skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Executive summary: Smart kid can't find a direct way to tell faceless companies his smart ideas so they can implement them, so he founds a startup in the vein of Halfbakery, Get Satisfaction or UserVoice where companies can track that sort of thing, and people can write their ideas up.

Translation from Bitter Whiz Kid to English: self-important child gets no traction on his resume so starts a web site that he thinks will obviously make the world stampede to his door and he won't have to get a real job.

Which is great, because even though this idea is nice, it'll fail because:

1. Companies don't want and perhaps even can't legally use unsolicited suggestions. Despite the "innovation happens elsewhere" maxim, no company actually functions that way internally. If you suggest something and they implement it, do they owe you anything? Look at all the flak Apple gets when they "steal" an idea from a third-party app, whether that's actually ever the case or not.

2. The "innovators" that founded the company are just as self-important as you are. It's their company, they know best, their employees know best, who are you? "You're just some kid," they say. Start your own company if you don't want to be the low man on the totem pole, which you did. Atta boy.

3. You're still just some kid. Or, more specifically, despite all your experience compared to your age peers, you're still terribly inexperienced in the ways of the world. Your entire blog post is a rant against the companies you want to attract to your startup. You have no diplomacy. Go read Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research."

I'm sure a lot of people here at HN were/are in the same boat. I would actually complain to friends and family, "Oh, I'm so brilliant, if only someone would just recognize that and pay me money to think neat shit up, I could do that all day." I'm pushing 30 and I'd wager my "experience" from ten years ago was at least as impressive as his is now. You know what? I was a self-important tool. I did the same things: started a business, did well for a few years, tanked it, did some consulting for a years, tanked that, started another business, tanked that.

Then I held two "real" jobs with big multinational hardware and software companies, and I think I've grown more as a human being -- able to relate well interpersonally, able to work the system to get my ideas and projects and wants handled, comprehending the value of networking and somewhat being able to do it -- in this time than I did the entire time I was doing my own thing. I get the system and I think landing my next "real" job will be way easier, as will starting my next own business.

People told me this when I was this kid's age, too, and I didn't listen, and I didn't get it. I just barely get it now.

Good luck, dejan! Try and lay off the bitterness a bit and work on your people skills a bit more. People will always need to see the "proof" of your brilliance in the ways they are accustomed to; it's up to you whether fixing that is more important than the ultimate problem you really want to be working on.
The technological singularity and limits to exponential growth
I launched a side project the other day to let you post longer messages to Twitter. You write whatever you want and then it updates your twitter with a summary and short url to the entire message.

I have it up as lngtwt, but I think I'm going to launch it officially as big.ly.

http://lngtwt.com

My particular use case is that I often want to respond to someone on twitter with a longer message and I don't have convenient access to their email or want my response to be public. This comes up all the time in support. There will be a bug that is being discussed publicly on twitter and I want to send those people a solution in a way that anyone following the discussion can see.

Here are two examples:

http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2349633865

http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2244340758

One thing I like about small side projects is that it lets you start with fresh code, which is helpful for testing out plugins. This one uses the Rails twitter-auth module, which was really easy to setup.
I love this. You're so right that every development environment should have a great console.
I'd like to jump in here. Hacker News and seomoz are the two websites I read the most consistently, and I've always found seomoz to be accurate, timely, and interesting. Although all their articles are generally well written, Danny's especially are always backed up by piles of data.

More generally, why is it that the mere mention of SEO brings distrust? I would expect this community to be keenly interested in SEO. Not only is the process itself fascinating, but I feel launching a start-up without a solid SEO strategy in place is at best irresponsible, at worst suicidal.
Could you not take the ffmpegX route and have the people download the pngout on their own? If they do not download it you can still make the program work without pngout but for the people that want the smallest filesize they can take the additional steps to download it and put it in the correct location.

Also, I think that having it finish quicker is >> correctly indicated timeline.
They don't fix bugs in new versions, they do that in service packs and other updates.

By now, anyway... Were the OSRn upgrades to Win95 free?
My first post on HN and replies that are actually helping me clear out my doubts/concerns!

I think on the long term i am going to find few reliable local 'associates/friends' with whom i can share projects/profits and discuss code etc, as you mentioned.
Google is also one of a very few companies where this type of micro-micro-optimizing even begins to make sense.
What's next, Mirsky's Worst of the Web? Maybe I should bring netstat.net back. Hmm.
I fail to understand why anyone would fantasize about anything remotely like rape.
Penny For Your Thoughts - Umair Haque
New 64-bit Operating System Released: LoseThos V5.08
9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal
If your goal is to appear calm and in control, good luck doing that by following this huge check list.

