skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few ways a PhD can help:

1. If your PhD research is directly applicable to a product you think is worth building. See, e.g., Google.

2. If you need to hire other PhDs or people with advanced degrees. Having a PhD gives you street cred which helps you build a team.

Beyond that starting a company is about talking to customers, prototyping ideas and products, and building a team. Along the way you might also have to convince other people to give you money to keep you going towards your ultimate, billion-dollar goal.
I love his humming.
Recessions end eventually.
BTW, I'd definitely choose Stanford if your goal is to start a company. It's one school where the line between academia and business is very blurry -- people pass back and forth much more freely than at other schools.

This means you'll have access to a whole network of people with the same interests or experiences directly applicable to your situation.
I'm not a salesman so I wouldn't know but it seems to me 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. is the very definition of why you need NDAs.

But again maybe I'm looking at this from an engineer's perspective and it's different for sales.

In either case, I don't think we'll change each others minds here on the Internet.
Driving a car, voting, and signing a lease are all much much simpler to do than understanding a non-compete agreement. And actually I think the line of "most" people falls somewhere in the middle.
As far as I've seen, pretty much all "premium 4 letter domain names!!!" are held by people like you.

If no one has offered you a lot of money in the last 10 years, it's likely worthless IMHO

You might get really lucky and be able to sell it to another domain speculator, or someone that really really needs it.

What's the last big website to use a 4 letter .com name?
Too bad they're only keeping up with the times when it comes to their lingo, and not with their business model
Did you lose your tweets recently?
Yeah, probably. They did it anyway, though, because it was fun (and who's going to miss those pennies, anyway).
>> "The going price for parked or low volume domains is around $15K Maybe an offer in that range will get his attention."

I wouldn't spend $15k on a domain unless that amount of money is small change to you. Also I think that's an insanely high figure in any event.
I just checked. John Maynard Keynes has no child. So perhaps by leaving debt to other people's children is the best solution to cleaning up mess that we created for the moment....

Beside from a point of view based on evolution. The creator of the mess will not leave bad genetic material that creates the problem. And by creating the big problem, he helps descendants of survivors pass the selection and become more robust to the problem! How unselfish is it!
Yes and no.

That's just a way of getting around the advertising restrictions. You can advertise the hell out of pokerstars <tiny voice>.net</tiny voice> and be confident that your users will actually find you at pokerstars.com.

(It's just a corollary to the ".net is way less valuable than .com, especially when spoken about offline" rule. No play money poker site could afford mainstream TV advertising otherwise...)
HL7 - Why Make It Simple If It Can Be Complicated?
Looks a lot like what Rob over at Cockeyed did with his Light Sharpener: http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

The Google version looks more professional, though...
How is it possible to have a meaningful implementation of "voting, tagging, or some reputation-earning scheme for the content itself" without an accompanying concept of identity?
Single finger text input without a keyboard (using language models for efficiency)
> The US government is not corrupt.

Fannie Mae?

> Governments do not achieve efficiency because they have no feedback mechanism to allow them to.

Elections? Defaults?

> I like the circularity of your statement though. As soon as it's working well, then it will be working well!

I merely meant to point out that the government has the potential for greater efficiency.
Agree, but if you're non-technical and you write up a complete spec and have mockups and head to elance, you're likely to be disappointed in the technical execution you end up with.
Times is trying to reinvent itself a lot more aggressively than other newspapers
> Most people are aware of .org.

No, they aren't. I worked at a nonprofit that had a .org address that nobody remembered, not even the staff, many of whom ended up giving out name@foo.com addresses and even printed their business cards with the .com instead of their name@foo.org address. Ended up getting the .com and the .org so people would stop confusing them. You'd imagine if there was a TLD someone would remember with regards to an organization it would be .org, but it's really .com or whatever the prevalent ccTLD in the country is.

Speaking of telling friends and clients and other such people your email address/url over the phone, every single time I've told my super short email address (me@janey.me) to someone that wasn't geeky, it ALWAYS ended with "so is it me.com?" (well, I do have a mobileme account but no...), "so what is this at? hotmail? yahoo?"... I think that's why I still primarily rely on my gmail account that nobody has a problem with.
Very cool concept! Are you screen scraping for data or is there an API of some sort?
Social News Fail: Great local journalism goes unnoticed on major social news sites
Cuil did (does?) a lot of deep searching but that's not the problem here. MSNbot is pretending to be an IE6-using human, including a fake referer header from their search engine.

