skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are you trying to solve with the text captcha? Users might get confused what is going on there. If a spammer wanted to create a zillion accounts, they could very very quickly write code to solve a captcha like that.

Those kinds of captchas work well for blog comments where the spammer is trying to get their link on lots of separate blogs, but usually spammers aren't trying to create accounts on every free service out there. They either want a zillion accounts on your service or they don't care anyway.
One thing you gotta remember is that that cookie is going to get shoved up to your server with every single request (images, css, ajax, everything). So if you end up putting 2k of stuff in there then it can really add up (esp. given that many clients have asymmetric connection speed). You don't want your tiny ajax requests that load 50 bytes of data sending the equivalent of 4 - 8k upstream because they are all sending a bunch of unnecessary stuff in your cookie. So, yes, it's good - but the key to it is keeping the cookie "slim".

(NB: couldn't see the presentation since I don't have flash, if they covered this, apologies).
That's an incredibly short-sighted view of the issue. A larger market for the copy rights to art works increases the return earned by the artists who make them.

Do you think artists should be prohibited from selling their copyrights, or that there is anything inherently wrong about them doing so?
flagged yay for spammy stuff
>"If you don't care enough about writing the book, just don't write it. Someone who cares (is internally motivated) enough, will write it or pay you to write it for them (external motivation). We don't necessarily need legislation to create an extra, artificial external motivation for artists, authors, etc. Writers will write, artists will express themselves, and the world will benefit with or without copyrights."

Meanwhile, the most popular pirated materials are movies that big studios spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make, in hopes of earning a profit.

Pirates are leeches that kill their hosts.
Most message-board comments abando
Titanium mobile, beta was just released today http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/
Could not find the article.

Link goes to a feed, which lists the article. Clicking on it gives a page that says to go somewhere else, but the somewhere-else link is broken. And Google on the title returns nothing new.
Or maybe it was all the annoying titles and annoying techcrunch gossip.
All I can really say is "citation needed" on all of your points.

You don't need suspension to turn a heavy bicycle. Look at all the tandems and cargo bikes without suspension. (I routinely load 35 pounds of groceries onto my bike without even thinking twice. Handling is barely affected, if at all.)

Caliper brakes develop plenty of stopping power, even in the rain. I have gone down hills fairly quickly (say, 35mph) only to encounter a red light -- and caliper brakes work just fine for stopping the bike quickly. (I have also ridden bikes with disc brakes. They also work very well, but are unnecessary if you are not riding through mud.) I am sure they are not adequate for stopping a motorcycle driving on the freeway, but that is a completely different case. The forces involved are an order of magnitude apart. This is an electric bicycle with a top speed of 20 miles an hour.

I am especially confounded with your statement, "At speeds above 10 you really have a motorbike." 10 what? At 10 miles an hour, you are struggling to balance a bicycle. Stopping and turning is not going to be a problem, even if you have a battery.

As far as hating bicycling...I don't...but I'm not going to get killed for the sake of commuting since bicycles on roads meant for cars are more or less incompatible in traffic.

This is completely false. Bicycles can use the road as well as cars can, as long as the cyclist obeys the same laws as the motorist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_cycling

(Yes, drunk drivers or psychopaths might hit you. But plenty of people die in car accidents, too, and nobody has any qualms about taking their car on a public street.)

(As an aside, I am not even going to comment on your anecdote of someone "almost losing it" while turning. That could be due to anything, most likely a flat tire.

Continuing along the path of making hasty generalizations from personal experiences -- I have crashed my bike. I did not die. Therefore nobody dies in cycling accidents...)
I get the impression that this is for prototyping as opposed to a new way to create applications.

ASE lets you develop on the device itself using high-level scripting languages to try out your idea now, in the situation where you need it, quickly.
I know its all very serious and its sad commentary on the mental baggage I now carry from watching too much TV when I was 15, but I couldn't help but do a double take when a guy named "Miles O'Brien", quoted Scottie describing engines.
I picked up a Dev Phone 1 (G1 / HTC Dream) last week, knowing full well that more refined devices are in the pipeline. I'll probably replace it for day to day usage in the not so distant future, but it'll stay relevant as a lowest common denominator for app development and testing.
Really its simple math:

The people you want to interview charge around $100/hour (or more). You're asking to buy >$50 worth of time for a $25 gift card.

Change the offer to $50 payable via Paypal, commit to it taking 30 minutes or less, and you'll probably get some responses.
But that's only a problem if your officespace is dreadful. For all the time I was at Songkick, the office had a full bathroom (and kitchen), and most fancy law offices I've seen have this as well.
I think you can go too far in either direction. I am a fan of Ben Franklin's advice against the obnoxiousness of appearing too certain. He wrote:

"I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat everyone of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention."

