skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes I wonder what I'd have to write online to get a knock on the door.

Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.
3. Focus on the positive feedback.

Figure out what people do like about your app and drill down. Remember, your aim is not to please everyone. Your aim is to just find some people who love your product, however crappy it may be.

The extreme example of this, however, is that you end up building your product for one person. I mean that's an obvious failure mode, and in practice you'd certainly hope to get more users than that, but at some point you've got to decide what market you're going after beyond just, 'The people who like your product just as it is.'

Ideally everyone would like your product. That's rarely going to happen, I suspect, because people have different needs for most things - but generally the thing with the more general appeal seems likely to win unless your thing is worth an incredible amount to the few who like it.
Good point but what's the differences between a short term rental an a longer term one? I mean, imagine that someone rents an apartment in a condo for 1yr, and they party all day, we are in a similar situation but with more rotation?
Do you need to be comfortable to be hungry?
I've noticed that people talking with a young startup founder expect them to be hungry - to not take a salary, to have no outside job.

But when little obvious costs like $500 for ordering rapid prototypes, a few hundred dollars per month in hosting, a $3000 license for software that is needed to proceed, it's not like you can raise a $9K for these and living expenses.

Why not? People say, "well, obviously you should already have $9K, that's a given."

To a vast percentage of the country - and the world - $9K in savings is far from reality: it would leave them - us - comfortable.

Corporate America loves handing out the lucrative contracts that are usually mentioned next: if you already have an education you pumped $80K into (and usually much more.)

My solution at the moment is simply to lie. People outside the company don't know that the cofounders, who are poor, have poorly paid jobs at the same time.

This does give us infinite runway. But when a couple of $2000 costs come up. What are we supposed to do? Save up for three months before paying them?

We put a lot into this startup but are young and have no other careers. Like steve jobs when he worked at an apple orchard, if you will.

It seems people expect us to be comfortable while telling us to be hungry.

How are we supposed to quit low-paying jobs and do our startup full-time? You can't just say, "I know! I'll just find some $15K I have somewhere."

It seems we're expected to be able to say that.
> Web development is more like plumbing than any of us, perched in front of two slick monitors, would care to admit.

Not only web development, but programming jobs in general. To be honest, after going through a couple of 'real' jobs, I am at the point where I'd rather do some plumbing rather than write another rpm spec or see why a bash script is misbehaving.
HFT Profit = f(Noise/Signal) - g(Tech Costs)
Conviction
See http://tweaky.com. It doesn't look like they do the kind of coding tasks you're talking about (yet). But I agree there's a need for a marketplace like that.
'Citadel' global cybercrime ring targeted by Microsoft and FBI
I would rather work with him in the forest than most startups in San Fran in an office personally. But that's because i abhor offices - they're the downfall of humanity.
Oh snaps...And I got suckered by this.
Universities aren't as meritocratic as you might think. I really liked this book, http://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges-Outs... I don't know if I agree with everything, but the realization that the majority of admissions at elite schools are to people who are in some way "hooked" is pretty shocking.

Also, the last Stanford graduating class was a fifth legacy students. http://www.stanforddaily.com/2009/12/02/legacies-a-fifth-of-...
Some friends of mine made a webapp at PennApps to visualize your Snapchat social graph by scraping the public profiles:

http://snapgraph.me/

Even if Snapchat isn't making a big network diagram it's certainly possible to create one.
Toshi ruined it for everyone.
Of course Facebook is fine, no matter what HN readers think of it. I suspect I'm typical in minimizing my Facebook use because, if for no more serious reason, too many instances of a Facebook "app" spamming my contact list.

And yet, I almost certainly count among Facebook's monthly active users. I cross-post to Facebook. I have family that doesn't grok Google+. There are even business contacts that prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for whatever reasons.

That might make the value of many Facebook users very low, but as long as Facebook doesn't stagnate technologically, it's more than just viable.
Some humor: Tumblr's awful HTML source
I think I focused on the headline too much. Democratizing personalized matchmaking is interesting. I look forward to watching this play out.
I'd like an invite please!

email: tnfog@lavabit.com
Basic Machine Learning With K Nearest Neighbor and Racket
Well, how do you know that the person in question is average?