Microsoft have been inflating their search traffic for years via many tricks. I think they still count every misspelling in IE that kicks to their MSN page as a "search".
What do you mean who owns the responsibility? The person who hurt or killed her, of course. I don't see the gray area. How is, what is in essence, a niche dating site responsible for what its members do any more so than the mainstream ones?
I think there are a couple of gators on HN.
I once elanced a site that grew to making 5 figures monthly. I know a number of other people who've had even more success than me with it.

I'd love to hear more about this :)
>> ...people like you

Hey, I take offense to being lumped in with domain squatters, because I have the domain name for purely personal reasons and I would never sell it. I was just curious about how much they go for, that's all.

(My first name is Idoh and I own idoh.com)
In general, no. Unless you do it with fraudulent intent:

Title 18 United States Code, Section 331

Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States;
or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

For an interesting explanation of why it is now illegal to melt pennies and nickels see:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_...
heh sorry... In that case, it depends on how many people called Idoh you can find most probably who want to own the .com
They say, "Anytime we see a referrer from serach.live.com, we check if the IP is in the range of known IP addresses for their crawler, and if so, we just ignore it."

I filter some stats according to user agent name: Anybody know if these bots use regular (honest) agent names? Or do I need to start searching for "range of knw IP addresses for their crawler?" (Anyone care to share such a range?
Google Calendar "hello" Easter Egg
They even launched two APIs recently. If there's a newspaper out there trying to reinvent itself, that newspaper is the NYTimes.
Stress and its consequences for software development
Cool concept. The animations are well done and not too over the top.

Couple of suggestions for you:
1) I don't think the ability to switch style themes is important at all. It really doesn't have anything to do with the core of what you are trying to accomplish and for that reason alone, I'd vote scrapping it.
2) The highlight for the search dropdown is very faint. I'd recommend adding a bit more contrast to this.

Keep up the good work!
so your email is idoh@idoh.com?
Yes. All of the ones from @directededge are gone. I know of a couple other folks that had the same.
Exactly. The OP was suggesting that Mass. is taking an action to prevent him signing contracts. On the contrary, it is saying it will stay out of the way an refuse to take action to enforce a certain sort of contract.
Thanks :)

Steam doesn't provide a public API for this stuff (or at least i didn't find one) and as far as I know the Steam client doesn't even know about packages and stuff like that so there is no other way of extracting the data.

As a side note, there are at least 5 game pages with invalid HTML that caused problems :)
How do you go about finding names? I've looked hard, and wasted a lot of time - I think that part of my brain must be missing or broken or something. I think mibbit is a great name btw.
But if you have a complete spec, then you can take it to a really reputable firm. The way the top web design firms make their money is by charging a relatively low upfront fee (~30k) for a website, but by charging you again every time you change the spec. The reason the firms make money is because 99% of people end up changing the spec, so clients end up spending 150k or so. As long as you never change the spec then you can afford to take it to one of the best design firms in the world, as opposed to hiring some guy off elance.

It takes discipline and a willingness to sit down and have all your fights upfront, but it is possible, and the results make the process well worth it.
"But for private code...what's wrong with that?"

Reread my first sentence. I see nothing terribly wrong with monkeypatching for personal projects.
the one thing that is keeping them from being successful is that they don't do 100% of the design upfront.

No one can, technical or nontechnical. Spec-and-implement doesn't work.
I'd buy that for a dollar! (sorry for the Robocop / iPhone joke).

But I would buy it.
Indeed, and once non-compete agreements are no longer enforced in Mass., non-compete agreements will no longer be a matter of contract law.
Even though it might not be considered production yet, I'd recommend any public site to at least turn off debug setting (and better add a catch-all route).
That wasn't my experience. Pretty much they'll deliver it, you'll test it to make sure it performs appropriately. There will be some cases where it won't, and they'll fix it.

The only time you'll care about the code quality is when you scale, and if you have that problem you can afford to hire in house.
What's the last big website to use a 4 letter .com name?

There's digg and hulu at least. I can't think of anything more recent. (there's also xkcd.com but it's not exactly big)
Finishing what you start. Enduring pain. Technical ability.
Oups, forgot to change the settings back.
A couple years ago when I was in school, one of my faculty members got his DEC Alpha workstation with Tru64 shipped out to him from his old job, and I tried to get the original OpenGenera port running: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Gener... -- unfortunately it was running a too-old version of Tru64, and even though I found media for the latest version, it has hardware-tied licenses. Trying to crack it seemed like a time-pit.

