skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, another example that execution and vision is very important.

Execution: As stated by mkinsella - it's probably the worst Flash site I've seen in maybe a decade (it duplicates late 90s era HTML frames)

Vision: What is this guy's purpose? To pimp Adobe Flex? He might be building something that people do want but using a technology (Flash) that is fundamentally incompatible with what most people have access to in a movie theater.

"Of course, I pimp Flex big time during the interview [with Leo Laporte on his net@night show]. I'm not sure if they exactly know what Flex is"

However, on a bright note, it demonstrates:

1) A clearly understandable concept/elevator pitch can garner you national-level press coverage.

"A few people here and there heard about it. Like Dave Barry. A producer from NPRs All Things Considered found out about RunPee from Dave’s mention"

2) For all of us who are worried about having a site launch without being perfect: Runpee.com shows that you can launch with a poor implementation of a potentially good concept and still get press if the idea makes sense.

"As to why it’s all Flash and not HTML: well, I have a saying, "Go with what you know." Since I’m a Flash Platform Developer I build everything in Flash - this is actually a Flex application. I had never before created a data driven app when I started RunPee."

3) You can have some hubris, make some mistakes and your concept/site will survive your imperfect personality.

"Maybe, someday, when I’ve made enough money to buy all of the major Hollywood studios. :)"
There used to be a web framework in Java (I can't remember the name) which made your web app look like Windows: every box was movable, resizable, they even had pointless minimize and maximize buttons. You couldn't invent a more pointless and annoying UI for the web.
The metrics that he invented to determine if it is a game of chance are contrived and outright dumb. It's not a game of chance because anyone can win if they are willing to spend more than the other bidders.

Even though people can try to use bidding strategies, it is not a game of chance.

Keep this terrible blog far, far away, please.
Ask HN: mass-manufacture plastic
I have a physical product with a finished design that I'd like to sell. Making the circuit is easy enough, but the way I made the plastic isn't scalable. I'd like to make 10-20 copies of my product. Ideally, there's some kind of cheap moldable plastic, anybody out there have any idea what I should use?
I wonder why somebody would release a site that's 100% in Flash when a sizable majority will access the site from a mobile device.
How to Be a Better Entrepreneur in the Next 30 Minutes
Geo Targeting: A New Criteria for SEO
Note well: "primary source" doesn't mean "first to report". It means "closest to the event".
Sounds like something the Alioth performance game was meant for. I'd point him towards chameneos-redux; the current haskell implementation (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...) is taking 3.73s to run, while the C champion (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...) is taking 12.29s. The current C implementation is also small, so I would imagine that it qualifies as a "relatively simple task".
Do you know who provides the ads?
I love Mefi and the crowd is extremely intelligent but the threaded commenting system on reddit is way better for following topics. I still visit Mefi few times a week and go to Mefi meetups in St. Pete/Tampa. If HN didn't have this kind of threaded commenting system, I wouldn't be on it either because I don't have time to go back to all the various comments I've posted to manually check if someone replied to my post 30 comments below.
I haven't actually done this yet, but I'm planning to move my backup solution to a home server with a git repo of my /home directory, setting up a cron job on my main comp to push to the repo. It would be space and time efficient, and would make for easy retrieval over the internet if need be. Of course, it also adds the benefit of being able to restore lost files.
Oops, this was meant to be a reply to the filters suggestion. Sorry.
They are mainly newspapers. I presume the ads are their own.
Does this really surprise anyone? Other than the fact that governments have been notoriously bad at picking favorites amongst both emerging technologies and companies, it seems as if ethanol hasn't ever been about energy independence but more about the highly successful farm lobby strangling true innovators in other areas of alternative energy.
Middle Atlantic RSH Custom Rack Shelves
"Inverted commas"? Really?
For Christ's sake don't give those assholes a specific reason to shine their cellphones in my face during the movie.
CouchDB can replicate for backup, but either way this test app isn't a "service" that people will care about if the hardware fails. (Software failure can provide lessons, though, since this is a demo of said software.)
Maybe one of those online fabrication sites (don't know of any off the top of my head, but you could find some on fabbaloo.com)? Or are they still too expensive?

Too bad you don't need more than 10-20, then you could probably use a factory in China.
Not so much. I wrote about this in more depth here: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2888 and I won't entirely repeat myself, except I would point out that they sometimes run "special" auctions where the "auction" price is free, and all you pay is the bid price. In that case there is 0 ability to "win"; it's straight-up gambling.

Even in the case where you are willing to put a lot of money into a "full price" auction, the ability that someone else has to put one dollar + auction price in and defeat your 2 * auction price dollars in bidding + auction price makes it unlikely you will win without "investing" radically more than the value of the product. (Especially since they are trying to create a bidding war between 2 or more people each of which are unaware of the "sunk cost fallacy", or at least not able to act on it.)