He describes how he cultivated "the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. ... When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."
It could be but I don't think it is. If anything it disproves the most common anti-blog slur, namely that blogs are full of amateurs with no talent. In truth blogs are like any other form of media. Those who are good rise to the top, those who aren't fall to the bottom and give up.
Regarding the UI:
When the 'charts' to stack over the site content but are the same width as the rest of the site, it appears at first that one has navigated to a new page, which makes it even more confusing when you're trying to get rid of them. I think this is a counterintuitive piece of interaction that unnecessarily confuses the user. If there's no significant functional reason for the charts to behave this way, I posit that it's uselessly damaging the overall usability of your site. Just make them their own page.
Why on earth aren't beans subsidized instead of corn? Among other things, this would cut down immensely on the amount of fertilizer consumed per year.
But why? Not even to website itself?

`You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without "meTracks’s" prior written consent.`
thanks for the reply -- do me a favor, if you have time, I'd like to chat more offline, email me at gfodor at gmail if you're up for it!
bookmarklet was added today.
We have incorporated Pinchmedia analytics and have also tried medialytics in our iPhone apps. Pinchmedia is much better. But now we are incorporating our own analytics as we are looking for individual user behavior more than average.
Thank you for creating this. I've written some stub about Google, and Paypal, and I encourage fellow hackers to take a stab at their favourite successful startup -I hope, that a "divide, and conquer" strategy might be put to a good use here.

On a technical note, would you mind removing all barriers of entry, allowing (anonymous) edits, if possible?
Worked for me. I'm on Cupcake. Not sure how much space I had before the install, but after it I have 7MB left.
tinkering, ya.

i'm having trouble coming up with useful ideas on what you could use this for. anything i come up with would be better served up as a true app.
Yes, I got it to work by rebooting the phone (eek!)

Whole thing takes about 12MB after install, much bigger than any other app.
Who Shredded Our Safety Net?
Can anyone confirm from a different video that the boss's voice matches up?
Skincare Product
I started reading "Currently in Beta, we require..." first, and then I started reading the features, and then I was thinking "wait, what does this thing do?" and then I finally found "meTracks is an innovative web based audio player...". I think the reason I didn't find the description first is because it's at the top right of its area. I recommend putting it at the top left, swapping its place with the meTracks logo.

I remember learning the word "bespoke" for the first time a couple of years ago. My point is, that's not a common word. Maybe use the word "customized" instead.

It makes more sense to use "e.g." than "i.e." here:
"Your answer must be in textual format (i.e. three not 3)."

In general, style guides advise spelling out low numbers, so replace:
"All it takes...3 simple steps"

with:
"All it takes...three simple steps"

Or:
"All it takes is three simple steps"

Remove the unnecessary words here:
"For the purpose of beta testing we will be restricting every account to 200MB"

Change it to:
"For the purpose of beta testing we restrict accounts to 200MB"

Remove the space before the asterisk footnote mark in:
"Limitless audio *"

Remove the space before the question mark in:
"What do you get ?"

Add an apostrophe to "its" in:
"so give it a go, its FREE!"

Add an apostrophe in "Amazons" in: "Unlimited space is available through Amazons S3 service."

Remove the space after the footnote mark, and add a full stop to the end of: "++ based on track size of 4MB and length of 3 minutes"

Capitalize the "S" in "Use my s3 account"
Collecting Error Coins
Discount hotels
go4hotels.com offers the best discount hotels online at cheap prices. Hotel reservations, last minute hotels and more online now. Best hotel information online now on our website discount hotel bookings for luxury hotels, cheap hotels, budget hotels and last minute hotel deals.
I will always love you - Lyrics by Whitney Houston
From the article

> Sociodemographic Measures
> Driver license data provide individual-level age and gender. Additional block-group census variables include neighborhood racial/ethnic composition (the proportion of the block group that is Hispanic, African American, Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander, and Asian); median family income; and the median age of individuals in the block group.

....

