skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visa problems as already hinted, plus how will you fund yourself while there?

There are quite a few schemes over here that will support starving students starting businesses, then when you have a little more of a solid footing you can hop over to SF and go crazy.

Not sure why you think it's a closed door policy here, I've had great success and loads of feedback from throwing my idea out there; it's undergone a lot of transformation in the last 8 months or so, to the point where I think I'll now get the most out of it going abroad. If I'd gone to SF last summer I don't think it would actually have helped that much because I wouldn't have been able to stick around, and meeting people once with a bright idea only has so much impact.

On the flipside I'm sure if you have the resources to stay in SF for a while you can get some great feedback, maybe find people to team up with, etc. I'd just be really wary of the financials and visa situation.
Google adds Java to App Engine cloud service
No.. why? Was that a joke? It's a poor show of one's convictions when one has to resort to playground tactics to try and make someone look silly rather than discuss something like an adult :(
I listen to Kerrang Radio UK regularly, and they're quite up to scratch with twitter actually
I didn't really just mean YC's money, more the unfeasability of ignoring all concerns but the code. Obviously some people (the IT consultant you mention, or those laid off with a nice severance, etc) don't really have their empty fridges as so much of a motivation ;)

I wouldn't really expect a startup to operate on $15k for a year; the whole point is you use it as a springboard for further funding, surely?
I was thinking this sounded familiar and then I realized the main source, Jonathan Haidt, did a similar TEDTalk on the roots of liberal and conservative morality. I thought it was pretty interesting:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_mor...
Pretty much daily now I drink a shake that contains 1 cup of dry oatmeal, some yogurt, a few cups of fruit, a banana and a tablespoon of peanut butter. Oh, and skim milk and occasionally some protein powder.

It's pretty good and it helps me keep my caloric intake at the right level.
Ask HN : Would people donate to an Operating System research charity?
I'm mulling over starting a charity dedicated to helping fund and guide blue sky research into Operating Systems with a reduced total cost of operation compared to Linux and Windows. Time being the cost in Linux's case.

The three factors it would seek to improve

- Increased Usability
- Increasing Security
- Reduced maintenance time/costs

Some research requires starting from scratch see Coyotos (http://www.coyotos.org/) for example. This is pretty difficult. (http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~vladimir/breviary/os-research.html)

Microsoft does do research into OSes but their goal is to increase profits so there are certain types of research they will not pursue. Reducing the need for the upgrade cycle, for example.

The operation of the charity would be mainly funding postgrad research places and PhDs studentships. If it generated a promising cocktail of technologies that would be worth the cost of switching from established technologies, then it would fund a group to produce an open source OS.

Jonathan Shapiro's decision to join MSFT (http://www.osnews.com/story/21262/Jonathan_Shapiro_of_Coyotos_BitC_Joins_Microsoft) made me think that something like this is necessary.

So what say you hacker news? Is there space for something like this?
Hmmm... on second thoughts linking to the tag does make more sense here seeing as there's a series of related entries. It's a shame Ola isn't using a tag that's specific to the series such as "dynamic-languages-on-gae"
How to improve the security of your wordpress blog
We have big problems in this country.

We sure do, when a seemingly intelligent gentleman who "consults about how to lead and how to live" goes chasing after someone else over a minor issue. This is how road rage incidents start. Why are some people so quick to anger? There was no accident - just forget about it dude. I almost had someone reverse into me the other day - I just laughed it off.

People will always be crazy and do things you don't like. If you go around forcing everyone to apologize, your quality of life will suffer and you'll never be happy. Live and let live.

That said, the rest of his point is well made. If you're the one who does something wrong, apologizing is well worth the effort. If you're one who is wronged, however, don't expect it. Perhaps the guy who cut you up on the freeway really does feel a little sorry but can't admit it. Perhaps he's fighting to get a dying family member. Life is complex and we all have to apologize and forgive.
Suggested text: "We think the problem with your monitor is that less than 98% of the pixels are Netflix Red. Click here to fix!"
Refusing to pay the fee is certainly an option. I don't see it being very popular with people investing money in startups when they ask how the startup intends to handle patent licensing and the reply is something like "Oh, we've decided we'll refuse to pay and hope no legal action is taken, or ship parts of our software from various countries where we think it's not covered."
Motorola E1075 / E1070 Unlocked at keepontalking.com
Motorola has one of the receivers Motorola E1070 among very excellent glance and incredible facial appearance. The phone has dense connection of network with 2G supportive network which keeps in touch with your subscriber.
Cron job-like functionality could previously be implemented on GAE through a hack. Further reading:

http://groups.google.com/group/httpmr-discuss/browse_thread/...

http://code.google.com/p/gaeutilities/wiki/Cron

http://schedulerservice.appspot.com/
Whether or not its a long time before (if ever) <video> goes mainstream doesn't matter. What matters is that an alternative to formats that require a payment is needed.