I'm not sure what metric you would prefer, but if you feel it's dumb and not gambling, I would invite you to try it. Me? I'll be over here, not trying it. I can work the math. But feel free to let us know how it goes.

If you'd like an easier metric, just go to the site and find a currently active item. Simulate yourself hitting the "bid" button, and keep track of how often you do it, and whether you win the item. Until you sit there and watch the counter in real time (as I did on a couple of items), you can't feel how this site works.

(And since Swoopo may end up here, I'll repeat what I said on my blog: I am completely uninterested in hearing from you, Swoopo.)
Does 'Bing' contain Powerset's technology?
For that size order, something like emachineshop.com might be the ticket.
The thing I like about ethanol as fuel is that it is driving up the price of high fructose corn syrup enough that many food manufacturers are switching to much tastier cane sugar.

fuel price is perhaps the best price externality affecting the tastiness of food in the past decade
Robyn,

SimpleCDN has never exhibited at any Streaming Media West or East show, implying otherwise is simply a lie. Here is a link to all of the exhibitors at our shows over the past TEN years: http://www.streamingmedia.com/pastshows Point me to the show where SimpleCDN exhibited. You can't.

I list over 40 CDNs on my blog at http://www.cdnlist.com, of which at least a dozen of them have never advertised with StreamingMedia.com in any capacity. You can "imply" anything you like but the facts don't back it up.

And speaking of advertising, why is it that your "chief engineer" reached out to me asking to advertise with us? See below.

Folks, if you are looking for a video hosting provider, pick one that is professional, returns calls and does not state things on message boards that are completely false. And pick a company that you can actually call when you have a problem, not have to reply on sending them an e-mail. If any vendor is not willing to speak to you on the phone, provides no support number, then you get what you pay for.

Dan Rayburn
StreamingMedia.com

--------------

X-HashCash: 1:20:080422:md50000000032::66RG6a/puIOEkJJl:0000B5R2
X-MDRemoteIP: 204.8.16.3
X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: mail@danrayburn.com
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:52:56 -0500
From: Frank Wilson <frank.wilson@simplecdn.com>
Organization: SimpleCDN
To: mail@danrayburn.com
Subject: Advertising Request
X-Nonspam: Statistical 48%

Hi Dan,

My name is Frank Wilson, and I am the Chief Engineer here at SimpleCDN, a new brand new CDN service which offers flat-rate pricing.

I enjoy your blog everyday, and am interested in finding out more about how to advertise on your site(s). Please send me your media kit, etc. so that I may pass this information along to our marketing department. I look forward to sending you more information about our company in the next few days, and starting an advertising campaign to get our company off the ground.

Again, thanks for the time, and I look forward to speaking with you more in the near future.

Thanks,

Frank
How many people worldwide starved because of the US farm policy's push towards ethanol fuel? Seriously, I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify that number.
I'm not mail list expert but I have a couple decent sized lists, and I usually use them to promote products I'm selling, or cross-promote some of my other websites. I've tried putting affiliate links at the end of the emails but that hasn't been very successful so far.
Banana Bread
Banana Bread is easy to make and delicious. We have recipes for every type of Banana Bread you can imagine!
Getting Auto Industry News Now Easy with Auto News Junction
1. digg. I still visit digg once in a while but for tech news HN is a better fit. HN has great comments while it seems that a lot of commenters on digg are trying to make puns.
How about this movie is so bad stay home and pee!
"To those of you who keep building things anyway: rock on."

I think that for developers and pretty much anyone in a creative pursuit the above mentality is key. If you set out to build something solely for the money you are not going to produce something of the same quality as someone who builds something they want to build anyway, and consequently you will fail at your objective.
So you definitely work for runpee.com, huh?
Australia produces its own ethanol from sugar cane. I mention this, because I see a lot of discussion around ethanol based on the assumption that it is produced from corn, but there's actually two points: should we use ethanol, and what should we make it from.
Wouldn't we get the same effect, more cheaply, by dropping tariffs on imported sugar?
Look up "tool and die" in the yellow pages.
Naruto Theme
Listen to all the Naruto theme music and songs online!
I've heard many people quote Hamming about "work only on important problems," but fewer seem to notice the caveat he has in the talk:

"We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack."

This makes the notion of "important problem" specific to you. In other words, dependent on your particular skills and interests, not on some external measure of worth. So even if you are working on something more "modest," say, what scat tells us about migration patterns of bobcats, that still counts as an "important problem" since you have an attack and can solve it.

