skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  Review my Startup (Idea)
Hey all-

I'm not sure if this type of post is allowed, but feel free to downvote if not. Basically, I was hoping to run an idea I have for a startup by the community at large and maybe find a cofounder in the process.

About me: CS nerd/bad idea generator

So heres the gist:

Create a site that would be a reputation repository (pardon the alliteration). This repository would be similar to gravatars but deal specifically with establishing "universal" rep as opposed to avatars. Rep could be used for any type of crowdsourced site, news sites like HN or DIGG, blog stuff and I think much more. Obviously these interactions would have to be fleshed out a little bit, but I think it could certainly be a nice little addition to some sites.

Thats the basic plan. What do you all think? Worth a shot? Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk about it. daftdg at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

edited to add contact info.
What's wrong with it is some of us still think the English language (in this case) exists for a reason and hate attempting to read vowelless nonsense created by lazy teenagers. I've seen some pretty poignant and hilarious stuff fit into 140 characters, and not one of them included "SMS-speak."

What, exactly, have they taught us? That you can effectively communicate using a bastardized version of a language? Call me old-fashioned, but I think I'll stick with the old adage and, "use my words."
Ask HN: Theoretical innovation to actual company?
Hi HN,

For stuff more general than the usual web startup flow chart (i.e. come up with an idea and implement!), what is the process to from theoretical innovation to actual product? A friend has come up with a theoretical innovation that arose out of his PhD thesis that has potential for several software projects of varying scope. He believes that he can write an application that utilizes this innovation in ~6months to a year.

What is the next step? Is there a series of steps we should go thru? Like draw up a business plan, identify user base, etc? What kind of stuff should we be thinking about?
PHP, iPhone and Blackberry Developers Wanted - Palo Alto, CA
Think Computer Corporation (http://www.thinkcomputer.com), the company behind the original Universal Face Book at Harvard University, is developing a suite of web-based software applications that help the corporate back-office become a more efficient and productive place. Think has been operating for over 10 years in the IT space and is looking to aggressively grow its software product business. Successful candidates will become an integral part of the top management team and will have the opportunity to take on an equity stake in the company.

We are in greatest need of software developers with heavy UI design experience. All candidates should also have:

* Significant experience with the LAMP stack (PHP and MySQL on Linux with Apache)
* Knowledge of JOINs, temporary tables, scaling and replication
* Knowledge of MySQL fine-tuning on the Linux operating system
* Willingness to learn and use existing tools and frameworks
* Experience with JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS
* Flexibility, not zealotry: willingness to work with HTML tables or stylesheets as appropriate
* A sample, functional web-based application URL to send along (include a description of what part you worked-on and the extent of your involvement)

Candidates who can answer any of the following questions will be given priority consideration:
- Both Flash and PNG graphics support transparency. What's one difference between them?
- What is a more efficient way to store this string: "0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1"?
- What's the best way to figure out if a particular MySQL query is slowing down your database server?
- What kind of bar code does the U.S. Postal Service use for routing packages? First-class mail?

Apply for this job at https://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/jobs/index.html . We will pay a lot more attention to submissions that use our form than we will to e-mails!
The Wii, the Nintendo DS, the original Xbox, the PSP... All were easily hacked and are super easy to load pirated games onto. And yet, publishers seem to still be making money quite handily on these platforms. It seems highly unlikely that Apples draconian restrictions on iPhone apps has much to do with piracy.
Imagine a version of OS X where every application had to be approved. Does that not strike you as horribly wrong?

No.

"I don't like it" and "wrong" are not interchangeable.
IPhone-style checkbox toggles in jQuery
It's as easy to hack the iPhone as the PSP or DS - you just need to jailbreak it.
I do now, because firefox with only 1 GB of RAM has become a pain and Opera is nice and fast.

(Any tips how to slim ffx down are welcome)
Maybe it was just me, but the 5th time I read "my book" was the time I had to stop reading entirely. It was incredibly annoying. You, of course, have every right (and need) to promote your book and doing so with the intention of also being educational is commendable, but I just couldn't take reading that phrase every other sentence.
developers need to put their foot down, as long as they continue to idly suffer indignity, apple will continue to heap it on.

i, for one, will not be releasing any iphone apps. if google would streamline android market they could steal huge developer following now that they have some prettier devices coming out
Lessons From Building a Basic Video Player in HTML5
That Washington Post survey you mention is flawed for a number of reasons, the main being that while it showed Ahmadinejad ahead 2:1, it was only with 33.8% saying they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 13.6% for Mousavi, and a full 42.5% of the respondents saying that they were either undecided or would not answer the question.