For people who want to use non-proprietary formats, or don't want to pay licensing fees for videos they provide. There should be a way for these people to use video on the web. Even if it remains only a niche usage, and at least provides some leverage to reduce the licensing costs of other formats.
Tipjoy opens Twitter Payments API, celebrates with an API Contest - Win a MacBook Air
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Personalised golf balls
Golfballs.co.uk supplies a large range of new + lake golf balls, in addition to personalised golf balls, bags, towels, caps and ladies golf balls at affordable cost.
> but the "Levant" region really has a lot to offer

You lost me there.
Doesn't this fall into the category of correlation and not causation?

In either case, it's not the destination, it's the journey :) Being a 'star' might be important to some people, but I would argue that most will not waste their time if they didn't enjoy doing it.
swombat deserves it, so don't tell him it was a good article - it will go to his head. ;-)
A slightly strange take on coupling and cohesion
Thanks for the nice comments luckystrike. We had a great time at the Web 2.0 Expo and we've been overwhelmed by all the interest in our service. We're pretty hopeful that we've built something that people want. :)
Notifications as a firefox extension:

- Start a listener in Firefox

- Get alerts from websites in the bookmarks toolbar

- Display subtle alert count next to icon in bookmarks toolbar.

No disruption.

Users can control who can send them alerts.

Simply add/remove icons from bookmarks toolbar.
"he must be convinced that the average patron is not confronting him to gather data for a lawsuit"

Well, convinced that few enough patrons are that the average cost of apologizing to this patron is low, which would mean essentially no lawsuits at all.
Would the last spy out please turn out the lights?
Being Isaac Newton: Computer Derives Natural Laws From Raw Data
Fortunately Java is not a language but a runtime + library + language. And it scales great :-)
Apple Sued Over Touch Screen Rights
Eh. The people with a natural desire to have children will breed and pass on their natural desire to have children. In the past, the desire for sex alone was sufficient. Those people will die out everywhere over the next decades...
I never do this but...

Why was this downmodded so much? I don't get it. Wanting to have native PHP support seems like a perfectly reasonable wish.

[Edit: Now it seems out of context, but the parent was at -2 when I posted this]
Thanks, we will work on the wording. Just for clarity, we actually do custom crawls based on your needs. If you need to access one million pages, you tell us how to get to them and pay us $2 plus any time you spend processing those pages. You can do a generic crawl from http://dir.yahoo.com or you can give us a very customized seed list and just read those pages or crawl only a few levels deep from there. Your choice.

You certainly don't need to crawl two billion (2,000,000,000) pages per day. In fact, that's our total estimated capacity right now.
Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller
companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take
the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

You got me on "hello"...
As for the visa issue, I believe you can get a lot done in 3 months and I needed longer, I could just go home and come back again to get another 3 months (I believe the rule of thumb is that you should stay longer in your home country than the US which would limit it to 6 months). I believe that if create a successful business in the US then you will find some way of staying, the Auctomatic guys managed it somehow.

As for the comments about the UK (I am British) I don't really know I just find that there is very little support for web startups generaly, we have an enterprise centre which I am part of but they don't really know what to say when they find out that you don't plan on selling anything. Everyone I know is very secretive about things, it's all about NDAs rather than actually learning from talking.

I'm based in Sheffield and my skills are most likely pretty basic comapared to most people on here but I enjoy designiing and creating asp.net sites which is how I want to do my contact site, probably not the best way but I think it's doable.

Richard
This might kill rss readers since I can track an rss feed placing an icon in the bookmarks bar alerting me when new stories are out.

So, mix alerts with rss alerts for a more complete solution.

Here is an average bookmarks bar:

- Gmail

- Twitter

- Facebook

- HackerNews

- Google Analytics (spikes in traffic)

- Paul Graham RSS

You could easily add family alerts, amber alerts, CNN breaking news, security cam alerts, etc

A new wave of web services will emerge like cnn.com/alerts, google/alerts, yourwebsite/alerts

Possibilities are endless...
Hi there, I too am based in Sheffield but at Hallam (I can here the boo's from here...). Feel free to drop me a line: lwcarab@gmail.com
Spam overwhelms e-mail messages (now 97%)
You open your argument with the implicit statement that we can consciously (thus should) control and minimise risk (to the point where black swans are eliminated) - and that it would be desirable to do so. but using your swan argument, to minimise that risk the explorers would have to have know about the risk - how could they? - and then decided that in light of it, it wasn't worth going to australia.

now, i have no particular affinity for australia nor its brash and smelly inhabitants, but frankly, i don't see either of those positions as logically tenable!
Neat site. I got it to work in IE6 but like an earlier poster think that the volume control should be in a more logical/visible place.

