skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait...so a Mahalo user manually selected a public Tweet and said they wanted to answer it, and therefore the question ended up Mahalo with a link to the Twitter profile that asked it? And Fluther has their knickers in a twist over this?

You've got to be kidding me. The tone of the blog post makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping the web looking for questions to steal (which is itself kind of laughable), but what it sounds like they're actually doing is just allowing users to select questions from public Twitter and answer them, including a link to where it was found on Twitter. How the fuck is that a problem? If you don't want users doing that, don't post your shit to Twitter.

This now just strikes me as whining from people looking for attention. Well done, you got some free PR. And I now have zero interest in using your product.
you lost me at correlation == causation
It's easy to tell at a glance if someone took the time to research your company and write a real cover letter versus the standard mail merge (or, worse, no cover letter).

Then, perhaps I'm biased -- I was later told that it was my cover letter that got me my current job (and no, I don't work at 37signals).
I found it very easy to come to hate George W. Bush even without the help of the press.
Going too casual can hurt you a lot more than too professional, IMHO.
I think a lot of those things can be turned to your advantage. If Chinese laws favor weaker IP protection, start a company that does legal arbitrage between the US and China (e.g. Megavideo - which is based in Hong Kong). Weak rule of law and lots of bureaucrats? Spend time building relations and you'll probably pay fewer legal fees than you would in the US. Do you risk having your stuff stolen by employees? Yes, but talent is generally less expensive. I think the challenges are different, but there are probably advantages in China as well.
I agree -- the number seemed low to me too.

That said, how much of our idea of valuations come from web apps? I was thinking about the number $215M and realized the only reason that it seems small is because Facebook is valued at $6B, or YouTube was bought for $1.6B. Outside of software, I can't think of companies that are really valued at these amounts, unless they make power plants or airplanes or some other giant necessity.

Is this how much companies are actually worth and we're all just in such a ridiculous bubble that we can't see it, or did these guys get desperate and cash out?
x100.

Mixi, the Japanese social networking service, has a mobile site. I was trying to surf to it via my DSi; but they refuse mobile connections from anything but a mobile browser that is recognized in their DB. They might have complicated that further by some awful IP address restrictions (thank you so much, jphone ruby package /sarcasm).

Result? I need to load the full website on a game system that simply cannot handle it. It cannot compare in the slightest to experience to the experience loading mobile Facebook. (Although to be fair, Mixi cannot compare favorably to anything done after Friendster anyway).

Please people, unless you really have to - don't browser-sniff.
Cover letters aren't hard. At all. I have a generic cover letter that I tweak a little bit for each company. Fill in the position I'm applying for, explain relevant experience, say that I'll "help the company $WHATEVER_THEY_DO", and if I'm particularly interested in working for the company, explain why. It takes 5-10 minutes tops. I don't think there's ever been a time that I didn't get a response when the job was particularly interesting. People tend to want to hire people who want to do the job.
I've always thought that this would make a great plot for a science fiction novel. A computer science fiction novel. There would be lots of intrigue, as the guy was tracked down by the NSA and covertly outwitted his opponents using his proof, until a final showdown where he discovers the horrifying truth about who else knows that P=NP, and what happens to everyone else who's ever proven it.

So...should I look for a literary agent or try and bootstrap this myself by hiring a private press? ;)
haha, that was fun times
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I was from the UK so Sker helped with the point I, apparently ineloquently, tried to make. I've only ever heard of E Ink in passing mention when discussions are made to the uses of ePaper in articles, if I wasn't into tech news as much as I am then I wouldn't have known that E Ink was a corporation at all.

Personally I knew who PVI was, but only because my dad's friend contracted in Singapore and then Taiwan. The thing that attracted me to the article was actually the dollar amount.
It looks pretty professional. Sort of interesting too. If there was a way to automatically get hashtags or news stories or submit possible stories that might be a way to improve the service.
I think you have to look at this comparatively though. The number of rich people is by definition small.

To make a comparison worth anything at all is a problem. While you might or might not like thinking of VCs as a filter, they do perform this function to an extent.

If your non-VC sample consists of mostly VC rejects, that's a problem.
It really depends on your definition of rich. Most salaried employees would consider themselves rich with a couple of million in the bank. Many private company owners have this level of wealth, and many wouldn't desire a higher level of success. I guess if you want 'have my own jet' levels of wealth, sooner or later you'll need someone else's money to help, even if it is just to secure their contacts/expertise. It's probably neither complete causation, neither unlinked correlation, but rather a more symbiotic relationship. People on the way to great wealth pick up investors. Sometimes they are cause, sometimes they are effect.
Putting search results side by side is old news:

http://www.graball.com/r.php?s=cuckoo+bananas

To get to Bing you have to use the "MSN" link, but you can get a side to side comparison of any two search engines. Plus, you don't have to install anything, since it just uses frames. (Most people implementing this today would use javascript, because as we all know frames are evil, and hence, we have to use other tools to re-implement frames.)
Geocode / tag your tweets
ICar Remote for iPhones
Edit: Ok. Just had another look at http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html , specifically the part about changing stuff without even keeping track of the changes. So, I rescind my suggestion for the ChangeLog.