Alternatively you can try to actually relax and feel comfortable in your own skin.
Gates is a such a prick.
Respectfully, if something goes wrong you should get rid of your employee before you rack up a huge debt to them in unpaid wages, yes.
Eh, just when you thought he was going to spit out the coolaid he swallows it instead.
Few is not none, and it only takes a few. Shared values and work ethic are the more important selection criteria in my experience.

Also, having tried it several different ways, I would develop a business partnership based on shared business successes (vs. friendship, desperation, or other non-business experiences) by dividing the income stream--and managing expense--from a series of projects. This is a reliable way to judge what it will be like to manage a business jointly.
Wow, I had never seen this previously. Kinda shady, ehh?
Does Jay-Z Have The Right to Diss The Auto-Tune? | Hip Hop MVP
Exactly. I'd never play down the countless hours of work it takes to make a living from the music business - but doesn't being connected with a major label imply that you're no longer "indie?"

So all you need is 10 hours, Twitter and a massive army of super-dedicated fans (340,000 listeners on last.fm alone)

Disclosure: I work for an independent record label.
There's something deeply wrong with the way web developers learn how this stuff works. I keep seeing surprised discoveries of facts that haven't changed since HTML 2.0 came out thirteen years ago.

What is it? Are the books they read (instead of the actual specs) really that terrible?
yes, but you want to close frame, img, li, and p tags

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533020(VS.85).aspx...
I associate relatively light pop with Jackson.

In fact, it is quite hard to describe without metaphors. Using metaphors, you can usually say that the music just feels as if someone smashes a heavy hammer against your soul and once the music stops, it pretty much feels like you fall down, as if you were leaning against a wall and someone removed this wall. Music which gives me this hammer -> face-feeling certainly includes, but is not limited to songs by Cryptopsy, Vomitory, Berzerker and to some extent Heaven shall burn and Suicide Silence (examples can be easily found on youtube). If you listen to several songs by these bands, I think my term 'light pop'will certainly become clearer :)
Not exactly what you're looking for, but check out http://codepad.org/ if you want an extremely quick and convenient way to dabble in various programming languages.
From Pasteur: Fortune favors the prepared mind.

Be anal about planning - no, probably excessive. Plan for alternatives? Critical. Absolutely critical. Those who play with money who thought the bubble might burst did way, way better than those who got blindsided.
Wouldn't it be kind of weird if Google's optimization tips were primarily meant for the relatively scarce few websites that operate on the scale at which their tips are even meaningful, whilst not even dropping a single hint to that fact, and in the process confusing everybody else?
I'd criticize, just on principle, but this is just too vapid to bother with.
I don't understand why this post has been so heavily downvoted. It presents an honest opinion with no malicious intent. Are we going to attack people fo simply not being aware of every hacker group?
I think it's worth making a distinction between "buying" a new version and "obtaining" a new version (where "buying" includes software that is charged for, even if you pirate it and don't pay for it). That is, the difference is between proprietary software and open source software.

When I pay money for software, I expect new features. When I go to download open source software, 9 times out of 10 I want the specific bug I'm dealing with to be fixed (and often it is). Heh, and often the bug I want fixed is that the software is lacking a certain feature -- but I've seen a lot of "issues" and "bug reports" listing feature requests, so the feature gets treated like a bug. Proprietary software is marketed in such a way that the latest version is all that you'll ever need, rarely are its deficiencies mentioned, and they definitely won't be mentioned as actionable "bugs".
The author doesn't seem to know the difference between a tag and an element. An unclosed tag would of course be something like "<html". It wouldn't even be accurate to say that Google doesn't close elements; for example the body and html elements are closed at EOF whether the closing tags are included explicitly or implied.

A more accurate headline would have been "Google leaves out some optional tags, as understood by all browsers and permitted by every HTML specification since the beginning of time".
The High Cost of Pretending | 43 Folders
The only thing about this I really ever heard was the fact that they strip out all whitespace, but checking http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co... it seems as if they don't use quotes on tag attributes where ever they are not necessary as well as many other things I was taught not to use, to produce valid code.
Indeed, I witnessed a car accident a few days ago, and called 911. Sure enough, I got a busy signal.

My first thought is that you should be put on hold rather than given a busy signal, but I wonder if the busy signal helps filter out some of the non-emergency calls.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could be absolutely sure Microsoft would not be able to sue users or companies using free software for patent violations?

I cannot be sure they won't sue people for anything they have patented that's used in Mono.
Now I just feel sad. Kragen-tol used to be a great inspiration for me once...
Theoretically, perhaps. Practically, I doubt the close-tags proposed by this MSDN article would make any measurable difference.

