YouTube founders said being on the ground-floor at Paypal and watching them build the runway for the company to take-off inspired them because it made them believe it was possible.
The Open Video Player Initiative
When I was reading the article yesterday I wondered why are they telling us that the grid has been hacked. I thought this is not news at all, I mean what can we do about it. And how do they know that it was Chinese and Russians? I am sure any nation would like to know how the advanced grid works.
Pay-Per-Chat Search Model
Wait. Wait. Backtrack for a second.

The year is 1974, and Linux, Mac, and Windows haven't been invented yet. There is no IDE, no SDK, and no documentation. Actually, there's no development environment at all. There are no APIs, either. Ruby, Python, Java, and friends are till 10 years or more from being invented. And yet, Gates wrote an interpreted language, on his own, in a week. Put differently, Gates wrote a language in a CAVE, with SCRAPS, in a WEEK.

It's easy to think that now we'd just Google it and scrape it together using copypasta if we really needed to. Hell, not only was there not Google, but there was no technical community to ask questions. Don't forget what he was really working with there.
Intellectual curiosity and startups? Derisive laughter.
The reader may find the link below more helpful since it contains information about studios, profiles etc.

http://logopond.com/gallery/
Sorry. I should have been clearer:

I don't yet know enough to evaluate all the comparisons.

But it at least gets me "off the pot" to get on with a serious Ruby study.
Silicon Valley a Systemic Risk?
I thought Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars were ok, but his online professional marketing persona is all aphorism and no substance.
Intelligent Advertising for Microbloggers: Who will be first to swim in the riches?
Article title on TC : "Ztail Launches Innovative eBay Guarantee For Worry-Free Shopping"

(Why was this title not retained when submitting to HN?)
Gauge.js 1.0 allows you to add gauges (with shading and reflection) to your webpages
How Google's Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time
But this can 'track' your contacts who merely email in to your gmail account without using any other Google things at all.
I actually think that this article is confusing two things, the fact that the technology has evolved to make music more accessible (even omnipresent), and the fact that there are a lot of people producing music at the moment. Whilst one may have facilitated the other, the effects the author describes in the article are due sometimes to one, sometimes to the other (e.g. the overwhelming amount of bands at SXSW is due to the large amount of music being produced at the moment, the fact that music is now everywhere -in shops, on the radio, on screens in public places, on YouTube or MySpace- is due to the technology facilitating music distribution.)

My problem is not so much with the fact that music is available everywhere as with the fact that most of it isn't very good - the commercial impetus behind most modern (pop) music means that there isn't a lot of variety (because record companies apply their own fitness functions, going for 'proven' formulas), and the emphasis on immediate commercial success puts more emphasis on tangential factors (production values, marketing etc) than on the music itself. So, I'm worried that although the availability of music has increased, its value to society (i.e. its cultural and intellectual benefits) may actually have diminished.
You may be right. Like I said, I never really tried. Then again, I've had people show genuine interest until I quote a price. Maybe I'm just attracting cheapskates.
Biologically Inspired Robots
I'd be more concerned about the extremely high likelihood that your tor exit node is hostile and sniffing your traffic.
I think the issue here that he is referring to (obliquely) is the disagreement on video codecs.

So to take your img example it would be analogous to a specification for img where Firefox was supporting PNG (but not GIF) and Safari supporting GIF (but not PNG) and IE supporting neither but Microsoft is at the same time pushing a closed source browser plugin that can show images in a Microsoft proprietary and patented format that sits outside of HTML. That would be a "sad web" too, even if it technically had images.

He's not (imho) against the video tag in any way, just pointing it out as an example of the (inherently) political squabbling and consequent craziness that surround standardization in a multi-billion pound market.
Yes. Though it has more in common with "strict functional programming with side effects" than traditional imperative code.
Reminds me of "information interviewing" from "What Color is your Parachute" (job-hunting guide). Part of the aim there is to just get comfortable with talking to strangers.

I love those two old guys. It's also like you've given them something, like a freebie sample of a new product.

> People are a bit kinder if they think you're a student rather than an nosy salesperson

Isn't that lying?
In the back of my mind I have played with the idea of a website for the coming "American diaspora" - the dispersion of Americans from the USA for places with less intrusive government.
Very nice specimens. Instead of Zoologically-inspired creatures I would drool over genetics-inspired robots that reproduce so that the replicators introduced in such living machines have another avenue for evolution by natural selection.
No need to apologize, that post was directed towards the crazies in the Ruby world. Good luck studying Ruby! It's a nice language.
Nanotech Fast Takeoff: Innovations
A better way would be to monitor when you are active in gmail. I bet that a pattern would emerge. If you're a nightbird your gmail activity would reveal this. If you go swimming every wednesday from 9 to 11 it would also show up. Combined with timezones and some statistics this could give a much more accurate picture, not only of when you're awake but when you're actually at your inbox.
I wonder how easily their approach could be gamed by companies trying to improve their credit rating; presumably, this would be more difficult if there were several places that the 'crowdsourcing' was taking place?

Also, not to be too facetious, but the guy in the picture looks pretty smug and self-satisfied, which is a little offputting.
Multi-touch build using Farseer physics with XNA in C#
You could also buy 32KB RAM for a ZX81 - but it felt a little out of reach. It was expensive, unusual, non-standard.