Fortunately, people figured out how to get it to run on x86-64 Linux: http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html
Are you suggesting that there's an obvious solution that the NYT is neglecting which would solve the problems that they - and every other newspaper - are facing? I'd love to hear it. I'm sure they would too.
How do we measure the utility?
The better contractors on elance will guarantee you an hourly rate for changes too. In my limited experience, they seem pretty reasonable about it. It's of course impossible to say whether they're over-billing, but it sure never felt like they were, and the rating system gives them a vested interesting in ensuring that.
Too late to edit. It doesn't force a scrollbar even in NetNewsWire though, so you might just want to widen the window a bit.
I think this is just more a left-in debug facility than a proper 'easter egg'
Semantically/Geographically hierarchical category ranking is exactly what I've been working on.
What is Gradual Typing?
Besides being a .net, this has the problem that "...dog dot..." is kinda hard to say.
WordPress plugin to block DiggBar (inspired by Jon Gruber)
There is something to be said for manners though.
A) This is a really great looking set of articles.

B) That guy looks like he could be related to GvR - I did a double-take when I first loaded the page.
I found this very interesting.

The thing that I can't stop thinking about is: Where is the line between prostitution and a relationship? I'm not talking about the legal sense; I don't find that interesting at all. I'm talking about the moral sense.

For example, if I paid a woman for sex right now, I would feel bad about it. This would be the case even if she was not whorish at all, even if it was the first time she ever had sex for money. I would feel that it's fake and that she doesn't really "accept" me.

On the other hand, I'd be completely okay with supporting a wife financially for the rest of our lives.

It makes sense that the man gives money to a woman who mates with him. But I think that the uneasy feeling that you'd get if you'll pay directly for sex is a real problem. I think it's more than just an uneasy feeling that can be ignored--I think it signifies that something is wrong, but I can't put it into words exactly. Maybe one of you can?

I think that "Sam", the sugar daddy who is mentioned in page 5 of this article, boiled it down to a pretty good formula:

Sam is also more determined than most to try separating a sugar baby’s affection and the money she’s paid to provide it. In his arrangements, he says, he establishes a trust in the woman’s name that pays a monthly stipend of at least $5,000 for the length of their contract. If the woman decides to quit sleeping with him at any point, he may quit serving as adviser and pamperer, but the stipend continues regardless. “If I didn’t do that, then it’s like a leash I’m putting on somebody, and that seems really unfair,” he said. “Besides, then I’d never know what the relationship was really about.”

Any thoughts?
Tesla’s Elon Musk Calls NY Times Writer Stross “A Huge Douchebag…And An Idiot”
I think being a professor trying to get tenure is more similar to founding a startup than getting the Ph.D. itself.

Professors trying to get tenure have to produce good research which results in a high quantity of high quality publications, attract and advise graduate students and chase grant money. In the beginning, professors will do most of the research themself, but as their group grows, their students mature as researchers and they have a steady flow of grant money, they're more like managers.

Also, I think stating what you'd like to do after you get your Ph.D. is like the caterpillar stating what kind of butterfly it wants to be. The process will change you in ways you can't predict, and you may want different things.

From someone who can see the end, good luck with your beginning.
Basically I was providing rake back to poker players. They would sign up at a site through my affiliate link and I would get paid a % of what they paid in rake. I would then pay them most of that back. I would receive amounts every month from the poker sites that a dishonest person with a short time frame would have simply kept and retired on, then pay most of it out.

The business was doing well before I elanced it, but I had hit a point where I could no longer scale without working crazy hours or hiring people. I also wanted my customers to be able to see their stats in real time, etc. So I had a friend (now my cofounder at Blue Frog Gaming) build a cool script to snag the stats from a website and put them in a db. Then I elanced the actual site itself, I think for $500 or so. Some Indian firm banged it out in 2 weeks, I launched it, and was able to grow pretty rapidly.

The point is that the internet isn't like a shopping mall where every business competes with every other for a limited set of eyeballs on the same few things. The salient points of differentiation in many industries have little or nothing to do with quality of code, but they can still make an assload on the web. They just need a website that performs a certain task with reasonable speed and reliability, and if you can define the task, you can get that on elance very cheaply.

You'll never end up with a Flickr, or a YouTube, or a Google that way. But you definitely could end up with a seriously profitable business.
I keep wanting to setup a spoof clone site called http://www.domainwigeon.com

"Domain Wigeon. Not the web's #1 resource for available domain names"
This seems to be what Common Lisp does, or am I missing some subtlety?
I definitely agree a language model is key to better input schemes beyond the current state of the art on mobiles .For instance RIM/TrueType, iPhone, T9 seem to only utilize a dictionary based solution as opposed to using a full fledged language model limiting their effectiveness.