At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...
True, but it's virtually certain there were people marketing themselves as world-class tulip experts.
Nothing wrong with labor. Dirty hands make clean money.
Out of curiosity, how do the numbers in Toronto compare to PEI? Do the jobs you've seen offer some mix of in-office/remote schedule?

-Canadian working overseas
Given your educational background, I think it could be argued that you are better prepared to do this type of personal promotion than others who have a purely technical background. In most cases, raw technical talent isn't as important (thought technical folks usually think it's all that matters) as being able to do the job at hand and being able to convince others that you can do that job.

Good for you for realizing that "marketing" doesn't have to be a dirty word and hopefully others can learn from your example.
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?

Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.
So you could send out amazon links to products with your referral id, have amazon pay facebook to pin it to the top of people's news feeds, and cash in if anyone buys something from amazon after visiting your link? :)
No, ultra-limited government means a government with significantly reduced power, reach and size with respect to what we have today. It does not mean "no government". Considering how massive and all encompassing our governments are now, even after severely reducing it at all levels we'd still have quite a few people running our cities, states and country.

You can twist it any way you want but nobody is calling for no government, that would be insane.
Fair enough. I think my response was biased towards professionals who you can be sure will do the job quickly, not learning on your dime.
So because Obama lied too much, you instead voted for the guy who probably told more lies than any politician in U.S. presidential history? And rather than voting for the libertarian who was running, you voted for the guy who campaigned on sending people to jail for getting abortions, using drugs, etc.?
Interesting voting pattern. To my mind, that pattern is another argument in favor of score voting (sometimes called "range voting") [1]. I'd vastly prefer score voting to our present plurality voting for all elections, and of course most importantly, national elections. This would have allowed me and you to score Obama, Romney, and Gary Johnson according to how well they match our ideals.

I grow increasingly weary of either "choosing the lesser of two evils" or "throwing my vote away."

[1] http://btf.io/362
> The US gov't has always engaged in the practices you mention against the people, although this has expanded since 9/11.

Whoa! There used to be executive orders prohibiting assassination. There also used to be a prohibition on the CIA spying domestically. They had to pass a law that retroactively made it legal for the Telcos to hand over call data. Torture wasn't legal until Bush Jr.

Things have fundamentally changed.
Yeah, I totally missed the sarcastic tone. I just thought she was making the joke on his actual illness, not the possibility of having another illness due to wine abuse.
pandawhale.com tends to have a medium sized portion of startup/tech news bulked up with a best-of selection from reddit or facebook.
China Seen in Push to Gain Technology Insights
I'm afraid in this case voting for somebody else is just not going to be enough. History shows us the only way to really change the status quo is by massive mobilization akin to the Civil Rights movement.
To those saying that if you have nothing to hide you should not have a problem with this, you are missing some points, and situations...

In addition, the idea that privacy is necessary to a full life and full persona has been addressed by an array of scholars and privacy experts; consider Decew's In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology as one good place to start.
The worst thing is that people will talk about all this for a few days and then go back to living their lives. I hope I am wrong though.
M-x spook

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...
I've been a part-time cultural critic for...a long time, and I couldn't agree more. I've always tried to do two things with my essays: make them as creative works in their own right, and always recognize the subordinate nature of criticism. This both makes me sympathetic to the artist (as someone who in a lesser way is presenting a work of my own) and also less prone to taking the all-too-common Superior Stance of the critic.

If a work is particularly bad, I'll generally just leave it alone, unless the artist has presented something that is obviously cynical and pandering, or otherwise obviously derivative and parasitic on the work of better artists. In those cases I might get slightly snarky. I try to control this and tone it down, because even derivative works are risks, and usually somewhat naive.

If the artists' ambitious goals weren't met, and I think I understand them, I try to lay this out in as constructive a manner as I can.