You also say, "full of hacks and note-to-self comments about fixing them.", so there goes the possible TODO file too. :)
What do you mean? The protocol documentation is already up, the api docs are already up, and they've promised to release their reference implementation. Are you just trolling?
Best Credit Card Rates
How to find the best credit card rates
You don't have to install anything, but you do have to keep remembering to go to a different site, outside your usual workflow, if you want to see the results side-by-side.
Does anyone else find it odd that a programming language has a Screenshots page?
I don't think checked exceptions are so important. They might make things a little more verbose and painful, but they don't impose fundamental constraints and backwards compatibility nightmares the way other things do. After all, you can always just choose not to use them - just convert everything to runtime exceptions and your own code will be only impacted at the edges.
Google Docs add support for .DOCX and .XLSX
Well, not so much right after his first election, but there was a time right after 9/11 where he was extremely popular.
Directory of Blogs by Entrepreneurs
Of course the denial is reported by Ars and not TechCrunch...
I'm pretty sure you're just talking out of your ass. Google has a long and storied history of releasing things to the sound of chirping crickets (Orkut, Froogle, Knol, Custom Search, etc.), and a lot of their services that aren't necessarily duds certainly aren't being circle-jerked over, either (Checkout, News, Finance, etc.)
Who I am kidding, the Americans would not want the other countries to know P=NP and talking to anyone else would be grounds for disappearance

Post it very publicly in many places, including 4chan. Hope that Anonymous gets hold of it, or that the spooks start whacking /b/tards or the /b/tards start whacking the spooks.
When I talk about theft, it's bigger than the occasional missing laptop. It's more like coming into your office at night to find a bunch of guys armed with tire irons loading your whole office into a truck.

Or perhaps you'll just come to work one day and find yourself locked out and the business "under new management". That's more common.

I strongly recommend aspiring China entrepreneurs read "Mr. China" by Tim Clissold. It's about one of the first major investment funds in China, and the problems they encountered. It's pretty mind blowing, and not atypical.
The patent text is, as usual, really hard to parse, but I wonder if it applies to games loaded over the net?

---
Recording medium, method of loading games program code means, and games machine
---

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
This Hummer gets 100 mpg — more or less
Font aliasing in the bottom timeline is not working for me. Running Google Chrome on Vista. Screenshot:

http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q
Rom Machine
Rom Machine 4 minute crosstrainer
But like I said...

According to my 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Hawks, that is grammatically incorrect. You meant to say "But as I said".
Palm doesn't strike me as being at all stupid, it wouldn't surprise me if they have a contingency plan for what they do if and when Apple makes a move. It wouldn't surprise me if some of Palm's IP from back in the day was being infringed on by the iPhone. And that would certainly be an interesting bargaining chip.
For the record, Calacanis has given in to Fluther's requests in a comment (http://is.gd/LXUp):

We’ll take down the account for you if it’s such a big deal. It’s like a half dozen questions that were imported by our user.

Just so you know we’re not importing every question from your site or anything we’re let our users import questions from the public timeline and answer them...
Just to rub it in Nintendo's face a bit more, during the demonstration at E3, the guy explaining the system said "This isn't a game where you end up on the sofa just kind of using some preset waggle commands."

Ow.
> Regardless, if you start making any money, it will probably be taken from you. [...] you have absolutely no legal protection for anything. Zero. If anything, the courts are your enemy, because they side with whoever has the most influence and that's not you. Your employees embezzle from you? Your competitor (or a partner) steals all of your equipment? Government officials demand "protection" money? Too bad!

If this is all true (and I'm not saying it isn't), how come China has had 10% growth rates for the last quarter century?
The Four Stages of Burnout
That poll would suffer pretty badly from survivorship bias. Knowing that 75% of people who are rich took investment isn't useful without knowing what percentage of people who seriously tried and had some real potential to get rich took investment - if it was 99%, then taking investment actually looks pretty bad.
Hey, guys. The meetup was a good time: lots of interesting people and conversations. It was good seeing people.
So you don't think going meetings of other small business founders or listening to lectures by an expert small business founder would be valuable?
Orlando Commerical Litigation
Orlando commercial litigation
This is an arms race that Palm can win, though. If Apple finds a way to detect it, Palm can release an update to make it work again. At some point, Palm will end up with an implementation indistinguishable in every way from an existing iPod. If they've already done that, then the game is already over. If they haven't, it might take only one more iteration.
The growth is mostly because they're selling a lot of exports. They've been building up domestic consumption, but it's still pretty weak. Almost all the growth is from foreign money flowing in one way or another, and once money is in China, it tends to stay under Chinese control.

