skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm playing with a web framework in C as a fun hobby thing just to see what's involved. My idea is to do everything as it shouldn't be done to see what turns out -- my inspiration for this is modern single speed bicycles which don't have gears.

For instance, theres no middleware just libevent and tokyo cabinet (so no relational database either). The handler that connects them (I've only written one so far that looks up a hash db value) is written in C and I was going to have a crazy configuration file using tiny scheme with macros. I'm currently trying to work out how to get tiny scheme to pass function pointers in its foreign function interface.

I had no idea I was joining the latest fashion in trendy web frameworks :-)
Need your feedback for this simple twitter bookmarklet that I put together.
Pakistan-lahore_blast_cctv - PakMates place to TALK
Artful & Professional Business Labels Printing
Has anyone seen this one before?

"We cannot post this iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it encourages a physical activity that could result in a customer damaging their iPhone."

That's what they told me for my beloved Falling Man app http://www.blendedtechnologies.com/iphone-applications/ :-(

I guess it's one of the more reasonable rejecting reasons, eh? I'm not worried, it was my first project, just playing with the accelerometer.
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Where in our thread did I dispute that 'not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever'?

The only thing I ever said was that YouTube wasn't a good example supporting your point, because it was in a completely different situation from most of the rest of the web, and that because of its unique situation, it actually could continue on at a loss for quite a while longer than most.

In other words, you were kind of right, but for the entirely wrong reason.
Super Mario Galaxy 2, Metroid: Other M head to Wii
The Local Motors Micro-Factory will play 3 roles: Build, Sell, & Service. BMW diesel engines are certainly understood in the aftermarket, but you are right they are more complicated. Concerning that point, Local Motors will provide service for the region surrounding the Micro-Factory - for the area where the vehicle is sold. This is an important point, so thank you for bringing it up.

We chose a more complicated engine because it is cleaner, and delivers more long-term value. We considered the SL1, but as we compared apples to apples, and presented the choice to the community, the 335d was chosen.

The trophy trucks that win Baja 1000 might spend half a million dollars. Clearly, this is not that. But for $50k you can experience Baja, the jumps, the desert of Arizona and you can learn your car inside and out. NJ is about as far from the desert as possible, but if you checkout offroad and baja forums you will see what ppl are willing to invest in their rides - $50k is an investment and it will have to be worthwhile. But in terms of the function and performance you will gain for the dollar, the Rally Fighter is quite competitive.

This is one of those things that can not be proven with words, but once we get the build process rolling in the fall we will be able to share more. At that point I hope you will help us find ways to improve the process and include more of what will make it exciting for you (like a vehicle you actually want, for instance!)

Thank you for sharing your very specific desires. I hope you will go to the site (local-motors.com) and find a body for your specs. Tell 'em you want it in Jersey!
WTF dude?
Here's an interesting debate between Dean Baker and Diane Rogers of the Concord Coalition (funded by Peterson): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5055039736979442205...

Baker has some pretty good criticism.
Marketers can determine if the false signature on a letter lifts response, for example, or whether straightening the tilt of the stamp on the envelope depresses it.

Did split testing exist in practice before junk mail, or did junk mailers invent it? (Wikipedia gives them credit for the invention, but it's unsourced.)
Would this be a former Tektronix person turned consultant?
Please read the article before commenting on what it does or does not talk about:
"the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, ... the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable."

Also, I would be wary of any analysis of a situation as complex as US health care that lays blame 100pct on "out of control doctors."
Very reminiscent of the HuddleChat case: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_takes_down_huddl...
You can actually buy a ps/2 compatible Klingon keyboard although the keys are not triangular:

http://www.cherrykeyboardsrus.co.uk/Klingon+Language-Details...
YouTube was acquired after the 18 months you are reffering to.
I work for a startup where everyone in the company is over 30
Patenting qualms aside, I think this is a brilliant idea.

I wonder why this hasn't been implemented. I could definitely see using this format for detection, but then visually using square buttons. Best of both worlds?
And apparently blue has the opposite effect:

http://www.colormatters.com/appmatters.html
Does it? This line

"In addition to protection from fraudsters, StrongWebmail.com protects against friendly-fraud where a boss or spouse snoops on your email. If one of these people tries to log into your account, you’ll receive a phone call alerting you that someone is trying to access your email (like a silent alarm)."

Seems to indicate that failed attempts would also text you?
Well for a start, they could really champion Java on them. If they won with that, that would be a fantastic move - and it makes quite a bit of sense.
I was really excited to see this, but is HN being astroturfed?

The bottom of chords.fm says "Copyright CBMS Networks, Inc."