Under this reading, Hamming's advice is close to the other famous nugget, "do only what only you can do" (Dijkstra). That is never the way I see it being used in conversation, however. Usually I see it in the context of encouraging people to work on some Big Problem that may not be a good fit for their skills and interest -- which is one of the quickest ways to encourage failure.
Although it may be evil and expensive, it is absolutely not gambling. The last person to bid, wins. There is no chance, no draw, no random event. The last person gets it.
Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins
Not to mention that such a policy would greatly benefit the sugar-cane farmers in Central and South America too...
Yeah, press ctrl-alt-esc to bring up the Task Manager. Go to the Processes tab, then right-click on a process. Choose a priority form the Set Priority submenu. Options are Realtime, High, Above Normal, Normal (default), Below Normal, and Low.
TOP Two Most Popular Ways To Monetize Your Wordpress Authority Site
Authority sites employ the geniuses of the best of webmasters to Monetize websites. With increased competition getting the king’s share of web traffic on Internet space it is imperative that you know the right ways to monetize your authority sites.
That is just ridiculous -- and by that I mean ridiculously impressive. Of course, it may be a step in the wrong direction w/r/t true randomness, both logically and in the psyches of whining gamers. If someone doesn't trust random.org (and I have to say, I would have stopped right there), I doubt that basic image processing where "pips sometimes blur" is going to help calm the whiners. Kudos for whimsy and throughput, though!
Quick word association test:

Google? search

Microsoft? Windows and Office

Bing? ah, the microwave's done
Cocaine found in Red Bull Cola
More accurately, you win if yours is the last bid to reach the server. You have less control over that than you think. Unless you pay for their premium service, of course.
i've been rich, avg and poor. believe me, avg is better. --me.
Why Darwin failed
Time Review of Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Skim
I get the impression that the author is painting things with a very, very broad brush. For starters, not all ethanol comes from corn, and thus ethanol does not necessarily drive the price of food up. What about miscanthus? There are MANY ways of producing ethanol, and though producing ethanol from corn is alarmingly inneficient, that does not mean ethanol per se is a bad idea. Either the author did poor research, or he is willingly distorting the facts...

Moreover, if ethanol is destroying engines, then that only shows how incompetent some people in positions of power are. I am quite surprised that the author failed to mention Brazil, where ethanol has been used as fuel since the 1970s:

http://current.com/items/89112645_the-worlds-sugar-daddy.htm

What the Americans should have done was to consult the Brazilians and ask for advice on how to transition to E85, something Brazil has over 30 years of experience in. If engines need to be modified in order to allow E85, why hasn't the public been informed?
Except getting the item is not winning. It's only winning if you pay less than retail price.
Twitter Heads To Hollywood, Plans To Develop TV Show
I keep reading all these stories about how bad the App Store is, and how you can't sell stuff after the first few days. I've got one app up there that took me a day to write, is typical of the 'this is my first iPhone app' apps, hasn't been updated in about 5 months (and thus would be well towards the back of the pack) and yet still sells a moderate number of copies each month.
Advances in analytical instruments have led to cocaine (and many other forbidden substances) becoming detectable in a number of curious places, such as all U.S. currency. The sane question to ask is no longer whether, but how much.
i know at least the sourceforge.net email lists have ads on every mail going out. hotmail did this and may still (does anyone still use hotmail?). it seems like it would be difficult for a 3rd party to provide an ad network like the many web advertisers do because the ad generation would have to be integrated into your mailing list software and run on your server, which may put it out of the reach of many list operators.

perhaps you should reach out to your own subscribers and see if any of them would be interested in advertising on the list. setup a web form, run your own ad at the bottom of list emails saying "to advertise here go to ...".
RT: @Microsyntax Sets Out To Make Sense Of #twittergrammar
Yup. From the article:

> According to this analysis, the 0.13 micrograms of cocaine per can of the drink does not pose a serious health threat — you'd have to drink 12,000 liters of Red Bull Cola for negative affects to be felt — but it was enough to cause concern.

Not enough to concern me (not that I'm enough of an asshole to drink this garbage in the first place).
Or: Pee before the movie, during the intermission and after the movie.
The taurine would have long killed you by this point.
In the past few years, we've seen mortgage-backed securities and financial derivatives and hedge funds become household words.

Each of these were ways to game the existing regulatory system. Take dollars, contort them in a way that appears new, and loudly declare you aren't subject to any existing regulations. The regulators won't catch up for several years, and by then you've taken whole generations of investors to the cleaners.

Swoopo isn't an auction, it's a raffle. When your school sells 500 $1 raffle tickets for a $100 prize, the raffle buyers understand that the school is going to profit $400 and the kids are going to get to go to band camp, and the government which regulates games of chance has given it a pass (typically, raffles may have to apply for a permit from a government agency, and only bonafide religious, charitable, or education groups are allowed to do it without the heavy regulations applied to casinos and the like).