I can usually only accomplish good criticism by immersion -- repeated (dozens of) listens to a record for instance, over a period of days, writing/typing out lyrics by hand, listening to all the artist's previous records, reading as many interviews as I can and just trying to get my head in the "space" of the record. At some point I get to a place of sympathy where I get into the "soul" of the record and I really have something to say, that isn't just a first impression, nor a knee-jerk reaction, but as close to deep understanding as I can get. It's really hard work, even for just a 150 word review (which is one reason I don't do it often any more).

It's rare to get that kind of perspective on a HN comment, "Show HN", or some blog post linked here. But even with the noise that's emerged over the last few years as HN has grown, I can still find the really constructive comments and learn as much as I always have. I just have to look past the frustrating drive-by comments, the throw-away accounts and the axes-to-grind. The signal-to-noise isn't what it used to be, but in general there's just as much signal, but a lot more noise to have to overlook.
Get out of the building - love it!

Currently doing something similar - not a coder though, I'm living on Rugen Island in Germany. Made my first fire last night (embarrassed to say I'm 32 years old) and it gave me a kind of satisfaction I've not felt for a long time.

Feeling a lot more creative out here - enjoying being reconnected to nature. Spent 3 months in Brooklyn earlier in the year - the contrast is unreal. For me living in the city feels so toxic now. I want to make this a more permanent living arrangement - that's my next goal.
Yes, 43, going on 5. I laughed.
If you are looking for snapchat for adults without the Best Friends feature check out www.ncryptedcloud.com

The private camera function is much better than Snapchat because I can send my private photos to ANYONE not just someone who has Snapchat.

The ability to watermark the image with the email or the phone number of my friends is WAY better than a notice that someone took a screen shot IMHO.
The horror stories are not half as interesting as I thought they'd be.
It is better to remain silent and be thought...

May I suggest that getting an education might do wonders for your life? Just a thought.
I'm bothered by the tone and inclusive language of this post. Of course an inspection of one's private conversations is intrusive and will make them uncomfortable, but this isn't true for all:
"We get incredibly offending[sic] when someone reads our text messages, but even if they never see the messages themselves we are still embarrassed the second they see who we are talking to."

I'm not embarrassed by the people I communicate with - hell that would make my friends list on facebook a nightmare! And when you see my snapchat best friends, it's my girlfriend and 1 other guy and 1 other girl - my 2 top traveling friends. We use snapchat while on the road to share funny, temporal traveling moments that don't warrant setting up a real shot or publication. And it's a lot of fun.

I suppose if you need anonymity for your snaps you shouldn't be sharing your username with those you trust. And you shouldn't be trusted, either.
FWIW, I went to install Postman and it also requires access to all your website data.
> I voted for Romney

You are part of the problem. When someone is a fucking idiot, you don't vote for the slightly less idiotic idiot, you vote third-party. You are not independent, and it's an embarrassment to say you are if you only vote for the lesser of two evils, and not one that cares about our country, like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein.
I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war?

If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?

To be clear: I don't want to go to war.
I think youre arguing against someone with an agenda, they cant possibly be this stupid.
Dune

1984

Would greatly help if you told us what type (or examples) of books you like.
You do know that the internet exists outside of the US, right?
This might be a dumb question: are there shells that have a HTML-based front and passes commands into the background? Seems like something like that would be far more flexible than this – which feels like a Jenga tower of hacks.
I live in Quebec and I'm not that literal. In fact your first example is funny because I just realized that I always say "steal" when I want to borrow something.
Somewhat off-topic; but if you're wondering how this became a story on HN: it was submitted to the ListServe a bit over an hour ago.

The ListServe is a really cool email lottery where every day one person wins the chance to send an email to everyone else on the list, and the results have been nothing short of mesmerizing so far.

http://thelistserve.com/
Journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained documents from a leak that confirm the NSA has secretly been requiring Verizon (and presumably the same for other networks) to provide the complete information (location, duration, id) of every single call, national or international, on an ongoing daily basis.

There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time.

That's kind of a big deal.

It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document.

His original article is here...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
Show HN: My first iOS app - SleepSleep clock for toddlers
I hope all these up voters have emailed their representative.
I do not know much about privy, but as a competitor - why do you feel snapchat was more successful?
According to their FAQ (http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue) direct debit data was probably also compromised.
I do, yeah.