Obviously a survey in which the amount of undecideds is far greater than the amount saying they will vote for a candidate is hardly evidence of strong polling for that candidate.

More: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/did-polling-predict-a...
This analysis of the newsweek article is spot on. Lyons is an entertainer and Kurzweil is a prophet. Throughout history, visionaries of the future have been attacked. Kurzweil is no exception.

These attackers profit because many people choose to disagree and we select opinions that agree with ours. The future Kurzweil describes is coming.

The only thing that could stop it is an all out war on technology, but technology itself is used in that war, so it's a bit of a paradox... or I don't know what you'd call it exactly, but the only thing that could defeat the singularity is that which is causing the singularity to ... evolve.

It's like we are witnessing evolution in process. like the telescopic evolution scene from Waking Life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saxX-Z6w3p4
I can't read the article.

"Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server."

sigh
I think circumscribing would be a better choice of word here:

"...without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms."

The translation is fluent, and I shouldn't make fun of it, but that line made me laugh.

On a more salient note, it's good to see that these proposals are not proceeding without public notice. It's hard to fight the "FOR THE CHILDREN!" brigade, but fortunately the Germans are having the debate openly, paying at least lip service to constitutional process.
>> Obviously these interactions would have to be fleshed out a little bit

When I first read your idea I thought "Hmm... This is to reputation what OpenID is to usernames and passwords". And just then a little light bulb appeared above my head: If you tracked this by OpenID, than any site using OpenID could easily switch over to your system - without having to confirm that a certain username was a certain account on YOUR system, yada yada yada.

I think it's a good idea - the only problem is getting this to catch on with at least a couple of well known sites. That's a hard thing to do, but I think it's a good idea. I like universality (though admittedly, I'm not the biggest fan of OpenID itself)

edit: If you're really serious about doing this - I'd be happy to work with you on it - email me at SHP4HN [at] gmail [dot] com
It looks like the platform rests on the edges of the masonite. I wonder if it will leave depressions in the hardwood floors underneath? Assuming they don't own the place, their security deposit may help pay for the proper fix.
This is why it's vitally important that photos and videos are getting out. Anyone can tweet that the Basij are shooting people, but photos of bloody corpses in the streets are evidence enough.

Also, some accounts are more reliable than others to follow.
Real-Life Twitter Business Success Stories
I like the concept, actually I love the concept.

One of my concerns though is that the email is not easy to give out. "No no it's together, but drop the o and the last e."

We'll see though, I'll give it a try.
Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple market.

Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely than a Wikipedia or Google URL.
Just one though as I was looking at opera unite right now:
if things go bad with the net, this will be important, everyone, even non technical, will easily host a proxy e.g...

By the way, in France our 3-strikes law was found unconstitutionnal, and this law seems similarly dubious: do you guys in Germany have some institutions that check this kind of cases?
Twitter can be a great source of information , but only if you can independently verify what's being said. The problem is, there's no way for us to do that in Iran, except to rely on the more traditional media and journalists. That's what always gets me when I read Twitter boosters go on about how Twitter is better than the news because it's "real time." How much of an advantage is being "real-time" if you aren't also reliable?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659271

the first article gained a lot of attention.

I still don't understand why apple did this though.
Sorry I don't buy the idea that free speech/expression is bad.

Many people are quite foolish, and they are this way in spite of much information that would prevent ridiculous things like the link you posted.
Less, a leaner CSS
"Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?"

Because if you want to perpetuate a widespread belief that homeopathy works, you have to require an equally widespead ignorance of how real chemistry works. Then, to have a modern civilization at all, you have to also have an elite that does understand how real chemistry works.

I'm sure you can understand how much of a problem this is going to become.
google had a strong product and even stronger word of mouth marketing that got it rolling - of course, word of mouth would not be there without a good product. Same snowball effect could have been seen with gmail.
Also, check out the article @ usabilitypost.com for the full story:

http://www.usabilitypost.com/2009/06/16/introducing-less-a-b...
Updated YC Company Hosting Stats
Do.

Stop talking and theorizing and just do.
Well, the placebo effect is also due to real chemistry ... just not chemistry that anyone understands enough to start designing actual patentable pharmaceuticals to harness it (yet).

I would counter that just as many people naively take advil when they get a headache. I think many doctors would say that OTC NSAID abuse is probably at least as big a problem as people not getting rid of their ailments b/c they took homeopathic remedies.