That said, while I like the language model I just don't se this interface being extremely usable. I believe there is a new interface waiting to be invented that, with this language model technique, start to approach keyboard typing speeds. Swype seemed on the right track, especially by reducing the learning curve and leveraging a QWERTY model, but I hope that even better options develop. For now a slide-out keyboard on my iPhone would be good enough for me. The PalmPre may even convert me if it works as good as it looks.
At this point I only know of one other Idoh, and he's about 3 years old.
I based the 15k price of transactions that friends were involved in One had a good name he wasnt using, the other had plenty of cash. Other considerations show up: in calif. it is very difficult to find a good company name to register. Combine that with the difficuly of finding a domain name, $15K may not be so much.

In general I agree with you, $15K could be put to a lot better use.
Go to an online-only distribution model and charge a premium if you want it in dead-tree format.

If their journalistic skills are so much better than those of the bloggers, then demonstrate that to us.
Interactive Singles Map
All Fixed. Have a look!
A lot of missing tweets are still turning up in the search timeline. You can find tweets like that with tweleted - http://tweleted.com/ - looks like that solves the problem for @tonido
Google Earth Flythroughs Come To The Browser
for sites where there's commentary, i do often wish there was a side-by-side view of the site and the commentary on the site.
I'm a big fan... spent ~2 hours looking through your lists over the last couple days. Nothing in particular stood out (like you said many of them are not very good), but it was invaluable in helping me think about my idea and naming in a different way. So thank you for that!
National Broadband Plan? Dream Big, Feds, Very Big
Everything else people have said is good! One other note, if you look on the iphone keyboard while you're typing in a URL on safari, there's a ".com" key to finish off the URL. Just a thought. One day we'll have keyboards with a .com attached to it right next to the return/enter key.
Quote from the piece:
"The main objective of raising marginal tax rates on the rich is not to raise additional tax revenue, but rather to keep top compensation under control and to curb the grabbing hand. In fact, the proposal that I am making--introducing a 80% marginal tax rate on all annual incomes in excess of €1m, leaving the rest of the tax system unchanged-would probably raise limited additional tax revenue...."

That seems to be an admission that they're not trying to improve society overall, but just to keep the rich fettered.

More commentary on the topic here: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132843.html

(sorry for replying to myself)
This is the sort of thing that people who say "What are we going to use 4/8/16/... core computers for? Who needs any more computing power?" are missing.

My answer - 'wasteful' things like this. Useful, but only if you have plenty of spare capacity to run them in.
It's the sex separation thing: men and women do stuff differently. Evolutionary speaking it's a very interesting and complicated game. I recommend "Why is sex fun?" by Jared Diamond for a crash course.

Any short answer I'd give would be wrong in some way, so I'll just say once again: sexes are different. Don't make the mistake to think this is less important in modern times. It's not. It's just a bit more complicated.
Yes, I lost all my tweets from November to April.

Unlike the author of the article, though, I am not "furious", merely amused. Why would I expect a free service to do anything for me?
I followed the links to YouTube, and am still amazed how fast a water balloon bursts in slow-motion. Think how many things are happening to and in it as it bursts! I can't get a grasp on how fast the world is happening outside my humanscale senses.
From page three: Indeed, most go to considerable effort to distinguish between “sugar” and prostitution. (Legally, at least, they are right; since the 1970s, courts have ruled that as long as the woman is paid for some service besides sex — housecleaning, companionship — the arrangement is not the equivalent of prostitution.)
It masquerades as IE 6 last I checked. It's not marked in any way as a bot, so IP addresses are the way to go.
I don't know anything about HL7 or HL7-XML, but this sounds like letting loose people that dont know zilch about the implementation side of things. In this case HL7 is translated into UML because the people involved know UML, not XML. Then the UML is translated into XML by the push of a button, generating monstrous XML.

Rant: dont let your tools substitute for personal knowledge of the domain.
I agree with a ban on putting it into an employment contract, however I don't agree with them being banned completely.

I don't think my getting a job should hinge on if I agree not to use my knowledge for my own best interest. If a company wants to offer me something that (from my perception) is of better interest to me than competing with them, then I'd possibly sign it.

If it's that important to a company that I don't compete with them, they should be willing to pay me enough that I have an interest not to compete.