skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The primary problem seems to be trust and identity. Those people who are being reviewed will want their chance to speak or vote. They may even do so surreptitiously. Who would run the service? They probably have conflicts of interest if they are doing it for money.

I have hope that the uptake of social networking will see some smart people deploy a service like this in the next 5 years.
Internet Marketing Strategy
Our Toronto internet marketing company offers search marketing and web marketing services such as search engine marketing, ppc marketing (pay per click), website

design, link building, and copywriting services.
Also see Scott Aaronson's lectures:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus
For some reason, though, 'who was Ozymandias?' goes unanswered.
I can't be the only one thinking about reversing the Kindle 'booklet' classes and hacking this in for native PDF support on the Kindle/2.
Q: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

(WA) A: a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood
I've working on my 4th startup, hopefully this one will pan out better than the rest :P
Amazon pays Kindle authors/publishers 35% of the list price (which is set by the content owner). The retail price is set by Amazon. Scribd's margins are clearly more lucrative. Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com) operates a similar model and pays out 85%. I think this is a great move - high traffic alternatives to Amazon can only be good for the self-publishing ecosystem.
Google announces new search tools to counter-fight Wolfram Alpha
ColoRotate: Home - Colors Come to Life in 3D
Couple of things:
1. Do you think you are in the right job, right now? The way you're thinking about the architecture rehaul and the business aspects of the project you should be the architect/CTO of the company :-)
2. If you are convinced the existing thing might not work, go tell your boss, sit with the team and make the changes. Starting out on your own is very time consuming, risky and tests your patience like anything, burns your enthusiasm out very quickly (speaking from experience)
3. I suggest fix the obvious gotchas in the current implementation within the current platform with minimum deviations and launch. In the meanwhile start a new effort, get a team, budget and targets. Work on your implementation, learn from the current deployment. Of course you may not be able to make millions out of this, but your risks too are limited.

But whatever you do, try not to leave it in the middle. Go the whole hog, enjoy the experience.
mundane and trite.
But at best (from an Australian viewpoint) we can talk about correlation not causation. Why not give us the data on mean income in the area or pricing in the area or average debt levels or something tangible rather than an identity label from which we are meant to infer certain connotations.

Unless of course the implication is that bank managers are foreclosing with a racial bias (letting white people stay in debt longer).
currently working on some ideas for startups, hoping to go full time soon
You have to compare Ramit Sethi to the many people trying to do this and failing. Very few people take on Loopt, because you have to accomplish so much to go from 100% odds of failure to 99%. But in Sethi's case, every marginal action -- writing a post, writing a comment, tweaking your layout, etc. -- can get you closer. This means that someone who wants to compete with Sethi can either be more talented (not something you can factor into the "Follow these simple but difficult steps..." analysis) or work marginally harder. Either way, he's stuck in the position of constantly having to compete to be a bit better than the next guy -- and everyone else gets to know that to be the next Sethi, they've just got to work harder than the current one.

It's like the steel business versus the soft drink business. It's really hard to succeed in soft drinks; if you're not Coke or Pepsi, you're kind of screwed. In steel, anyone can compete. Steel is just steel, so if you make a little more, or make it for a little less, nobody cares who you are or how long you've been in business. The steel business chews up capital with very low annual returns. For every dollar of tangible assets, Coca-Cola brings in $.75 in profit every year.
kind of sad really that they have hard coded all these kind of silly 'questions' - I showed it to a friend today, he asked it about the photographer Robert Frank and it did a name frequency comparison. n-grams are your friend Mr Wolfram.
> Why doctors need to make millions?

Here's an interesting link:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/reprint/334/7587/236.pdf

Doctors do indeed make more in the US, although the US has higher average income than the countries it is compared to (which have socialized medicine.) Once you compensate for that, the effect is probably tiny.

I would be very interested in looking at the amount medical supply companies make in each country, but good luck finding that data.
At the risk of killing you, http://www.aonevitamins.com/caffeine.htm , which is simply the first hit for "caffiene powder". It's not exactly a tricky recipe.
Any failed startups selling office furniture?
Desks, tables, chairs, etc.

Doesn't have to be a failed startup... just saying I'll take it off your hands. Anyone selling office furniture?
Actually, you're onto something with Dropbox. Currently, I keep a copy of my Git repository in my dropbox and set it up as a named remote. Then I can just:

git push dropbox

You can run into issues if two people push to the Dropbox before the files get fully sync'd between computers, if that's the case, you need a hosted solution see the gitosis project for rolling your own or github.com for a slick paid solution.
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After canceling my cable TV subscription, I realized that online TV is much better
Carbon Emacs
I also did before and after snapshots of the registry and file system. As with any normal boot, there were some minor changes to both, but nothing that stood out particularly. A checksum of the hard drive would of course be different after every boot, with or without Kon-Boot.
I honestly have very little to do with software development in any way. I just come here because the things people tell me to read on this site are very interesting and informative.
Who knows, maybe it's part of the the low-level threat scanning aspect of our nature. Maybe it has something to do with our capacity for self-consciousness, maybe it's a side effect of being sentient.