Which points to this website: http://cbmsnetworks.com/

Is this really a startup? Is this really YOUR startup? Or a project at a larger company that specializes in technology like this?

Looking at the "about" section it's hard to say. http://cbmsnetworks.com/index-1.html#

Sorry if I'm totally off-base. I just know too many people who see HN as nothing more than a distribution channel and are willing to take advantage of the general good will people have here.
Ruby growth in China
I printed out sheets with the following quote in big block letters and passed them out to my fellow programmers:

"Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live"
That's true, but it wasn't owned by the current owners. Not long after we launched, they started poking around twitvid.io and testing out features, as they've continued to do. A few days later, they bought the domain.

We are all for competition. However, it becomes an unfair competitive environment when your competitor's sole strategy is to confuse and deceive users rather than innovate.

In a few cases in the past couple weeks they have been @ replying people who had used us, telling them to use the "real" TwitVid.
I recall reading many years ago that a major auto company, I think it was Ford, who ponied up for a split in Reader's Digest to see which sold better. Apparently it was more than a little expensive. So it is possible that split test might have had a different origin, but then again, this is also unsourced.
Since when was the EFF competing with Apple? You're mental.

I would be if I said anything remotely resembling that.

When Apple arbitrarily rejects applications, it can be construed as being anti-competitive. While at this point, it's not overt (like saying, if your company makes an Android app, we will never approve your iPhone app), the infrastructure is in place for implementing this system. Maybe it's happening now, and we just don't notice.

Anyway, just saying that this might not actually be OK. Or, it might be. (Try writing software for your favorite video game system.)
I am waiting for an invention that brings you your direct mail prediscarded.
Pointless regulation. Full disclosure, a family member has used these to quit. And also broken the law while doing so in the US.

This is regulation by inertia, to insure everyone's safety everything of type X needs very expensive trials and regulations. X happens to be "medical device" whatever that means in this case.
> Either they are going to have to start serving many many
> more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the
> amount of content they provide

I suppose another option would be that we get more effective ads. Right now I get bombarded with flashy ads about things I have no interest in, so I no longer even see them. But if, say, HN would have a "Buy now" link off to the side every time one of us mentions a book, or "Learn <programming langugage>" with a link to the O'Reilly's book for that language every time we mention a programming language, I'll bet those ads might lead to a lot of sales. Arguably, you could even call them a service to the reader.

Not that I hold out much hope for this happening at very many sites...
Plus the poster's account is like 8 hours old.

Call me paranoid, but I've come to believe in the last two months HN has started to be gamed
I'm sure he is pretty agnostic about the future of the tax code after he, as a hedge fund manager, already avoided even the level of taxes you or I would pay:

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/pm120/

The ordinary arguments for capital gains taxes don't apply when it isn't even your capital.
That's pretty damned paranoid. I've read no stories of anything similar to that.

The system is fucked up, obviously, but there's a difference between fucked up and totalitarian, and it's pretty huge leap from one to the other.

Last I heard, lots of developers were releasing video games cross-platform; not quite sure I understand you.
Had to look this one up, but thanks! Enjoyed that!

For anyone else:
http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/obsessed.html
You only get the call if the username and password were actually entered correctly and the computer is different.
$250? This is much cheaper http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/how_to_make_plants_...
I'd like to see quantitative studies showing how much of an improvement this is! That should be very doable with the App Dev Kit.
Everyone copies everyone else. That's just the way this business works, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

I agree they should just change the name and try to out hustle these guys. If they didn't have the $ to buy the .com domain in the first place, they certainly can't afford to pay lawyers to wage a protracted trademark battle.

Does anyone know who posted the original entry? Was it someone at twitvid.io/fliggo, a friend, or just someone random?
You are right in general case. In my case, I was responsible for few large subsystems (Linux and related stuff, automated testing and continuous building, packaging, deployment, automating of common tasks, configuring, support and troubleshooting, training, documentation, reviewing, enforcing best practices, developing of development standards, predicting future problems, etc.). I just cannot leave that project for long period of time, because large amounts of tickets must pass through me in some way (investigation, suggestion, implementation, reviewing/fixing, approving).

I solved problem by training team, which replaces me. Then I leaved my work (IMHO, crisis is best time for that). Team works slower than me. Their solutions are not so good, because nobody has picture of whole project in his head. However, they can continue to work, while I cannot. As I can see, this scenario is typical.

IMHO, problem with XP and SCRUM that they producing too much load on the few competent persons. Overall result is better than with traditional methods, but competent person burns much faster, because they contribute more than others.

It is hidden magic beyond the process - XP and SCRUM just delivers task to competent person much faster than any other process. The drawback is that there no reason to grow for other developers, thus load on competent persons tend to increase over time. Pair programming and peer reviewing helps when people are roughly equal, but that is rare.