Most people don't have a clue what is really happening when they flip on a light switch in their home ... so by your argument they should avoid electricity, appliances, etc.
They're also totally alienating an important part of the market imo.
Technically this is nothing revolutionary. I worked on a project that included a jetty server and SQLite database as part of the download. For the user it was a single button click and updates were automatic. The purpose of the server was to supply services that are difficult with central servers, like watching your page views to see what you were interested in. The local server talked only to your browser and the central server, but it could have easily talked to your friends. The advantage it had over the cloud is that it was using free compute power and it could be an assistant without violating any privacy issues. Of course, generalizing the service raises other issues. You certainly dont want 50 or 100 servers running on your machine.
What about the part where child abuse pictures are an ill-defined category? Take, for example, this comic:

<NSFW> http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF215-Kitty_Photographer.jpg </NSFW>

Is that child abuse (the photos the man took, not the comic itself)?
This is a big reason why speech recognition works. You have a list of probabilities of sequence of words occuring(language model) and it decides on the next word based on the last few previous words.

So if you have the word Super, odds are the next word is Man and not Microphone.
The user who wants his phone to just work without having to launch process monitors all the time would probably get a worse experience if multitasking was done wrong.

The iPhone, with rare exception, obeys the UI convention that leaving an app closes the app rather than leaving it running in the background. The exceptions to that (Phone and iPod) indicate at the top of the screen that they're still running in the background. OK, so third party apps could have that too. But once you start adding taskbars and process monitors to the phone, you still lose something.
I do not intend to disparage ccBetty in anyway, haven't used their service enough. I'm sure there's some users that will find their service great.

But mainly we wanted something to do secure business collaboration (all traffic over SSL, and the ability to S/Mime encrypt all the email traffic for example). We also wanted reusable group email addresses "somewhere@tgethr.com", instead of looking up a crap load of email addresses or everyone being forced to create their own groups of email addresses in address books all over the place.

We also wanted a dead simple way to manage multiple of these groups and not feel forced to use a webapp to use the tool well. Didn't find the solution to all these wants out there, and we feel we have a knack - our opinion of course :) - of doing simple web apps for business, so we gave it a go of making something that works for us.
full thread is somewhat more interesting than one guy's bitchy smackdown.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...
Actually, P2P communication inside any browser has been possible since the release of Adobe Flash Player 10. Two Flash 10 clients can directly communicate with each other over most NATs and firewalls (in contrast to Opera, Flash 10 supports NAT punching).

Just over two weeks ago I've launched a web-based service that uses these capabilities of Flash 10. The service enables users to send files directly between each other. No software to download. If interested, you can check it at http://www.FilesOverMiles.com

Feedback on the service would be appreciated :)
I'm not confident in the ability of the common internet user to distinguish interesting but unverified chatter from quality reporting. Despite the saying "don't believe everything you read", I think a lot of people do.
I've just tried it on a few of mine and had zero savings. So I'm not sure what it is doing that is different to Photoshop.
Wouldn't an NNTP server with an SMTP gateway and HTTP client serve basically the same purpose?
Why only 1 on linode? Is there a reason?
talk about loop abuse:

(flet ((make-random-move (rankf)
(loop for place in places
for rank = (funcall rankf place)
collect (cons place rank) into ranks
sum rank into ranks-total
finally (loop with r = (if (zerop ranks-total) -1
(random ranks-total))
for (place . rank) in (shuffle ranks)
sum rank into current-ranks-total
when (< r current-ranks-total)
do (cond ((and (eq place ahead) (move ant)))
((eq place ahead-left)
(turn ant -1))
((eq place ahead-right)
(turn ant +1)))))))
(if (ant-food ant)
{Less} Extends css by adding: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules.
It might be worth noting that "one guy" is the designer and implementer of Clojure.
I agree that state changes being reported by one person are not necessarily true. However, a state change being reported similarly by multiple unconnected sources is helluva more believable. Also, remember that BBC/CNN/etc. did not jump on this story. As a matter of fact, they've ignored it for the whole weekend, even when their international stations were reporting it on other TV channels. Who knows what their motivation for that is, besides verification (which might not have been possible, considering that communication sources were progressively jammed by security forces).

As for the number of people goes, if you take a look at the videos, you'll get a clearer picture as to how many people there are. From what I saw, it was 50+ across and it was pretty consistent width as far as the camera could see. I'm not saying that 3 million is accurate, I was just saying that videos show a lot more than 5 across and that's where you were off. ;)
isn't the NNPP the reason middle management exists :)
I think this is a good idea. I've actually thought of something similar myself. Why not have each person's reputation be based on a variety of attributes -- discussion forum insight, financial reliability, technical expertise, etc.

This could eventually replace the credit ratings infrastructure of experian, equifax, etc.

Ideally lots of sites would participate -- e-commmerce sites could rate you as a customer (headache free, not trying to cheat on promotions, etc.), kiva could rate you, etc.