I somehow doubt that it's a purely socially ingrained tendency though.
Nooooo, there are a WHOLE lot more full-time people now.

Meh. I suppose being terminated provides good incentive to go full time?
It installs a root-kit.
Just a request to all those who'll be responding: Please add screenshots!

I'll be setting up xmonad and working on my layout for the next few days, if this post is alive until then, I'll post my screenshot.
How many HN readers are working on a startup with someone else that reads HN?
Moving between directories quickly in a multi-terminal environment?
macbook air, a mouse and a rtw ticket.
For fiction, http://StoryMash.com is doing exactly this. Writers earn over 50% for their collaborative content. Today it all comes from advertising, but when the first great internet novel is re-published, the participating authors will see a real payoff.
> but simply stating what other people are doing is not sufficient

That depends entirely on the culture of the audience, it'd likely work pretty well on Asians because of their more collective culture where everyone cares very much what other people are doing.

You're likely an outlier, those things that annoy you might be very effective on the general populace. Honesty is not always the most effective strategy.
Subversion is a fair bit less overbearing if you ignore the branches/merging stuff, which you probably don't need in a 3 person team anyway (yet).

I would stick to svn if the team is already familiar with it but not with git. Otherwise, +1 to github.
Atlas Shrugged updated for the current financial crisis
I've been an independent consultant for about a year and a half now. I've been working on my "startup" idea part time for a couple of months. My day job is in IT, but has little
to do with my startup.
MacBook + 24" Dell

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/3219406843_af228d3a04.jp...

(Not pictured: Airport Extreme with a USB drive for Time Machine--critical stuff I backup to Github if it's source code and Drop Box if it's not source code)

Software-wise I work with IntelliJ, TextMate, vi or Xcode depending on the task at hand.
This is modest if not simple by hacker standards

I'm not so sure about that ;-) My setup is simpler than yours:

I do all my development on one machine - a macbook pro (Tiger, haven't got around to upgrading yet).

I run only three applications pretty much all the time, and they're all full-screen - Firefox, Emacs and iTunes, and alt-tab between them. Occasionally I also start a Terminal, if I want to ssh into a server somewhere.

Usually my Firefox tabs are gmail, yammer, ganglia, http://irc.justin.tv, and often some documentation to help with whatever I'm working on.

Typically I have a dozen or so Emacs buffers open - mostly python, javascript and haxe source code.

I never write notes by hand. I either write them in an Emacs buffer, or I send myself an email.

This is where I work (at justin.tv): http://abstractnonsense.com/workspace.jpg
I'm full-time on my startup. I'm in my second (or third?) sprinting phase where I'm spending most of my waking hours working. I can't say this is healthy but I'm having fun in some sick way. http://www.afterthedeadline.com is me.
My dear zerp, could you please expand a bit on your claim? As stated, it leaves a trifle too much to the imagination. Would you be so kind as to provide filenames, registry keys, et cætera? An ample dollop of detail is just the thing.
Nope, I hack most of the time with a macbook on my dining room table. Sometimes on the coffee table.

At work I have a 30-inch screen for Vim next to the macbook, but it's optional.
I'm a high school student working on a startup in my spare time. I picked "part time", but with summer coming up...
I live in the loop already working on my startup. Let's connect somehow.
It's dirty, crappy, no dual-screens, no mac prettiness, no butcher-block table, no glass, no stainless steel, but it's awesome and it's very productive. :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3508980363/
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Heh. I wasn't terminated but as of a few days ago I started full time.
If you're interested in that, check out:

http://www.deskography.org/

There are some pretty crazy and inspiring setups on there, and you can share your own.
How to go from a beginner to intermediate developer
From the sound of it, he's the one offering work, not looking for it.
Bodes well for innovation as a whole. Bodes poorly for each individual startup founder seeking his fortune after being laid off.
Our free MathPlayer plugin for IE enables it to display MathML. Except for having to be installed, it is as "native" as it can get. It even works with screen readers to speak the math for those that need that. See http://www.dessci.com/mathplayer.
that and the old idea that enough monkeys pounding on typewriters can reproduce the works of shakespeare.
Business Networking Tips
Whether you like it or not if you want to be successful in your business then you should work on enhancing your business networking skills. Unfortunately, not everyone pays attention or gives importance to business networking. If you want to survive in the midst of high level of competition then you must sharpen your business networking skills.
Consider that most Web 2.0 forms of communication (i.e. Twitter, Facebook and the like) are still closed gardens. Yes, they have APIs, but they still hold the keys and own the technology. Anyone can set up an email server and have it talk to anyone else.
I make an exception for Gmail addresses when it comes to non-professional. I know that you can get free Google Apps and all that, but I'll generally trust someone on Gmail. Doesn't mean you can get away without a live blog/portfolio site, however.
Make the key the tag name and the value the list of image ids.
You might be giving up on projects too soon, or you're not thinking hard about the market potential and income options.