If we try to model situation, then we will see few major stages in evolution of project and/or group:

* fast growing of project and/or group until physical limit of few key people will be hit;
* degradation of group, because key people leave project, until there no overloaded people;
* stagnation.

PS.
I spent last few months to improve me in sport-dancing. I meet new very funny girl. I plan to work next 2 months as instructor for wind-surfing at Black Sea (Eastern Europe). I hope, it will help.
I'm guessing this is more of a marketing ploy (and it seems to be working...).

Just like the LifeLock CEO who gave out his SSN to show how effective they were at preventing identity theft.
Rather, I'm waiting for an invention that shocks people every time they buy shit from junk mail. It's those people that keep encouraging them to keep sending the rest of us crap.
does "or be blocked" sound like direct pressure to you?
I feel for you, but in the minds of users, the .com is the 'real' one.
Says a lot when your product is cloned in a couple of days.

Well, there's some truth to this statement regarding the functionality of the site, but at the same time I'd say that the design is harder than you might think; the work of creating designs, slogans, site names and copy text is underappreciated; it takes time and creativity to get those things right, and absolutely no work for someone to steal them. Not to mention any PR and press work done by twitvid to promote the site which could now be misdirected.
I don't think cute kittens and this are the same thing. W

hile I often rail against the cool picture of the day, this is only cool if you have a thirst for knowledge.

I bet the intersection of people who want to look at this and also like kitten photos is tiny.
They tried to buy twitvid.com, but they couldn't afford the asking price. But "Twitvid" (not .io or .com) is what both parties are claiming a trademark on, and there Twitvid was clearly first.
To be honest I can't imagine the Marlboro man undergoing chemo for lung cancer. Or standing outside a bar smoking in the cold with all the middle aged office workers.

What I'm trying to say is that he's a pretty two dimensional fictional character. I don't think we bother to fill in any details beyond the few that he signifies: freedom, smoking, epic marketing triumph and whatnot.
Link to SFgov site about the service: http://sftwitter.sfgov.org/twitter/
From my little understanding, a total loss of power usually means from the engines. There is backup generators that can be used to restart the engines during flight, however anything could have happened to stop the engines restarting, but allowed the electronics to remain active.

I personally highly doubt terrorism. It's a flight from Rio to Paris, it's not exactly high risk for terrorism, plus no group has claimed the downing (to my knowledge). This means it was a lone psycho, however the chance of getting explosives onto an airline is kind of low. Plus if it was an explosive detonation, the damage would have caused explosive decompression and damage to the air frame. I'm sure the information Air France received would have indicated an explosion, likely as there would have been a complete disconnect between cabin and electricity (engines or backup generator).
Very good point and something we're working to rectify, thanks for head's up, input very much appreciated.
I'm a little surprised that there are a lot of 30+ founders.

The thing is we mostly read about young people getting into YC.

I have also been to a number of gatherings with the YC founders and most of them are young.
The left sidebar is a classic example of keyword stuffing. If you click on a lot of these tags, you get the same two blog posts for a lot of them.

These guys are at least clueless, probably unprofessional, perhaps even desperate or unethical. No thanks.

Fellow HNers: Don't gobble up cheap marketing (link-)bait. This story has too many upvotes.
"A huge chunk of their traffic isn't handled by Rails, and their web interface is fairly perfunctory."

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I meant they rewrote the parts that didn't scale in another language. Scala, I believe. Is that incorrect?

So, my point then is that writing it in Rails to quickly get it in front of users and quickly iterating on features turned out to be worth it, even though they had to rewrite large portions in another language once they had a lot of users. Do you disagree? I'm not a Rails developer, but this is my understanding of how Twitter development played out, and it seems to have worked very well for them.

I'm curious, if you would accept 10% more difficult, would you also accept 20%? 50%? I'm wondering just how exponential the suck can get.
That same analogy is what caugth my attention in the first place.
I still cannot visualize wich is going to be the killer app.
The clever thing is that there is no EE side; Google just imports power data from the utilities.
Great things here, thank you for your replies.
I think age normalization is very tough, made even more difficult if you have a limited window into the 30 year olds you were judging (e.g., field changes, new start-up religion). Since you're betting on the entrepreneurial equivalent of race horses, though, you might be right. In other industries, like book publishing, one would like to see similar standards across age so a Frank McCourt gets though. The thing getting judged, though, is an already existing body of work and not the promise of future work.
One of the Y Combinator Funding Application's questions says:

Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

I think the minimum answer is: because we've already bought the .com name!
twitvid.com Created : Mar 30 2008.

twitvid.io Created : May 12 2009.

