skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi. I am that guy. And we do have some generic offshoots to do other products. But the car thing is our first project, followed by international versions of it. (We're bootstrapping, after all.)
I don't know, "go fuck yourself" sounds pretty unambiguous to me. What is there to explain? Digg knows exactly what they're doing, and that's exactly the reaction they deserve, IMO.
It's not a myth. I would be happy if the success rate for YC's investments was over 1/3.
Now there is a quality name for a porn recommendation engine...
Glenn Gould foresaw tech role in music
New in Gmail: Inserting images
http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html has a SQL database as well. Their database is broken up in to 255 tables (for each of the first octet, and each table consists of the fields corresponding to the 2nd and 3rd octet.

Recently I made a traceroute visualization mashup with their database (http://www.janitha.com/geoiptracer) just enter a list of IP's and it will draw lines connecting them in order.

Talking about geolocation, another shameless plug for my weekend project, a phonenumber-geolocation mashup http://www.janitha.com/telmapper
it isnt really fair
If you had to spend a sizable chunk of your money supporting your parents or paying for a sibling's college education or [fill in the blanks], I wonder how welcoming you would be of a 40% tax rate when making $75 an hour.

Why would it feel any different than doing so when making $20 or $40 or $60 an hour, other than being obviously easier when making $75 an hour?
The Quest for Zero Login, Part 1
For the TL;DR crowd: my thoughts on how to build a community site without a required login system. How to structure an anonymous community with user-generated content / assets.

I've been working on this idea for the past few months, and have only come to a rough solution. I'd like to put the idea out there, see who else is working/has worked on it, and get some feedback.

To be frank, I'm working on this for a project I don't intend to monetize, so maybe it's not right for the community, but I think you might find it interesting anyhow.

Thanks all, feedback appreciated!
So we are supposed to take Scoble seriously because he has a lot of Twitter followers? His track record with companies indicates he doesn't really predict the future too well.

At Microsoft he made a name for himself by blogging when no one else was doing it. That was a good move and is what propelled him into the public eye.

Since then, he hasn't really accomplished much. He went to work for an unsuccessful podcast company, was booted from Fast Company, and now wants to tell us what the future of the web is?

I think taking what "experts" predict seriously is almost always a mistake. Look at the stock market - experts were running the companies that are collapsing and experts told people to invest in Bernie Madoff's fund. Oops.
Duking It Out At... A Funeral?
America is known for getting uptight about certain “sinful” acts, such as public nudity, marijuana, etc. Personally, I’m a million times more offended by the presence of those picket signs than a naked hippie smoking a joint.
Scaling VAT is 7% (17.5*.4) but than you should consider that tax petrol/alcohol is very much higher.

My figure for council tax is low as it was sharing and was not in London. The "rich" living in London will be paying a lot more.

Progressive income tax would have only minor effects on the "rich". It is obviously a big help for those just above but people in the middle earning say 100K are already only about 5% and the difference only declines.
Indeed. Their fear wasn't the lawsuit, but delaying a product launch by a few months, at best.
I believe that tax is what one pays for the service one gets from the Government. Like police security, military protection, road maintenance etc. As far as fairness is concerned, if the Government is going to provide more of these services to the rich, then it is justified or fair that it taxes the rich more. If the Government is going to give equal treatment or serve all its citizens equally, then it should only charge everyone equally.

Does coke or Apple or Toyota charge its rich customers more and poor customers less? Then why should a Government?
> How do you get started? All that's required is a great idea for a product

Harrumph.
Has anyone here installed a lisp machine emulator on a linux pc? I am wondering where to get the source from. The unlambda page, which according to google hosts the code, seems to be down.
A name that says "everything" says nothing.
Video + presentations from BlackHat US 2008
"The first 500 registrants get a free dub sack! But wait...call now, and you'll get two, that's right, two dub sacks! That's a $60 value for two easy payments of $10!"
Noncompetes are a trade. Companies provide employees with access to resources, client lists, and trade secrets. They want to ensure that rolodexes aren't shopped and product plans aren't bootlegged.

Isn't that an NDA?

I see non-competes as nothing but attempts to reduce competition. Except that is exactly how markets are NOT supposed to work. You're supposed to out-compete, not simply reduce competition.
It would be better if you replied to his argument.
Although your comment is all kinds of wrong, it's the bit about being "profane" which really gets my goat.

I mean, seriously. It is 2009. We are all adults. Are you honestly telling me you are offended, even in the slightest, by hearing the word "fuck"? If so - you got problems.

Swear words are part of the language. Whether one uses them or not depends on the circumstance - inopportune or over-use gets you marked down as lacking class or civility, warranted use is justified and commendable. This is the latter IMO. I personally applaud Gruber telling Digg to "go fuck yourself". That's exactly what I thought, too, and they deserve nothing better.