It's hard to "start" a company, that's why it's better to keep all your resources and retool or specialize on a certain direction as the market dictates.

Or you might just be calling the wrong thing a "startup". Software developers might be prone to this error, thinking of any application project as a business (note the multitude of "iphone startups")
UK 'at risk of sea-borne attack'
Welcome to the club, now bleed! :-P
I used Docbook SGML (and later XML) for my book about Webmin. It wasn't worth the pain.

I've worked on another large Open Source project that used Word (yes, really!) and OpenOffice with custom templates and conversion tools (they would, for the most part, save as HTML, and then convert from that to PyDoc, .chm, and several other formats).

I later converted the Webmin book into wiki format (TWiki, specifically), and now we're in the midst of moving it to Markdown (with extensions). I like Markdown best of all, and is now what we're using for everything (forums, tickets in the issue tracker, and all documentation).

Don't underestimate the cost of hard to deal with formats. Docbook produced beautiful output, and in many formats, and was useful for pulling data out automatically. But, the effort involved in writing the docs was atrocious. Even with good tools (most competent XML-capable editors can work with Docbook pretty well...I used jEdit in the end), you'll produce half the docs with twice the frustration. With Markdown, when you need more control you can drop to straight HTML.

Markdown works great in revision control systems, and is easy to generate programmatically (we've started exporting our API doc PODs to Markdown, for example). Nearly everything support it, as well. Our new CMS is Drupal, and it has great Markdown support, and there are converters from various wikis (we have more than a thousand printed pages worth of docs in two different wikis to be converted).

I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Textile is another popular minimal markup that I imagine has pretty much all the same advantages as Markdown.

Pandoc might be worth a look, too. I haven't had need for it, yet, but it's got an awesome feature set, and can do PDF from Markdown (so I probably will use it soon, as we get pretty frequent PDF requests).
Svn would be perfect for you

Our personal setup: linode with svn, redmine as issue tracker, wiki, and discussions). I went with our own server because I know for sure our data is private, and fine grain control.
Are you great at product development or online Marketing and want to take part in founding a company? Dm me twitter.com/pascalzuta
I'm curious as to how those individuals working on a startup full-time are able to support themselves without receiving any compensation. Are you simply a student going to school and this is a non-issue? Or are you working form some sort of financial cushion you saved up from your previous job?

More bluntly, how do you pay for rent and food?
I work 16 hours a day, and the other 8 I am on hold on the phone or waiting for bureaucrats and various types of desk-jockeys in several timezones to wake up and answer my emails or pick the phone.

Being a transnational startup is really hard :-P
out of curiosity, what is bothering you about django?
How does one get from a very narrow discussion of medicine to all medical science? Without questioning the merits of the post (happen to agree with a good chunk of it), that's a sliver of what one might call medical science, albeit a rather lucrative sliver.
I'm not saying I expect the score system to be perfect and "fair". That would be impossible. But it isn't pointless either, because it helps us sort the articles and comments. If it really were pointless, as you say, then even the single voting axis that exists today should be removed, right?
Wow just a year or two ago everyone would have said SVN/CVS!
I have used reStructuredText (which both "docutils" and "prest" can use to generate documents). The source text actually is the plain text "output", while it is still possible to automatically generate HTML, etc.

For something as complex as a book, reStructuredText is best; though I often fall back on the simple Textile format for really short documents that still need to be converted to HTML.
Most of Scribd reads HN.

Oh, and I hope this isn't too forward, but if anybody out there would really like to be working on a startup and you're good at rails / flash / web dev, hit up me or us.
Here's a picture: http://is.gd/AU6T

Typically I have Emacs, Safari, Terminal.app, and iTunes open all the time. Once in a while I open up MacVim and do some editing.
Top disappointing technologies
Maybe my wording is a little too antagonistic. “Primitive” is a strong word, but I simply meant it in a relative sense: there are other methods more modern.

Also, to brk's point, I am in no way advocating replacing email. Email didn't replace the telephone, handwritten notes or face-to-face speech, it augmented them.