Swoopo just decided to call themselves a legal auction rather than an illegal raffle, and they're waiting until the regulators catch up with them. Then they'll slightly alter how the scam works, loudly declare this new system is perfectly legal and isn't subject to any existing regulation, and start all over again.

This type of internet-scamming is going to be increasingly common, and programmers really need an ethical duty not to participate. It's like a 3-card monte, or free throw shooting game where the basket is oblong rather than round, but, hey, over the internet.... call it Carnival Scams 2.0. The populace has NO IMMUNITY against this sort of thing so it's going to go through them like swine flu.
Brilliant college dorm idea.
Only problem is there is no way to check when the problem is identified.
While not wrong, this research leads to foolish decisions: people will read them, and use it to justify their actions: "this is how it is, so this is how I am."

But no. This is projecting how people are meant to behave in their natural state to the complexity of modern civilization. It depends on the assumption that the human mind is a crystallized, unchanging bundle of desires. This is where most of us humans fall short.

We have the ability of metacognition. Hence, we have the ability to self-evolve. A better way to go about publicizing this kind of research is "sex sells, by default, and is optimal for [these set of conditions -- i.e. if your goals are all sex-centric. Maybe they are, good for you]. For [another kind of condition], this is the optimal strategy, which leads to [these kinds of interesting interactions]."
I wish you'd posted the damn permalink.:)
Indeed, but I think PG's usage was more informal, to include times when TC is a first/exclusive/main source of new startup info.

(Otherwise, the situations where TC is truly a 'primary source', in the sense meant by a traditional journalist or historian, are not 'often' but rare.)
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420
My favorite feed is still this one:

http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi

Grabs the full content of the article, and contains links at top and bottom to the comments. Beautiful!
The title is not fair at all. Slashdot introduced me to PG via "Beating the Averages" many years ago.
Protomold.com is your best bet, ultimately you can make a larger run off the molds where as milling won't tell you anything about the viability of it as an injection molded product. Also injection molding is a bit more complicated than just drawing up a shape so you might need some expertise if you are going down that road.
SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives, Intel/MacBook
stereolithography
As this is HN, I'm surprised their isn't more support for Ethanol.

Using data and statements from 1995 and earlier isn't realistic. Significant gains have been made in Ethanol production and North American auto standards didn't require engines to be E85 compliant until 1998.

The statistics as to the effectiveness of Ethanol greatly depends on the source fuel, and the process for extracting ethanol.

We didn't stop creating solar panels because they didn't create enough power. We support the initiatives and continue to develop the technology so it can live up to its potential.

Same thing with Ethanol, and it is getting to be very good, and further improvements in the processing, as well as materials will result in an effective energy source as a stop gap until we can move the majority of transportation fuels to even cleaner sources.

Sorry, but we aren't going to switch all the existing infrastructure from gas to electric with a 10 year span. Ethanol can take the place of gasoline without detrimentally effecting the system.

I am from Canada, so our ethanol production numbers are better than the US because the majority of our ethanol production is powered by hydro, rather than coal or nuclear.

Today many ethanol producers in North America are using corn (not all). Some plants are now able to make ethanol from corn cobs which is a waste product. Others are trying switch grass, wood chips and of course sugar cane.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. As a technology and entrepreneurial community, I'd expect HN members to see the potential of ethanol.

Anybody want to explain all the negativity?

Does everybody here really believe that oil and all the drilling, transportation and processing is better for the world than growing fuels - corn, sugar cane or other?
This is several weeks old, but I read it today and learned a few new facts.
This is a great essay, makes me feel more on track than disorganised. Point 2, work in long stretches and the fixed cost of re-visiting a program - I think I'll show this to all those who interupt me and that don't understand why I don't really seem like I'm listening! This essay also explains part of why so many big companies are producing code that from a user who can program, you end up thinking "I could do better myself..."
An interesting side note: Forbes magazine had an article a couple of decades ago on a study comparing McDonalds franchises which found that those who paid more than minimum wage were more profitable than those that paid minimum wage (and yes the study did control for socio-economic status of the location: it was an apples to apples comparison).
much of the increase in food prices was not due to a lack of availability, but where a result of
1) rice disease killing of significant ammounts of the rice crop 2008
2) cost of fuel increases (oil, not ethanol) and the resulting increase in transportation costs.
Favorite part: "As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice. Tangible revenge. "
Stereolithography is usually fine for evaluating product form, but the cured polymers aren't (usually) functional. Fused deposition systems (from Stratasys) produce functional parts from ABS, similar in strength and workability (for drilling/tapping holes, finishing surfaces, etc.) to injection molded parts.
Yeah, and good luck running it on your cell phone from your movie seat when you need it most!
It doesn’t have to be an innovative business that solves a pain in the market place; it just has to be a business that can turn a healthy profit every year.

On the contrary, a business must solve a pain the market place, to become profitable and healthy.