By trying to label and dismiss his justifiable reaction as "profane", though, you sound not only self-righteous, but as if you are attempting to discredit his argument using moral labels - like someone who is "profane" doesn't merit hearing out. Well, if that's what you think, you can go fuck yourself, too.
I meant "whether it can appear". Apologies for any confusion.
I'm using an open-source script and part-time Objective-C developer. But yes, I agree with you in general... to become an AAPL/GOOG/MS requires significantly more emphasis on unique and progressive technology (or to move extremely fast). But to be a profitable web company, it's rather quite easy using secondary development resources. Sugar, Inc relies heavily on Drupal if I'm not mistaken.
Trust the entrepreneur who reluctantly tells you what he thinks is coming down the pipeline over the pundit who gets paid to do so.
erlanger, put a newline somewhere in your code! It's breaking the page.
>Failing car brakes do not endanger society, either, so we can leave that aside.

Uh, yes, they do. My inability to stop might not kill or injure just me. Your loved ones jetta might be the object I slam into attempting to slow down.

>In the most obvious case, such a person is unlikely to be as well-educated as they'd otherwise be, which means they are unlikely to be paid as much, which puts them in a higher risk bracket for all kinds of lifestyle diseases which statistically result in earlier death.

Replace "learning disability" with "using windows" or "being black" or "growing up an orphan" and your argument still holds true. Its just a generality on life, not a rational legal argument.

Aside from the fact that so many in the Forbes 500 aren't highly educated (success was the right combination of timing, luck, position, savvy, persistence, and hard work on their part) the constitution of the United States merely guarantees the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Thanks for posting this--great talk!
"Because it's my money that I earned that represents my hard work and the risks I've taken to generate that wealth."

Interesting. I, for one, am reticent to take credit for having been conceived by a pair of white, upper-middle-class, nurturing people. Nor do I wish to take credit for living in a society in which every one of my medical needs are accounted for without any effort on my part. Nor do I take credit for finding myself in an economy that values my particular skill set (for now, at least).
"predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microprocessor would double approximately every two years"
Right - the microprocessor wouldn't even be invented for several more years. Moore's law is about the number of processors on a chip - and I don't see any real reason they'll stop increasing in the near future. If nothing else, more support functions will move onto the chip or more computing power into smaller chips both of which will support less expensive and lower power use mobile applications.
"If only it were that simple."

If you are able to spec out how every single screen and interaction works before outsourcing your site then it is that simple. The reason most sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a year to design is that entrepreneurs don't force themselves to thrash up front.

I would posit that for the vast majority of non-technical would be web entrepreneurs, the one thing that is keeping them from being successful is that they don't do 100% of the design upfront. If you can actually write a completely unambiguous spec and then have the discipline to not change it at all until after the site launches, no magic is required.
This kind of taxation already exists in the form of gasoline taxes. The Hummer driver will tend to consume more gasoline than the Fiesta driver.
Why can't they just stay dead?
Actually, by law, no California law can unintentionally contradict another California law. (You can repeal laws or parts of them, however.) They have an entire state agency whose job it is to make sure that this never happens. I have no idea how successful they are.
Non-competes could be seen (from a company's point of view) as a form of the prisoner's dilemma: everyone is better off if no one requires non-competes, but if everyone else requires them than I need to. Therefore, a law of this sort could potentially improve conditions for all companies in a way that individual companies could not accomplish themselves. That is, the government is not trying to tell you what to do, it's trying to create a better business and employment environment.
He's saying basically, instead of manipulating a bunch of data algebraically to get the exactly provably right answer you can use this other algo to get you a damn good answer faster. (I think)
How millennial of you. It's from 1996.
"Hi. I am that guy."

This reminds me of the scene in "Annie Hall" where the guy behind Woody Allen keeps pontifcating about Marshall McLuhan until McLuhan shows up in person to refute him...

MCLUHAN
(To the man in line)
I hear-I heard what you were saying.
You-you know nothing of my work. You
mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you
ever got to teach a course in anything is
totally amazing.

ALVY
(To the camera)
Boy, if life were only like this!

Hey Alvy, it finally is thanks to hacker news. Another reason why I love it here!
robots.txt won't work?
Josh Freese' Creative Way to Sell Music Online
In some countries, reporting yourself as single may be less common because the line between single and being in a relationship is somewhat blurry, at least for younger demographics, and people don't want to be faced with the awkward situation of having to decide when to change their relationship status. Easier just to leave it blank. Just pointing out it may have nothing to do with privacy concerns.
You're gloating about being too cool to care about karma?