In fact, leaving tags out consistently in certain tag-heavy auto-generated layouts, by reducing network IO and fitting more content into memory buffers at a time, could be faster.
It's an edge of your seat ride every day around here...

I'm of the school of thought that everything allowed by physics will be built at some point in time. The only things worth arguing about are when a specific product is likely happen and whether you're going to help make it happen.

More on timelines and growth constraints based on human nature and incompressible human organizational strategies can be found here in a review of Kurzweil's singularity book from 2005:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p...
I thought this was going to be a new interview, but I remember reading this interview and discussing it at work back in the 90s. I know, this anecdote doesn't really give this much of an air of legitimacy, but archive.org does confirm that it's been around that long (which of course validates my memory more so than if Bill Gates actually said this stuff).
It's always interesting when people with special circumstances try to distill their situation into general principles. There's usually far too many variables to take their advice at face value, but occasionally you find useful tidbits.
With enplaned passengers at 101.9 million/year, it's not dumb luck that defines a safety record, but basic probability.

We must also consider the possibility that there is a bias against Southwest by the safety inspectors, and that perhaps Southwests safety record is a more accurate representation of how safe they are.
Aardvark: Now All Your Friends Are in the Answer Business
Knowing where to start always looks a lot easier in retrospect.
I did choose "I want one" when I got the error.
I'll post there again. I just have to get unblocked a bit. Glad you enjoyed it! I hope my ideology doesn't prevent you from enjoying it in the future :)
I demand to see some evidence supporting this assumption that closing tags "take up time". It seems to me that logic dictates it would take longer to parse a broken schema than a valid one. Perhaps leaving out those tags saves Google $1MM per year in bandwidth costs; it wouldn't terribly surprise me. But what would surprise me is evidence that browsers are quicker at processing an invalid document.
A few days back I read the story of 'The Tiger and the Traveller' from the Hitopadesha: http://tinyurl.com/kqsw39
. My first thought was 'That's microsoft !'

That story is very short, the Hitopadesha is much longer (it's a collection of tales, a bit like Aesop's Fables which are more well-known in the west.

It's set up as a morality play, but it occurs to me that there is a certain amount of market wisdom embedded in such tales too. Maybe they contribute to the success of Indians as traders (if that isn't just a stereotype?)
Adrian Lamo, the hacker philosopher
It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

I don't think it's a big deal that the autocompletion is not updated in realtime... someone looking for info on the case will just type "michael jackson death" and find it anyway. The rest of the article was interesting.
Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.

The more life beats you down the more you appreciate a great a smile and the way it makes you feel. And also, one learns to be more wary of people who aren't smiling.
Bringing up the non-emergency calls is a really good point. Abuse/misuse of 911 is a huge and serious problem:

http://www.popcenter.org/problems/911_abuse/
Twitter should automatically and quickly delete your tweet if it is bad.
The idea is to specify some criteria as to when twitter would automatically and quickly delete your tweet.

For example, if more than 2 people unsubscribe soon after your tweet is posted, then delete it automatically to avoid further reducing your audience.

You can even be more specific by only considering unsubscribers who pass some threshold in that count (e.g., those with at least 1000 followers).

Moreover, your criteria can take into account retweets and new subscribers.

CLARIFICATION: You -- not twitter -- would specify the criteria for automatic deletion of your tweets. If you don't like this feature, then don't use it.
Why Enterprises Don't Like SaaS
In the Wikipedia article history, I can find the edit you mention at 21:12 and the edit freeze at 21:45, but not the edit you mention at 21:48...

This page should show the relevant part of the history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Jackson...

I would say Wikipedia confirmed the death at 22:27, just after MSNBC and CNN, which is consistent with Wikipedia policy of relying on mainstream sources.
Is there any real reason for the body and html close tags (and head for that matter), other than to fit in with the rest of the syntax? Like something you'd want to put after the body, but still within the html tag?

<html>
<head>
Here's our head
<body>
Here's our body
Noticeable performance gains change user behavior at any volume. The only difference volume makes is the cost-benefit, ie. it's a no-brainer for google to spend $100,000 for a 5% gain in their home page performance which is not true for the vast majority of sites.