> Our conclusions are tempered by several study limitations. First, self-reported BMI was used, which can underestimate true BMI. Second, few individual measures were available, thus excluding other potential controls (e.g., number of years in the neighborhood, individual racial/ethnic status, commute distance). Third, the sample is based on one (albeit large) county. Finally, because the analysis is cross-sectional, it is possible that those who value healthy weight may move to walkable neighborhoods. One study of longitudinal data on adolescent BMI demonstrates that cross-sectional relationships similar to those found in the present study did not translate into longitudinal ones.45 Accordingly, future work should assess potential selection effects using longitudinal data on adults.

http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...
Yes, this is why you load images and CSS from a CDN, and you can do JSON+callbacks instead of Ajax onto a big app server somewhere. (There's a gem for Rack, if you're on Ruby, to automatically handle the parenthesization.)
i know three languages and i suck at remembering words when i need to. i am fairly good at grabbing onto concepts, but have a hard time remembering the word that's used to describe the concept.
Inc.com Audio Slideshow on PG & YC
A few things
1, you should put united-states at the top of your country list

2, WHY does everyone use Flex for their audio players, I simply CANNOT understand this. Just use flash and avoid the 200k framework code and the few megs of memory usage associated with the Flex framework. And since you are running a few instances of flash applets on the same page, the problem is exacerbated.

3. I think the interface is ugly.
Holy crap. Do you mind giving us a rundown of what you ate in a typical week? I'm really curious.
Yeah, I want to like that since I'm a fan of the idea, but there are other problems, such as not including major surrounding cities/suburbs that are more walkable than the main cities themselves and not accounting for crime.
Uhhh. I am pretty sure that recording someone without their consent is an actionable offense. Viral or lawsuit.
I've written some stub about Google, and Paypal,

I can't see your stubs. Please submit them.

would you mind removing all barriers of entry, allowing (anonymous) edits, if possible?

They were removed already. I just signed out and created a stub for YouTube as an anonymous user (http://bizmodels.wikidot.com/youtube). Anybody can add pages and edit the wiki with the only exception of the home page.

Edit: I just unblocked the home page too.
Jaxtr, Free voice calling service bites the dust?
I figured so, but I'd never heard of it myself. Still, I'm sure some of Microsoft's reported $90+ million advertising budget could have convinced Scotty to fake a video.

It would be pretty clever of them. Even we Hacker Newsers are apparently prone to rubbernecking enough to get this on the front page (really, guys?). The Bing references are subtle enough that it doesn't feel like product placement, but prominent enough that people talk about it (like many comments in this thread).
the RSS numbers tell a different story

Mashable: 225,000

Techcrunch: 2,150,000

But then again for twitter, Mashable is leading techcrunch by about 100K. So there is probably some shenanigans going on
That's true but how many blogs are even started with either generating lots of traffic, or lasting forever, as goals? The article implies that all or most do, but some percentage must be started just as experiments or hobbies, and I would hardly call those "failures", not in any useful sense of the word.
I was in a hurry when I wrote this so I didn't realize the formatting didn't work:

- why do you want all that info? I usually don't even give my full name to a site until it has earned my trust.

- what does Bespoke audio player mean? I'm guessing it's the flash audio player, but that means nothing to me.

- I can't tell if it's free forever, or free only while in beta. For this sort of thing I would rather not use it if it's ad supported, since the ads are likely to be untargeted and visually intrusive. But it is the type of thing I would be willing to pay (<$10/mo) for.

- The text could be improved. I see a few small grammar errors and some sentences that could be worded better.
I'm impressed with the people who post here whose native language is not English. Not only do they write passable posts, but they are even more well-versed, phrased, and seem to possess a wider vocabulary than most native speakers I run into. As an American, I am somewhat jealous of that ability.

[EDIT: Ironically, had a grammatical error!]
"You're like the octomom of puppies" -Olivia Munn

My 10 second, "WTF?, click, oh $diety make it stop" bing-a-thon odyssey.
Ask HN: Please review my startup crowdmind.com
English is my third language and I resent it very much.

Fluency in English is the only thing that matters in today's world.

Anything that hinders your ability to speak it at the highest level possible (e.g., learning other languages) is a mistake.

CLARIFICATION: What I resent is that English is not my first (and preferably only) language.
If you're on EC2 they now offer Elastic Load Balancing which allows you to move away from the RR Dns setup many are using. If you have your own hardware and are looking for a Layer 4 load balancing solution take a look at http://www.ultramonkey.org/
The Twitterverse
I Graduated Today and I’m The Only Student Taking Computer Science
your own analytics? take a second look at 3rd party offerings, and make sure you that you really can't customize any of them to your liking. there is more to analytics than click-stream, log analysis, or fancy graphs.
Great communication is first and foremost about clear thought, as is great programming.