The thing is, 16GB RAM will soon be ordinary. Every PC will have it. What things become possible that are unthinkable today? Maybe multiple virtualized OSes could become standard.
Exactly right, due to "security concerns" you were not supposed to run anything other than IE6. In this case, "security concerns" are defined as: "the club by which a corporate IT department can beat down a reasonable request without being forced to have an intelligent discussion". All machines had monitoring software that phoned home regularly to tell IT what software you were running.

Most average employees just need to get their work done, so they are not going to risk a fight with the IT machine over a browser. To non-geeks, it's just an annoyance, not a major blocker. Better for them to save their energy for a fight that matters (like getting an exception to the 100 megabyte email quota).
I think it would be a bit of a problem to find a place with a similarly wealthy market to buy the products you create that will charge less in government taxes.
I don't mean to nitpick, and I'm not trying to brag, but I'd add another catagory of 300+.
How do they figure the guaranteed price? Is it based on historical auction data? If so, won't the increased volume of these items drive down the actual sale price at auction? Does their model take that into account?
Nice idea, but they're already one step ahead of you: you can leave if you want but you still have to pay taxes.
HAPOPI rejected
That's a standard free-market, laissez-faire take on things, but not entirely accurate. The usual IT factors of lock-in, path dependency and network effects have their place. As does the frequently underestimated, yet monumental task of getting effective interoperation even when all parties are willing and able to do so (neither of which is generally the case).

Minor browser engines such as Webkit, Gecko and Opera can't change the market much on their own. They need to be interoperable to some degree for people to start using their additions to the standards on the wider web. HTML5 (nee WHAT-WG) was initially those browser vendors coming together to work on exactly that.

You give Canvas as an implementation before standardization example, yet it was far more iterative than that with Apple's original implementation (for use in the walled garden of their widgets) being presented for standardization with the explicit idea that it was good for Apple if there were interoperable implementations out there.

It's a pretty good example of Co-opetition. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition)
My Inner Cynic says: "great idea!" might be a way of trying to get rid of people in the easiest way possible, since it doesn't cost anything? Maybe not, but if you have nothing to lose because you're just some random guy who wants to disengage as quickly as possible, it might be easier than arguing about why it's a bad idea, especially since you don't really care.
Nanotechnology in Science Fiction (and vice versa)
Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Discovery-Computational-Exp...

Looks interesting, thanks (from 1987 though).
Weight Loss Discovery - Brown Fat
Or to make it simpler, have your phone send a note to a service whenever the alarm goes off. Usually when your alarm goes off it means you're awake :)
Without having read any of the "x is dead" articles in question, I assume it's just a snowclone title used to draw in readers. "dead" simply means "less alive than (it used to be/some people think it is/it ought to be if it wants to grow stronger)".

Some of these articles will probably be worth reading, others will just be publicity grabbers. But that's orthogonal to the title.
I understand. Somedays it feels like I can vote for either commies or facists and no one else.
Thanks for posting a "middle of the road" kind of story like this. I have found all the stories from the extremes of iPhone app revenue curve to be almost completely useless in understanding how to grind out a reasonably profitable app.
Yeah, it's also not bad supplemental income if he's got a "day job". He's easily offset the purchase of the iPhone, developer account, and maybe even computer. On top of that, he has an extremely valuable research project feeding him data on the app store and his users. He's learned some lessons that I'm sure will help smooth the release of his future more ambitious (and hopefully lucrative) work. I'll bet his game will have a "lite" version for sure now, whereas he might otherwise not known how important that can be to drive revenue of the full price version. The app is also quite valuable as a motivator. I know I get discouraged from time to time working on my app thinking that nobody is going to buy it. I'm certain I would have more gusto if I was watching sales numbers from a simple app roll in, even if they were incredibly modest.
Sure, it's a pain, but I think it has to happen, and just like images, where jpg/gif/png emerged victorious, some video formats will emerge that are supported everywhere. Maybe just wishful thinking...
"Atlas Shrugged" remake, with (perhaps) real world situations.
What makes the article so compelling is how he ties a broad issue like government power and control to a deeply personal and rather embarrassing issue. That had to be hard for him to write, but it makes the piece come alive. Add in a story of personal redemption and you have one great read. And he does it all in a few paragraphs. Thanks for the link.
Dear rubists: The move to Scala is besides the point, the battle is long over. Ruby on Rails is not scalable. End of. The beacon of scalability you hold up for us to gaze at in awe, Twitter, fixed just about all of its scalability problems with SQL caching. That's SQL caching, also known as 'bypassing Rails'. If you can't reduce the known facts to this obvious conclusion, you have no business arguing about scalability.
Why not do both? When he says it makes "$100 a day," I doubt he means his days are filled with development and heavy effort. As he said, it provides him with a decent stream of money to continue work on his primary project.
The financial industry really has poisoned America, in two ways

The first, obvious way is in the causes of our current recession.

The second way is how when "normal" people think of "rich" people, their first thought is often of someone in the financial industry, as opposed to someone who started a successful company that makes something people want. The feeling that rich people are just stealing our money is much more strongly reinforced by looking at "Wall Street fat cats" than a successful entrepreneur.
Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead"
Hacker News is not a site for discussing politics. There are other sites for that.
Make that extra taxes. Congress recently passed an "exit tax" for the rich. With $7 trillion dollars already committed (over 14 times what was spent on the New Deal), I'm betting that the definition of rich will soon be "downsized".
Very nice article, and I remember reading it alot. Don't forget that it is 9 years old though.
See http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html and http://bit.ly/MRJ2S