But can it really be argued that email is the most modern form of communication? Every innovation up to this point has reached critical mass, and then subsequently been supplanted in less time than the previous. Basic writing took millenia, the printing press took centuries, the telephone took decades. At this point, email is a few decades old and already mainstream. It's due to be overtaken by the latest new thing, of which there are multiple candidates:

* Discussion Forums
* Instant Messaging
* Wikis
* News Aggregation Sites
* Real-Time Information Streams

Again, let me emphasize that I do not think email should be replaced. But to a lot of people, email is the be-all and end-all of modern communications. This is hardly the case. It's more like the beginning, the starting point and the basis. There are plenty of sophisticated tools at hand that can be used to solve specific problems which email is ill-suited to address.
why is it difficult to organize in India?
I just finished talking to one of my best friends from home about how to cut her credit card debt. Being a graduate student has taught me valuable financial lessons that I'm incredibly grateful for.

My first diagnosis: Quit trying to live the life you were accustomed to at home (unless you plan on moving back home with your parents). Cut internet, cable, and car usage. Move to an apartment within walking distance of your job. Drink cheap beer. Go find a farmer's market. And God, please never go to Starbucks.

I think once young adults accept the fact that they are going to be poor for a length of time, everything else falls into place.
What you said.

My little slice of the Japanese countryside is heavily invested in manufacturing. There are 6,000 Brazilian factory workers in my town. About 5,000 of them are out of work right now, and many have taken a government offer where they'll pay for your plane ticket if you leave the country and promise to not come back.

Meanwhile I'm in an air-conditioned office, just got a positive performance evaluation, will receive my bonus on time this summer, and have job security that the Pope would envy.

We don't even know how good we have it some days.
I agree; there's no perfect voting system. This is similar to what you said, but people getting lots of upvotes for saying something many others agree with probably means at least slightly fewer unpopular views are being posted.

Thanks for the welcome! I know the account is new but I've actually been here for a long time. :)
This is probably the most relevant comment to the discussion I was trying to raise. I don't necessarily agree though.

Almost anyone, especially any IT department, has the technical knowledge to set up a wiki, for instance. Sites like yammer.com make setting up a private microblog platform within anyone's reach. And yes, even my mom has a Facebook account.

At one of my clients, the issue they are having is more related to the cultural acceptance of using the wiki than the technical difficulties in setting it up. Anyone visiting this site knows how wikis work and for what uses they can be applied. To the general population, "wiki" is just another weird internet word.
full time on a startup
Telephone numbers are just meant to be somewhat organized line noise. Humans can just treat it as a big arbitrary blob of data they have to type in. But domain names are meant to be "human readable" but just look at the mess the URL makes of them?

Phone numbers were that way because telephone companies had to organize a hierarchical set of wires that could make physical connections between any two endpoints with limited relay-driven processing. Packet switched networks are supposed to abstract away topological addressing for the higher layers. Why make users type it in? Why, with all of the computing power we have available, do we make users put in the protocol? Protocol is certainly not relevant to most users. I've even known CIOs to mess that one up. Why put it in front of them at all for the default situation?
Is there an American version of this guy? It seems like all the really well known American pundits are non-anonymous...
To facilitate traveling to client sites for my day job: MacBook Pro, vim, firefox and a (paper) notebook. When I work out of town, the one thing I miss the most about my home workspace is my 3x4 foot whiteboard.
What happened to the other three?
I'm surprised people can speak ill of Quicksilver, it is one of the things I just can't be without, I'm running an out of the box QS with just a couple plugins installed and have no complaints at all.
New Zealand Launches Hookup Airways
Currently working on version 2 of my startup and working full time as a freelance developer.
Ubuntu + VIM + Acer AspireOne + 3 USB drives + external monitor, mouse and keyboard :)
ahh... more politics in HN.
2 desktops connected with synergy..a laptop..huge speakers..bottle of scotch..and a coffee pot.
I saved money while working at my last job.

But I'd point out that working on a startup full-time does not preclude receiving cash compensation. Aside from the founders, the current employees of my start-up are earning competitive cash compensation.
Ask HN: I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language
So this summer I want to begin development work on a new web project, but I am having trouble deciding on a language to implement my ideas. Maybe it doesn't matter, I don't know. I thought I'd tell you what I want to do, what I'm good at, and YOU tell me how my time will be best spent.

Project Idea: Create a web-based recruiting tool for our graduate department to keep track of interested/prospective students.

What I'm really good at: Matlab!
What I'm ok at: PHP, C#/.Net (And I love visual web developer!)
What I'm not good at, but interested in learning: Python

I currently have shared hosting (LAMP), but I wouldn't be opposed to buying another plan for C#/.Net if that would be the best way.

Any ideas?
Free rent (thanks sis!) and a small savings since I was laid off.
I keep a vestigial social life and cook at home.
This has been since January.