I think it would be a mistake to ignore those facts, and according to http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/23/twitvidcom-lets-you-tweet-... they 'launched' within days of each other.

Also http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;

I'm no lawyer, but I think the launch is too close to award anyone anything. I'd expect you have to have a clear established customer base to claim they will be confused - not a couple of days usage.
Purely event-based I/O for V8 Javascript
There's a difference between copying individual elements, and making a knockoff of something. That's why there's a distinct word "knockoff" for that case.
MS has been really bad about cooperating with China in the past. I understand this, and in fact it's why I'm so surprised. I don't necessarily expect it to last forever, but hey -- there's always a chance.

Maybe we should write letters, wherein we express that we are pleased that MS's search engine division isn't cooperating with China, and that we've started using Bing for this reason.
Stealing (or being influenced by or whatever you want to call it) the design wouldn't lead to misdirected traffic. Not owning the .com is what will do that job for them.
> When logging in from a home or work computer, a cookie can be stored so that no verification call is required.

Try XSS.
Sony is all about the games and that is the wrong strategy
Sell it to as many customers as you can find first, and then go to them for the extra $10,000. You get more money than you would have otherwise, and you also save innocent people from being unduly compromised. It's a win-win situation ;)
I don't know about other countries, but in the US you get trademark protection just by claiming a trademark. That's when you put a little TM after the name. You can also go a step further and get a registered trademark, which requires filing paperwork with the government. If they approve your application, you get to replace the TM with an R in a circle.

We usually advise startups we fund that a TM is enough initially. That's all YC itself has. Even Google only has a TM in their logo-- though maybe they have a registered trademark, but think the R in a circle would look too stuffy.
Exactly! That's probably why people don't sell chemo treatments or smoking regulations by talking about cowboys.

What I'm saying is that people smoke to be someone, and very few people want to be the person who smokes these. I guess if they invest as much in branding as Phillip Morris did, they can change that. But it's probably not worth it.
I'm guessing that as many people as are probably trying to log into his account, he probably doesn't answer his phone any more, or even use that email account. How would he know if the access he just authorized was him, or someone else?

Maybe if they texted him a code he had to type in, it would be more secure, but then it would be simple enough to brute force all of the codes, or find the seed and generation mechanism.
TwitVid.io has to sue, or they might as well change their service name.

If they adequately established a trademark in 'TwitVid' via use or registration before TwitVid.com began offering a similar service, they'd have some chance of success.

It might not be cost-effective, though -- it could take a long time, and any similar use by the TwitVid.com owners/operators before TwitVid.io started might foul their claim. Even if they win they might not be able to collect much money/damages... though perhaps they could be awarded the TwitVid.com domain name.

Ignoring this or fighting TwitVid.com only in the 'court' of public opinion could lose any trademark rights TwitVid.io has -- by failure to enforce against a notorious and substantial infringement.
It get's me thinking back to university, where there were a number of mature age students, most of whom were putting in much more than students on average. These people were obviously passionate, and had experiences in other industries.

Not sure who to believe here. Also not sure if it's illegal where pg is to discriminate based on age.

However it does seem that there's been a lot said about how people right out of college are the yc targets.

Might be good to explicitly state the position on age, to clear everything up. That way old hands know if it's worth applying or not.

Sounds like there a number of older people though, so I'm sure it's all good :)

Yes, you are supposed to hold a 20 year old to the same standard as a 30 year old - otherwise it's discrimination.
> How do you trademark your web app?

tough question to answer w/o specifics. trademarking the name of your app is moderate to hard (unless it is very unique). Specific technology (e.g. somethign it is built with) that is unique you can trademark the name for even easier. Trademarks usually take a while to process.

Also in the US they like it to be used commercially for a while before an application.

If you have a super wicked new way of doing something then you can Patent the technology (which protects the IP of the "idea" rather than just the name).

> Do you have to get it trademarked in different countries?

Yes. In the UK it is easy. The US I think it is easy too: take a peek at the US patents and trademarks site.

> Is it important to get one?

Probably not. People Trademark names like the Iphone etc. stuff that is likely to be ripped off. Is someone likely to open up a similar web app with the same name? remember that is pretty much all Trademarking covers you on. You cant trademark the idea so a web app with the same functionality and a totally seperate name isnt affected by any trademarks you hold (that is where Patents and IP law comes in).

I wouldnt like to give any firm answer w/o knowing anything else.

And as usualy this advice is not legal advice - just stuff I picked up from our dealings in these matters :)

EDIT: pg's post reminded me to add - I am talking about registered trademarks here, not just the "slap a tm on" type :)