Twenty years ago gay marriage was a radioactive issue. I know because I was an intern in a Democratic Senator's office back then, and when the Defense of Marriage Act came up I got to watch my boss and a bunch of other normally progressive people rush to vote for it to avoid any possibility of being painted as pro-gay. It was a deeply depressing spectacle.

Now gay marriage is not only thinkable, it's on the verge of becoming the new normal.

Why? How did that happen?

It happened because gay people organized. They spent two decades doing the hard work required to change peoples' minds. And now that work is paying off.

A democracy is not an immovable object. Moving it is hard, but it can be done. You just have to be willing to put your back into it.
For marketers, http://inbound.org has a similar format.
One reaction: Routine Web site "plumbing"
is not nearly all there is to the Web
now or its potential in the future.
If the OP wants work more advanced,
significant, powerful, valuable, meaningful,
etc., then he should try to think of
a Web site that needs more than just routine
plumbing.
HN is great for getting exposure, provided you find the value of the exposure & feedback worth the cost of collecting & processing it. The author's point "Unless you’re selling something for which HN is going to be the main target market (shudder)..." is good to keep in mind regarding all HN feedback, not just pricing.

The feedback you should pay most attention to is that from your actual target market. Heck, most products in existence that generate tens of millions of dollars per year in sales would be flogged mercilessly if posted to HN with a request for feedback.

Screw all that. Go find actual customers and use their feedback to figure out how to meet actual needs sufficiently to make some kind of transaction happen. And if your target market is HN, then may God have mercy on your soul.
You're right, with one big caveat.

All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
Are you sure ? I thought they had only minitel.
The economics of airport security – the case of Poland
I wish more startups would spend all of their time out of doors in outdoor offices. I keep wanting an outdoor covered workspace here in Texas, even when it's 100 Farenheit outside. I think offices dull the senses, and separate us from the world.
I agree that Snapchat needs to be more forthright about what kind of information they store and what actually happens to the photos. But I kind of feel like if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry. If you do have something to hide, maybe it would be worth your time to find a different app.
You'd have to be very rich and have an extraordinarily resilient body to party all day all year round. Whereas an ever changing cast of vacationers can each party while on vacation and then return to quiet lives in their home town.
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".)

Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.

I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
True. People shouldn't shy away from personal promotion, just do it at appropriate times and in appropriate places. I hated advertising in school, but thought it was the only way I could make money with a graphic design degree. Turns out coding with a graphic design degree is a lot more rewarding (for me at least, I'm a builder by nature).
Hetzner Robot has been compromised
What Conceivable Statement of Facts Could Have Produced this (FISA) Order?
Me too, if I'm not too late, please :). dave at addedbytes dot com
No we're not worth it. We should just go back to pencil and paper.
Not all - the main three languages are English, German, and French (IIRC the Italian government just won a court case of some sort because they claimed this was discriminatory against its citizen, especially when it comes to posting job vacancies)
All this establishes is that the person in question is not your mother.
I have been working on a project: http://www.ellsy.io

It is not complete yet, but I could use some feedback. Specifically regarding a commenting system. I am thinking about rolling my own, but that comes with a lot of issues. Any ideas on how you would like it to look?

The site has the ability to curate posts, and then as you follow topics or even other users, you can start to build out a custom stream of news by sources that you like or are interested in. Both curated items and stream items are ordered based on the amount of likes that they receive. There is no down voting.

Each user also has a profile page showing where they typically "like" items and where they post them.
By Thor, are image macros really necessary? It seems you can't have a technical presentation these days without some silly generic "memes" sprinkled all around, it's ridiculous.
> As someone who lived through the Stored Procedure hell of the late 90's and early 00's, can someone explain to me why this shouldn't scare the bejeezus out of me?

Because it doesn't have anything to do with "Stored Procedure hell". Having one more choice of procedural languages (of which there are already many available for Postgres) doesn't do anything to force you to adopt bad practices as to when you use procedural code in the database.