Some of the metadata appears to be messed up, as well. I clicked on what I thought was a Lemonheads album and got Presidents of the United States of America covering "Video Killed The Radio Star" instead.

And the billion-dollar question: How can this possibly be a sustainable business model? Ads for Verizon surely won't cover the development, licensing, and operating expenses for this site, will it?
I use clicktoflash...

1) It protects me from any security, privacy, and correctness flaws that might exist in the Flash implementation on my computer.

2) It makes my computer snappier by not letting poorly written Flash ads eat my CPU, RAM, and battery.

3) It keeps the blinky flashy ads to a minimum while I read content.

It is one click on the content area to load and run a flash, so if I go to a web site and really want to see the flash content that isn't too high a price to pay. (modifier click to white list).
Bumptop 1.0 Launched today. Looks sweet.
Alternatively, perhaps your bandwidth is too low. :) If "takes too long" is your actual objection, then a music streaming site is probably not something your connection could handle easily anyway.
I've always thought that web 3.0 would be a 3-way web and this looks like the right place to start.

The mobile world is ahead of us in this aspect.
And if Woz didn't have Jobs, he'd still be at Hewlett Packard. A thousand people like Jobs at any MBA program? You've got to be joking.

I have no particular love for YC, but let's be fair. They are interested in things people can use, especially web apps. Things it might be possible to make money off, one day. While I love CouchDB and use it every day now - it's not an end user kind of thing. I'm not really sure what it is. Apache is a pretty good home for it, IMO.
http://www.playlist.com/ which was announced on HN a while back provides this service too. It's worked quite well for me so far and their UI has drastically improved since it launched.
I don't think australians are that brash...
Facebook Welcomes 200 Millionth User, Wants To Know How Facebook Affected Your Life
Apple refusing royalty-free license to widget patent
Ok, Mozilla guys, this one is for you. I would like to see this implemented in Firefox 4.0. Show the world you can do it. Opera will be working on it as we speak.

No listener for the moment, just poll the site every x minutes and make it configurable for every site.

Add these new properties to the bookmarks:
[x] Alert. Every [10] Mins

Simple.
This wasn't imcompetence--it was thuggery. They use the same "shock and awe" tactics as the police and military--crush your opponent with overwhelming force so that everyone else will be terrified of you and cower before you. This is a deliberate tactic on their part. All federal LEOs work this way--DEA, FBI, etc.
They will try to create/prop up speculative bubbles?
What about traffic?

2000000 * 40KB(Average compressed) / (10241024) 0.1 = 7.6 $. That's alone the cost to transfer it to your datacenter. I can'r reliably access the data on remote clients.

I guess the 2$ pricing tag is just marketing blah blha
Well, to explore unexplored areas involves risk of some form, it is just the magnitude of that risk that is unknown.

So then to simply avoid unexplored areas and as such, minimising risk, therefore it could have been possible to never see a black swan.

Now, on a more personal note as an Australian. Black Swans are primarily and originally were native to the Western side of the country in the southern areas, but are also found on the Eastern coast of Oz as a result of human interference. When Australia was "discovered" and originally settled, that was done on the Eastern coast of Australia (hence why the east coast of Australia has about 80% of the total population of the country) and only through risk of magnitude unknown would it have been possible to discover the black swans.

So no, you're assertion is wrong sir. Thank you for insulting a country you know sweet FA about.
First of all, you should apologize to Peter for insinuating that his short temper is a major problem for our country.

All jokes aside, I sort of liked the journey this article took. Starting with a personal anecdote, moving on to some real data (albeit not much) and ending with a pro Obama/Anti-Bush commentary.
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Australia to invest $31 billion in broadband
Game Simulations Answer Baseball’s What-Ifs
ITunes Tiered Pricing Goes Live
We use it on MightyBrand. It's fucking amazing, at least for us. For an example, indexing a couple million items (blog posts, tweets, digg stories...several gigs of data) takes < 1 minute in most cases, on my Macbook. Full text searches against that data are typically a couple of milliseconds. Getting it setup took all of an hour. Definitely worth installing and playing around with.
Any chance that the if you upload a lot of content to YouTube that you are uploading ripped off content, or minor modifications, whereas if you upload a few videos you may actually be uploading stuff you produced?
Kinda reminds me of Mixturtle... but this is AWESOME!
According to this, the law firm themselves said they did.
In cases like this, you never know what will suddenly disappear. :)
Total user accounts or active? And what is the threshold for considering an account to be 'active'?
Saltlick Labs Seeking Additional Partners (iPhone / Web)
Good morning HN,

I'm the founder of Saltlick Labs and we're looking for a few good people to join us. You can find more information about our current products and company history on our website, so I'd rather spend the time talking about our approach and the types of hackers we're looking for. The company structure is not something you'll come across regularly. Our goal is to incubate creativity and increase efficiency by reducing managerial and corporate waste.