I'd be perfectly fine with having no limit on negative karma on messages but with a limit on the impact it has on your global karma. So let's say you have 5000 karma and then make a message that gets downmodded to -34, you'd still have 4992 karma left. Best of both worlds. I'm more concerned about the loss of information than anything else.

edit: You know things about Reddit and I don't. Good for you, good for me. Please choose another "nemesis". You're really annoying. If you could at least contradict me in constructive ways that would be great.
A Sinful Imperative QuickChecker in Ruby
Arrington Has CrunchPad, Scoble Has Time Travel Machine
the captcha don t appear
No. A sales account manager at AcmeTron can dump the entire CRM database, walk it over to WidgetCorp, and run all those same accounts for them without ever once violating an NDA.

Frankly, and I hope respectfully, if you can't see the distinctions here, I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone to take your opinions about noncompetes seriously. You might also consider wording your ideas better: "noncompetes are nothing but attempts to reduce competition", for instance, might not be your best rhetorical play.

I'm pretty ambivalent about noncompetes. They've hurt me more than they've helped me, both as employee and (in concert with) employers. But I don't like shoddy arguments.
I made this flash demo of Dr. Hinton's generative neural network simulation about two and a half years ago. It's a small world. Hinton is the smartest man I have ever met.
Really? Finish your thought. Why is everyone better off if nobody requires noncompetes?
I've had lawyers in Georgia tell me a non-compete has no teeth under GA law. You still might get sued, but apparently, the law leans heavily towards the employee.

Intellectual property and trade secrets are however well protected for the employer.
Mike Arrington: The future is CrunchPad.

Scobleizer: No, the future is Building43!

Guy Kawasaki: You both are now on Truemors, which is the future.

Me: 42!
I'm really not sure why I'm expected to muster sympathy for entrepreneurs facing noncompetes from VC's. Isn't this an eminently reasonable use for noncompetes? You're epsilon from corporate-to-corporate contracts in this scenario.
Right. A thorough functional spec would eliminate the "magic" problem and introduce another concern: management. Having the perfect spec and the right talent guarantees nothing. You must still manage every single step of the dev process. Needless to say, this is non-trivial. OP glossed over this part.

I would go even a step further. I think the "management of talent" concern is so non-trivial that, in many cases, it simply doesn't work. The world has plenty of people with the scars to prove this.

For a tech start-up, I'd put a team of quality hackers on the most critical path. Something the rest of the world conveniently seems to forget.
Gmail needs a better way to organize options like this under the "labs" menu. It took me a while to find this option to enable it.
I'd argue that £100,000 is not "the middle" by any stretch. The median wage is £27,092, while top 10% of earn more than £49,192. (citation: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285).
That's the case in most jurisdictions; judges will tend not to interpret contracts in ways that preclude individuals from earning a living. In a lot of states, judges also have the authority to modify noncompetes on the fly, so that they aren't confronted with the choice of screwing a former employee and throwing out an entire contract term wholesale.
This is highly dependent on what kind of startup you're doing, as many of the complexities in building a web app are behind the scenes, and therefore can't be captured solely through a requirements spec and perfect mockups of everything.
Um, slavery is one of those things that've been outlawed -- meaning the courts will not recognize it as an institution. It makes his argument look strong. Outside of the state of nevada, he could've also said prostitution.
It's that "critical infrastructure" bit which concerns me. It just seems way too open to scope creep. Who gets to declare what is critical?
It's a big leap from shifting numbers on someone's tax returns to locking them up for years based on a lifestyle choice. If we were debating full-blown socialism, it might be comparable, but it's not (necessarily) irrational to say that in one arena the social contract is unfair to the individual, and that in another it is unfair (or suboptimal) for society as a whole.

Reality is more complicated than either/or, and the devil is always in the details.
While I agree with the core of your comment - a disagreement isn't really news - your comment is two adhoms and a contentless snark, so I downvoted it.

1. Who shared or commented on an item. The search above I knew I had liked the picture, so I constrained the search to only things I’ve liked.

But I didn't know Robert Scoble liked the picture, so it wouldn't help me find it.

2. How many comments or likes are on an item.
Good if you happen to remember it, but also something Twitter could add - search filtering on how many @replies/retweets something got.

3. What was said in the item.
You can't comment on a tweet, but you can @reply/retweet or just tweet again moments later with your comment. It's not the same as friendfeed but it's not dramatically far away. I'm not convinced it's such a big difference that twitter can't overcome it with search improvements.
I love how articles like this give the general public the perception that software development is akin to getting something heavy off of a tall shelf. Its okay if YOU can't do it, just find someone tall to do it for you, and viola, you'll make a million dollars.
Well, pricegrabber could have called themselves carpricegrabber, and that would have been a mistake.
Will it lens?
"Having the perfect spec and the right talent guarantees nothing. You must still manage every single step of the dev process."