But we're still talking about improvements of at least 1%. Some of this PHP stuff Google was absolute nonsense--not just because it was technically wrong, which it was--but because string quoting method is never going to make even a single millisecond of difference in any real world PHP app. Even in contrived situations where it would, you could probably make an optimization that would have 3 orders of magnitude more difference by caching or using a C extension. This is the type of nonsense that 16 year old bedroom hackers with no experience or formal education come up with for their first blog post. Google out to be ashamed.
I agree that attacks are unwarranted but 1) downvotes are not necessarily attacks so it's folly to interpret them that way, and 2) the universe didn't just blink into existence at the moment of one's own earliest memory of it, and to treat things as such with arrogance and critique is just revealing the speaker's ignorance.
Reddit had a good list awhile back: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ji9m/

Includes ones for Scheme, Python, Factor, Cat, OCaml, Forth, and Brainfuck. And, of course, all of the many languages covered by Codepad.
you can get by with very few. you're clearly getting by with 0. try 1 and see how that goes.
Any clue on what the [edit] solo album advance might have been? I think advances range over two orders of magnitude or more, don't they?
Isn't this a major opportunity for a centralized, scaled outsource provider to deliver 911 service to municipalities who sign up for it at a lower cost and better rate of service than would otherwise be possible?

Imagine an advanced call center with 500 employees. The center can afford sophisticated technology such as geographic point identification of the call, bucketing multiple calls about the same incident, maybe even things like voice stress detection. And because of the size and geographic diversity, spikes in certain areas could easily be handled because they would make little impact. Even time zone diversification would cut costs, because traffic incidents from commuter times would be more evenly distributed.

Not to mention training. There are always incidents where, despite the good service of the vast majority of 911 workers, there are gross mistakes made in some cases that can be traced back to poor training. A large facility can develop excellent processes, training and electronic infrastructure to reduce these sorts of problems.

Or is this already done?
It's always hard to give general advise, you want to leverage your background, position and what you know.

'random' with Tim Ferris and Kevin Rose is nice also.
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/category/interviews/
fans who would certainly pay far more than $25 for impromptu hand-designed T-Shirts from her, whatever the medium through which they were advertised

While I agree that her fans love her, I suspect the immediacy of the medium made a big difference. If she'd advertised in the newspaper, ⓐ most of the fans never would have seen it and ⓑ those who did would mostly think, "Oh, maybe I'll order a shirt the next time I'm online."
They fly much shorter routes. I guess the number you really want to know is the number of staff per passenger kilometer, but the graphic doesn't say...

Other flaws:

* Misspells Aer Lingus.

* Claims low cost airlines have turnarounds of "up to 25 min" instead of "as little as 25 min."

* The 43% cost advantage is unclear (that's the cost advantage per passenger kilometer, or what?) and circles are not a good way to convey amount (is the radius important, or the diameter?).
You really don't want people in a large call center out in the middle of nowhere who are unaware of local landmarks and surroundings answering 9-1-1 calls. It's a huge public safety issue where you're dealing with distraught people and the operator has to make sense of various small bits of information quickly.
Great point, I'm sure all the mid level bands that have shirts languishing on Zazzle or CafePress would love to have those kind of sales figures. Having a huge fan base helps, but this is a new kind of experience that isn't possible via web,RSS, or other channels as currently offered.
Python 3.1 released
Yeah, dial "zero", then say "operator, connect me to the police department."

You have people dying and you can't go to plan b?
Build a Search Engine with 10 Open Source Software Projects
It would actually be an interesting interview if someone asked Kevin about shadiness. I note quite a bit of spin in Kevin's bio at the bottom of the article. Digg's inception keeps going further and further back in time, for starters.
It's free? What a deal!
"Don't use the nice readable str + str syntax to concatenate, instead, use StringBuilder"

Depending on who the audience is for your coding standards, this may not be a bad standard to have. In certain scenarios (e.g. building a very large String in a loop), appending with a StringBuilder can be vastly more efficient than "str+=" concatenation. Without the standard, the audience needs to know when it's not appropriate to use "str+=" concatentation.
hahahah - yes, so true.

Actually in this article, when I re-read it, I think it is written in a sort of ironic/fun tone.

Although I love clojure, I understand the disappointment in not being "lisp all the way down" - there is something satisfying about the purity of that approach, if it is practical. Maybe one day...
They don't ATM claim patents on mono. They do claim patents on the linux kernel.
I recently had to call 911 when I witnessed a highway accident happen. I must've called within 30 seconds, and the operator (I got through without any wait or busy signal) told me they already had several reports of that accident -- within 30 seconds! I was impressed.

I guess it varies by locale.
I remember Anne van Kesteren's site once had something like "it's valid, sure." in the source code comments. I had looked through it by chance and couldn't believe someone from Opera would omit so many useful tags. But then, sure enough, it validates just fine.

http://annevankesteren.nl/
What's that? (86)
Everyone is responsible for what he tweets; but the idea is good and can be a good Twitter App