15% of net profit revenue is put into a founders fund which serves as a cash reserve for company growth (and Apple's odd payment cycle). Partners typically work as pairs on projects and share remaining profits evenly 50/50 (1 dev, 1 designer). Our company costs are less than 4% of our revenue, product costs are typically 0-1%, and company debt is $0. The books are transparent to all partners, and profit dividends are paid out in full every month.

This is not a structure suitable for everyone — you're responsible for taxes, health care, etc — but it's been a great way to minimize risk and maximize reward of the AppStore. Our team works remotely: 1 in LA, 1 in Australia, and I'm in Austin. I work on this full-time (++), 1 developer works PT, and the other is somewhere in between. I would love to find another developer who can commit full-time, but more than willing to take another part-time guy if he works smart and moves fast.

We're interested in Objective-C/Cocoa developers and a background in web services is a big plus. If this sounds appealing to you, please submit examples of your work and resume to partners [at] saltlicklabs.com.

For questions: feel free to call me anytime today at (512) 795-4326 to discuss, my name is Colin. I'm also happy to answer questions in this thread. Company website:

http://saltlicklabs.com

Thanks!
And in fact video producers receive higher ratings for their later videos, even as their success rate declines.

Ah, so people are less successful over time if we define "success" as "sheer number of hits".

Just because they're not reaching the widest audience doesn't mean that these people aren't reaching their audience.

Isn't this how you want it to work? The point of publicity is to get everyone to look at your work once. But there's no way that all of those people are going to stick, unless your product is heroin. (Even then, some people are smart enough to say "no, thanks" to your first offer.)

If nearly 100% of the people who first see your product stick around, the most likely explanation is not that you have invented heroin. More likely, you have not reached enough people yet: Your product is still spreading solely via word of mouth, and there are potential fans among the general population who you would pick up if you cast a wider net. (Though, obviously, casting such a net has a cost. Your true fans may accuse you of "selling out" once your ads start appearing on daytime television.)

The important thing about a viewership curve is not that it declines over time. The important question is: What's the asymptotic value, and is that equilibrium number of fans large enough to keep you happy in perpetuity? If it isn't... what's the rate of decline, and is there enough area under the curve to keep you happy while you work out the next thing you want to do? The first scenario is The Simpsons. The second is just about every other successful TV series in history.
Of course you're right that this is the fundamental dilemma, and I generally agree with what you (and the author) are saying.

The point I was trying to make, though, is that it cuts both ways: If you know it's a litigious society, you have to be aware of what's going to be in the other person's mind when you flex your "I was wronged" muscles. Marching up to someone who isn't cut-and-dry responsible for wronging you and demanding an apology, that's a really assholish thing to do.

Before the average person will forgo a lawsuit

I really hope that the average person thinks of a lawsuit as a last resort, rather than as something to forgo.
The advice here makes an interesting contrast/overlap to my own slogan "Shut up and do the impossible!", though that's advice honed on a completely different sort of impossible problem where the main resistance comes from technical difficulties or your own confusion, rather than people.

"Be prepared to lose" is the main advice I would completely reverse for supreme technical difficulties.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ
In context, I think they were including slips and falls, traffic accidents, etc.
And on the flip side, I get very little spam to any of my inboxes.

This includes gmail, an exchange server using Frontbridge, and some personal domains running on dreamhost.

I'd be more interested to hear about what portion of this spam gets through modern filters.
Why Is Gmail Still in Beta?
I'll be curious to see what happens in about 6 months. What percentage of songs will be $1.29, what percentage will still be $0.00, and what percentage will be $0.69?

Not to be pessimistic, but I suspect $1.29 songs won't decrease in price as they age.
I can believe that ancient japan would have invented a computer if given sufficient time in some alternate reality. once the appropriate questions had been asked and answered of course.

The real issue is not whether Japan would have invented a computer in an alternate reality, but whether we have invented it in ours, and whether what we call a computer really is what we perceive it to be. If human reasoning was fundamentally incorrect, we wouldn't be able to detect it.
I applied to justin.tv but they told me that they don't accept students who aren't eligible to work in the us.