You shouldn't have to. Squidoo was completely outsourced. The deal with them was once they handed over the spec the company wasn't allowed to challenge anything. If they had a question about what something meant they were allowed to ask, but that was it. Other than that any communication was forbidden. Because of this the project was done early and under budget. And it seems to have worked; Squidoo is one of the top 300 sites with 91% growth last year.
Ask HN: .net vs .com 
I know this has been asked before (it looked like a couple of years ago from searchyc.com), but I'm working on a site for which I have a GREAT .net address.

The problem is that the .com is not available, and the owner of the .com isn't interested in selling the domain (or I'm bad at trying to negotiate it... but he didn't even seem interested in talking numbers). The .com version of the site is not being used - it currently just lists an empty directory (and has for the past 9 months or so that I've been watching it).

Am I going to regret pushing forward with the .net address, or should I try to think of some different names that end in .com?

I'm still writing software and tweaking the model quite a bit, so I'm afraid I can't really mention the domain name yet; I hope it's possible to speak about this in generalities.

I will say the target audience is more the Facebook / Youtube / Myspace crowd than it is the Slashdot / reddit / YC crowd.

[Edit: Just a quick note; if I had been able to find any .com names that were even 60% as strong as I feel the .net name is for this particular idea, I would have just grabbed it and moved on. I know de.licio.us did fine, but I just feel they were targeting much more technically savvy users than I will be.]
What have you been using to learn how to use Parsec?
Sure thing it's complicated.

As an example, some made the case that in every major war we've been in, we've run up the debt and then raised taxes to pay for it. "The rich doing their patriotic duty" as some describe.

Problem is, I must have missed the war that raised the debt to the $10 Trillion mark and am somewhat astonished that we're planning to double that in the next ten years with new programs.

So obviously, to me at least, war is one thing and the decay of democracy by folks voting themselves programs we can't afford is something else entirely.

So yes, absolutely it's more complicated. But when you say it's more complicated, then the onus is on you to explain where you draw the line -- where is the foundational principle that socialism violates and that progressive taxation does not (to use your example)
In defense of the link it does give a point by point summary of all the points in the book. However, most of the problem are those you encounter in a large company with poorly managed development. Even there a lot has changed since 1996. If you find a company with heavy front end requirements and no source control, just walk away.

I did find #16: Contractor Failure to be relevant in HN land. I have personally dealt with several startups started by business types who contracted all of the product development offshore, only to receive a product that just didn't quite make it, particularly in infrastructure. If you are going to do offshore work, you need a resident expert to manage it.
Highly recommend my friend Nate Lawson's presentation, "Highway to Hell"; Nate reversed the Bay Area Fastrak toll road transponders, and broke the whole system. Nate is awesome.
>"#6: Noisy, crowded offices. Most developers rate their working conditions as unsatisfactory. About 60 percent report that they are neither sufficiently quiet nor sufficiently private (DeMarco and Lister 1987). Workers who occupy quiet, private offices tend to perform significantly better than workers who occupy noisy, crowded work bays or cubicles. Noisy, crowded work environments lengthen development schedules."

The problem with private offices for developers, which is how I read #6 as advocating, is that it separates developers and cuts down communication. If you're a developer you're generally working with a team, and this has no team component. Joel got it right IMO: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

EDIT: Something came up and I didn't get to finish my thoughts on this topic. You need to be able to strike a compromise between privacy and for focus, and openness for communication and making sure that the team has a single, unified vision. Joel does that well by giving each developer an office with glass walls. Everyone is approachable, and you can see what they are doing, pop in and ask a question, etc... But the distractions of office noise and chatter are cut out.
I'd guess that people often agree to non-competes because they don't know how bad a deal they are. This could be solved if (1) people checked their contracts with lawyers more often, or (2) contract terms were standardized in such a rigid way that people could quickly learn about all the potential clauses.

Why don't people check their contracts with lawyers? If it's because of a high estimated cost, is that estimation right?

Part of the problem (and therefore part of the solution) is that the choosing of contract terms asymmetrically benefits the employer, since they only have to do the lawyer work once.
I wonder why Gmail development is suddenly so active the past few months after a lull of a few years. Anyone knows or makes any educated guesses?
You can only write an exhaustive spec if you know what you want - and no startup, and most software projects in general - have no freakin idea what they want 'up front.'

Thats why BDUF failed and hardly anyone uses it anymore. You have to use a prototype to know what you really want and even the prototype changes as you build it. Its an iterative process, and one that requires an intuitive developer as well as customer contact.

And you can't get that using elance. Building good products requires technical intuition that you can't rent.
Job Boards are great for monetization if you have a community around a specific niche. Even in these times, there's money in recruitment.

You could try Easy Job Boards for a simple hosted solution where you get to keep 100% of revenue - http://www.easyjobboards.com/
I'm pretty sure I wasn't pontificating. Awful analogy.