Regardless of how the general economy does, the question is: who benefits? The answer is usually government officials, or people that have relationships with them. There's a general assumption here that anyone with money must be corrupt. While that's not exclusively true, it's certainly true enough to discourage entrepreneurship.
This is a great idea. But I wonder why USPS uses a different domain for this. Seems like a legitimate domain because there's a link to prioritymail.com from usps.com also. But having two separate domains could be confusing to customers, I would think.
That's just silly. There are only so many ways to ask "Why is the sky blue?". In 140 characters it's a little difficult to get creative enough to make a question copyrightable. And once it's in the Twitter-verse, there is no controlling what is done with it.
There's Sneakers (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/) but that's just about factoring large numbers, and is pretty light on the CS (though Len Adleman, the "A" in "RSA", was a consultant on that film).

Yours sounds good too.
This works well for any product where there isn't a almost as good free alternative available. The iPhone example doesn't work well because it doesn't add to the case for the non-ad revenue web as there hasn't been an example of ad based apps having a large success.
Or maybe they spent the cash on X360 and Natal.

Sometimes MS make some pretty damn good products.
I'd say it's probably a mix of the two. The economy is currently rather crappy and we have no clue of the current situation of the company, perhaps they care more about getting the technology out there than making insane profits. However, the deal probably included shares in PVI and we're just not privy to that information either.

Facebook has a user base of ~200 million active users. They have an income of $300 million and only 700 employees. When you consider companies that have a fraction of their customer base, selling for $6B is pathetic. Ford, despite losing money like an alcoholic loses body fluids, has a revenue of ~$150 billion with only 5.5 million customers. Ford gets an average of $27,000 per customer 'per year' (this is based off their revenue divided by their customers, I'm trusting that with a company so old these numbers average out the money you'll give to Ford later in your vehicles life through parts, etc; so essentially the average person pays $27,000 through a vehicles lifetime), Facebook gets a total of $1.50 per customer per year. Compare Facebook to Google, who get roughly $58 per customer per year. So even by internet standards, Facebook is worthless for its user base, it hasn't capitalized at all on its potential market like Google has.

Companies like E Ink only have a handful of 'customers' and deal with large shipments. They're probably more comparable to a regional meat distributor than an online industry. They ship their product to only a handful of companies and then it's out of their hands.

The only reason so many of us know who E Ink is, is because it's used in products we care about. I believe the type of ePaper that will get a company worth into the billions will be manufacturers of color ePaper like used in the FLEPia. This offers instant conversion into low cost computers, cell phones and mp3 players.
E3 Live Stream by Justin.tv Draws 1.6 Million Viewers
This screenshot should scare some people at Redmond http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RAq5KuHSLq0/SiQFoMkuQ8I/AAAAAAAAAT...

But, it still does not export files in DOCX format (only DOC, PDF, HTML & RTF)
VC investment is great for founders, you can pay yourself a real wage (no more ramen), you can hire, and really make the company a success. Giving up 30% of the pie to have $5M in the bank is pretty good methinks.
Sure, you may get kicked out, and / or the company may fail, but with some cash in the bank you are THE MAN for a couple of years.
Of course you're trying to start a legal battle. You're using the words 'cease and desist' and infringement.

At least that what is seems like to me from a quick read of the post and comments here.

If you're not trying to start a legal battle, what's the point? Are you trying to shame them into doing what you want?
A lot of the discussion seems to surround the way the Pre interfaces with iTunes, mainly in regard to how Apple could and might update their software to close the hole, under the assumption that Apple actively wants to block the Pre.

However, it's possible that Apple doesn't mind that the Pre interfaces with iTunes. After all, the iTunes music store has been facing recent pressure from Amazon and other companies trying to tap into the online music/video market, and customers are more likely to choose or stay with iTunes if they don't feel as though they're locked into the Apple ecosystem.

Also, there's the non-insignificant legal matter of leveraging their music store business in an attempt to dominate the personal player market, which can be considered anti-competitive. If Apple does decide to go down the path of blocking devices access to customers iTunes libraries, they will definitely have to tread carefully.
DeviantArt is meant to be a social network for artists. The people there aren't posting work looking to be hired. There are other more appropriate websites for that.
being an asshole doesn't have that affect. It's very easy to find flaws in anyone's work. For instance, almighty zed didn't implement chunked encoding in mongrel. You don't see me running around calling him names and putting down the work he's given to the community to boost my ego. It wouldn't have any positive affect at all.
Someone already did this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Archives

basically, all the really clever computer science such as NP=P turns out to involve summoning demons etc in the book. If you want to read a ridiculous spin on computer science + fantasy, fun read.
The author is talking about a decision that I don't think is made very often. Founders don't sit around thinking, "Gosh, should I do a VC backed business or a lifestyle business? Which has a bigger chance at wealth?" They generally chase the idea that they chase-- because they are passionate about it or because it falls into their lap. Based on that idea they say, "I could pull this off without someone else's money" or "I need to go find some money somewhere if I'm going to pull this off."
'Tis true though. I've worked briefly with the Wiimote, and it really isn't as capable as advertised - forget tracking any sort of complex gestural movements, it's really only good for jerks and twists - i.e. something that saturates the sensor good.