It would also be great if reputation could be tied to biometric data to prevent transfer and fraud.

Such a system would ideally be open, cryptographically sound, and free.

I think that a properly designed system would end up removing lots of the transaction costs associated with more mainstream reputation systems.
Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site
To short circuit any confusion, right now these tgethr groups are private and more private :) (using email encryption). You can't give out a tgethr address to people outside of your group and have them be able to email that address. Though we are attracted to this feature, it obviously opens up the group to spam which seems to still plague Google Groups. Still pondering this one.

Currently for this purpose of a public@somewhere.com (like our support@ type emails at Inkling), we use Tender (tenderapp.com) which does a great job already of managing a public discussion, support queues, etc.
I don't know anything about this and the flame/troll aspect of the thread makes me not want to. I was kind of hoping that a new Lisp on a new platform might have a chance at a fresh start clear of all that stuff.

I did notice one thing, though. Assuming that what Rich Hickey's saying is true, it would be better to point to something visible that the demo does that the knockoff can't do. If it's possible to appear to reproduce a demo without doing the hard parts, then maybe the demo wasn't actually demonstrating the hard parts. In that case a better demo would be a good idea. Such things can be hard to come by, though, as demos tend to be relatively simple and thus knockoffable.
Reminder: know what you're measuring
Android (linux-based): Linux, Mac & Windows free SDK

Palm WebOS (linux-based): Mojo seems to be Linux, Mac & Windows

Blackberry: MDS is an Eclipse plugin, so Linux, Mac & Windows

Apple and Microsoft are the only ones to lock you onto one platform. Despite all the marketing dollars invested in showing how different Apple and Microsoft are, I see them apply the exact same strategies for the same purposes every single time they get the chance.
The privately owned data center concept is unsustainable

It's not clear what you're saying here, but I think I strongly disagree. Data centers have real economies of scale (both in dollars and in availability) which shouldn't be ignored. Web 2.0 "freeconomics" may be unsustainable, but you don't have to use that business model; you can make data centers (or "the cloud") work for you.

...and defeats the concept the internet, which is distributed data.

IMO the concept of the Internet is to move packets, and servers are equally legitimate as PCs.
Yes, and it is a weak point.

My point, instead, was that FP does not break down when things get ugly; on the contrary, it gives much stronger guarantees on correctness. Of course, it takes effort to express the problem in the more restrictive functional paradigm.
It works without the "www.".
State Dept. to Twitter: Keep site up in Iran
Laying a shaggy carpet would have probably have been easiest ;)
A poem about the greatest technology of childhood
I like the look of Less. I've taken cursory looks at other CSS generation tools have been less than enthralled by the ugly syntax and over-complications. Less is lean and looks like something that might be a future CSS extension. I'm definitely going to give it a try.
It's too meta.

It's also impossible. HN and Digg and Reddit are not going to implement your universal reputation system.

This has been tried before by at least a half dozen companies and you've never heard of them because they all failed.

Lastly, Twitter and Facebook already solve enough of this problem with twitter auth and facebook connect and have hundreds of millions of users so you would have stiff competition.
I was just thinking the same thing. 14 on Slicehost and only 1 on Linode seems like an odd ratio considering the similarities of the services provided and price point.

Maybe its because Slicehost offers backups?
Surprised me as well. I don't know of a metric where slicehost beats linode.
um, no it isn't. And that one guy happens to be the guy who invented clojure. Rich Hickey does often seem a bit testy at times, but I think it's because he is a bit of a visionary and it is tiring always having to drag along people that don't quite get it.
PV is used on a far larger scale today than solar thermal power generation. Solar adoption is currently constrained by manufacturing capacity which is why it can quickly scale. It's 0.15% of total electric use today. But instilled capacity is doubling every 2 years.

The maximum efficiency of PV is far larger than solar thermal systems and they have been improving far more quickly both on cost / watt and peak efficiency. PV systems are easier to install and maintain than solar thermal systems.

PS: Looking the cost / adoption curves PV is only looking more attractive each year. But, suggesting there is no long term energy crisis does not generate a lot of publicity. Also there is a perception that PV is magic and hard to understand even though manufacturing it is a well understood process.

Edit: If you have a more secefic issue with PV I would gladly address it, but it looks like PV is going to provide atleast 10% of our electricity needs within 20 years.
I'm not YC, but yes backups differentiate for me.

Though I'm still itching to find something just like Slicehost but with gigabit on the private network.
the interview alone is interesting, I was not in for the "tips".
Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them.
Just to clarify, when I said I 'put the first 10k chars into my Trie', I didn't mean I inserted them into the Trie... merely that I called longest_word with a 10k-char string.