True, a final piece of code shouldn't repeat an idea. Then again, neither should a final essay. Repetition is for ideas half-formed and ill-explained. And in programming as in conversation or writing, an idea is repeated, refactored, reformed until its perfect expression is found--and then all the junk is removed. The final product in both cases should be an idea well-expressed and clear as crystal--so inevitable and straightforward that its essance requires neither repetition nor explanation to spur understanding, and its correctness seems self-evident.

Mediocre code compiles. Great code, you can't imagine that it wouldn't, or that there could possibly be bugs.

Great programmers are not particularly over-literal, either. Great code, great software design practices, can be absolutely stuffed with clarifying metaphor. Everywhere there are trees and packages and publishers and factories and decorations and tags. In a design context, even strictly mathematical terms like 'vector' and 'map' can be loaded with poetic meaning.

Mediocre programmers might choose excessively literal names for objects like 'AggregateCollection'. But it is the poet who chooses to name it something like 'SpaghettiTree' or 'BitVectorVector' with quiet philosophical humor that makes his point so blindingly clear.
"That kids got ants in his pants.....better than uncles." Nice one Sudeikis
Error reporting. Figure out a way to handle errors in a useful manner and report that information back to the developer. This is probably the second most soul crushing endeavor in all of programming.

How so? This sounds like a simple case of using continuations. If something odd happens, call the callback. The user code can then decide what to do; either continue the computation, abort it, or do something else.

(BTW, about Qt being the most elegant library... does it still require "moc"? If so, that's not exactly elegant; at best it's a horrible hack, at worst, Qt is a programming language that compiles to C++. Neither are particularly elegant.)
Father's Day Gifts: 3 Questions that Will Help You Buy for Men
I am ready to share my winning stratagem with you for selecting perfect Father's Day gifts. You really have to think about what the men in your life truly like to do,
I just started a community wiki with the same idea but inverted; it's a catalog of known successful startups and their business models: http://bizmodels.wikidot.com/

So it starts with the examples instead of starting with the business models. Maybe a catalog as you wish could be accomplished tagging the corresponding startup wiki pages with "ad-supported", "freemium", "license software", etc., and then navigating each tag to find examples.

Feel free to modify the wiki to enter wiki pages for business models themselves.
The offer was made publicly on the full-disclosure mailing list:

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Jun/0062.html
Google Page Speed 1.0 vs. Yahoo! YSlow 2.0
Mozilla to let enterprises build custom Firefox browsers
English is my third language and resent it very much.

You're looking at it wrong. English is the closest thing we have to a human lingua franca. I hope you're not bashing it for nationalistic reasons, because, even if it owes its ubiquity to an imperialist past, English today is the property of its non-colonial speakers as much as its native speakers.

You will appreciate this oddball pseudo-germanic, latin-esque language when you venture out of its home turf: I tutored English to Arab students who were learning it to communicate with Chinese manufacturers, and a Vietnamese musician who wanted to reply to his Myspace fans, including a Thai girl who has a crush on him :-D
It would be interesting to see a truly data-driven study of VC decisionmaking outcomes.

Do dumb VC's (of less than average intelligence or academic performance) do better?

How does a VC's educational background affect their success rate?

Unfortunately we will never be able to ask these questions of a high-quality dataset, since only funds with better than average performance will want to participate and much of the data is not public record.
What is this mlLK?
I am fluent in two languages, and I have encountered the exact problem described in the article: I am trying to recall a word, and find that I can't. At times I can recall the beginning letter, even the rough sound of the word, but not the word itself. Then the word will come to me a few moments later in a flash. The embarrassing part is when this happens during a conversation; I have resorted to filler sentences or repeating myself as my brain searches frantically for that right word.

I used to worry if it was some kind of early warning of Alzheimers ... good to know this phenomenon has a more benign explanation too.
That was terrible. Incredible that Microsoft actually paid for that.
While there is a lot of good information in this article, the tone is a bit too tabloid-sensationalist for my tastes.

"So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets."

Boo those big corporations for trying to pick optimal flight paths, save customers flight time, or otherwise make a buck (and who cares about all the environmentalists breathing down their necks about burning so much kerosene). How DARE they? Think of the children!!

The one thing common after all these crashes is the amount of looney speculation that goes on right after, and then we magically forget about it. Does anybody even remember the British Airways 777 from Beijing that landed short at Heathrow a couple of years back? The reason: entirely mundane - faulty fuel pump.
You're not reading or listening enough. Languages need maintenance.
Physically I would say yes (air purifiers). Central AC that is. Not sure the efficacy.

Also, particulate matter is much more volatile outdoors, because it's outdoors.

And, the downmods, two in a row, make zero sense. Else, explain it please.