This thing is going to absolutely destroy the Wii, if it works as advertised...
Yeah, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a clever way to basically state that I've flagged the story

Yeah, you know what the rules are and you're still trying to figure out a clever way to break them?

You're behaving like a house guest who keeps trying to rearrange the furniture in the living room. Despite repeated polite requests to stop. Who responds with arguments about how the design is all wrong.
I wouldn't have written this if the rich people I knew were mostly from one company I'd worked at.

Because of YC I've met a wide cross section of people who got rich from software. From literally hundreds of different sources. (I'm sorry I forgot about you; between you and Wolfram I know 2 who didn't take investment.)
Convincing people is easy. Build a closed system, grab an inverter, sell power back to the power company, which in many places they are required by law to pay you for. Sell enough power back, you'll get attention.

The idea that demonstrating a net-positive process is hard is merely smokescreen tossed up by the perpetual motion scamsters. It's not. It's easy. It's as easy as it is to demonstrate that a gas generator produces power when you add gasoline and oxygen to the system. If you have a process that works, you can generate and sell power to prove your point and go from there. The fact that nobody can quite seem to manage this feat, despite the easy money it would represent if you actually had a solution, is proof enough that it simply doesn't work.

A system that pushed out a kilowatt and never stopped would be very easy to prove. It's only hard to prove something when you're sitting there fiddling with picowatts and arguing whether the power comes from the magic process or if you're simply translating magnetism into electricity or some other fiddly, on-the-edge-of-rounding-error sort of thing.

Also, any true net-positive process can be turned into this sort of thing, simply by feeding back the net-positive process onto itself. Any net-positive process should be able to produce a kilowatt, easily. (Arbitrary amounts of power, actually, but let's take something thinkably-small.) Again, the fact that they have to resort to fiddly little rounding errors is proof that they have nothing. Any interesting perpetual motion process would be able to power a nation, if it actually worked.
Promoting your software with banner ads - is it worth it?
E Ink seems more valuable than $215M. It's a great idea,...They are growing in a new sector.

The problem is that we don't know what's coming next. Will E Ink be supplanted by something better?

That dev kit is very cool! Anyone have it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n2xxqMQyfY

It's a wonder that this hasn't been submitted here before.

Seems like they'll be capable of real-time animation. I wonder what that does to their power consumption and screen life?
When should one use generic Cialis?
Frank Lloyd Wright's Sky-City
3) Apple changes iTunes so it does not work.
I have both this and SICP in hardbound book format, I wonder if anyone has converted them to kindle format so I wouldn't have to buy another copy.
E Ink Developer Kit (animation speed + interactive)
Interesting. That could be the way to beat the iPhone. Instead of attacking head on, go a level down and spread sideways. Apple doesn't like their software to run on devices they don't make. But they can't make every cool device. So even if Apple managed to crush Android on phones, they couldn't crush Android. And as long as Android lived, it would always be poised to creep back onto phones. Or whatever replaces them.
I would post a question on HN saying "P=NP, what do you do?" and then take the best suggestion.
If the customer base gets the idea that iTunes sync is a sometimes on-again-off-again unsanctioned affair, then that will be a pyrrhic victory for Palm.
As someone trying to make a video for "the product" with zero video editing experience, let me say that I no longer expect it from others. It's enough programmers are even making the UI useable.
Christian Videos Network -
Well, when I metacognate, I kinda feel the connotations of words. In some sentences different connotations will be stronger than others or dropped. So, these abstract concepts fall into this abstract network of concepts.

For the word politics one might be teaching children at a summer camp. While teaching them one may notice the kids have fallen into a popularity hierarchy. When recounting the kids social structure one could describe struggles over their social order as fights amongst clicks or the kids politics. Whichever description comes up first, and depending on what lesser connotations or more desirable.

That's the way I believe it works, but I'm not sure I've conveyed it very well. It's an abstract idea that I don't know how to convey (there is a better word) well.
I've always assumed it is a given that as soon as you make that discovery, all sorts of agencies would be hunting after you and you would have to run for your life. So my worry would be how to safely publish the information to get off the hook. I used to think publishing it to Usenet and sending lots of emails would do the trick, but I am not so sure anymore.