skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on the business model.

I've seen a strong correlation in some areas, where the entrepreneur's business relied on lots of contacts and sales through contacts. But I've also seen success by what you would consider non-social types, the sort that go into a hole, work their tookus off, emerge with something valuable, then sell it through non-social methods like online and mail order.

The strongest entrepreneurships I've seen combine different people with complementary skills.
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It's just putting a great deal of pressure on it. The coin becomes much thicker.

Better pictures: http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinkergallery.html
Yehuda Katz - What to Expect in Rails 3.0 [video]
"A shrunken coin weighs exactly the same as before, and its density also remains unchanged. The coin becomes thicker as its diameter is reduced, but the overall volume of the coins stays the same."

http://capturedlightning.com/frames/shrinker.html
Some of the best trips I've had did not include a plan. Order a plain ticket, jump on the plane, arrive at the destination, and take it from there.
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I think he understands many things we'll only recognize much later, and one of these is that kids need clarity. (Not simplicity; people talk down to kids all the time.) And clarity is orthogonality, it's structure, it's everything we need in our funny little industry and nothing we have.

There are 20 people I admire in this field and the first seven are Alan Kay.
Testing: http://benhoyt.com/20bucks.php
why does Google want or need to own a piece of a biotech company?

have you seen GATTACA? a 23andMe scan will eventually be part of the recruiting process.
I think the argument is "Unlimited Data for the iPhone" - not for a laptop connected to it. If that is the case, I wish they would make it explicit.
Well, as they tell you: Girlfriends are expensive, wife even more so.

But seriously, why would one of their early investors divest themselves and invest in a competing company? something just doesn't seem right.
I really like the idea, what I don't like about other money management systems is that they connect with your bank account, but if you live outside the united states you can't use them.
Some people are on texting plans so they don't pay for SMS. Oh and thinking about this some more, a really good input method would be voice-to-text services such as jott. Frankly, I can't imagine you can go too wrong having a lot of variety in input methods. From looking at sites that have done this right (eg. toodledo - check out the input methods they support, their syntax has some similarities to yours), the secret seems to be to have a robust mature API into your system, and then people will be motivated to provide the gateways with their favourite applications even if you don't.

Feel free to ping me when you have more to test-drive, my e-mail address is in my profile.
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>> "That messy planning stage that delays things and prevents you from getting real is, in large part, a waste of time."

Does anyone else find "getting real" a horrible horrible term that sounds like old people trying to be hip, and completely failing? Or is it just me?
Is there a middle ground? So for example I would be a fan of young people who left school and stay on the dole for several years (say 2 years) being made to do some form of service (maybe not military). It would certainly give them a boost IMO.
I think it is very interesting that they did internal Hackathons to find a new direction for the company.

Wish I could just get together with a group of people and do hackathons until we hit on the right thing.
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Read Lateral Thinking. I saw it on his list and read it. Very good for teaching you how to think outside the box.
I second this opinion. Start attending meetups. That will widen your network and you surely have more awareness on what other events to follow. Eventually, you'll end up in a group of hackers and startup founders.
Thanks - so the title is misleading, because the size of the coin does not really change, nor is it being shrunk.
Interior Designers
A site that analyses flight price fluctuations would be awsome. Currently all the online travel sites work on the assumption that your days are fixed and gives you the prices around that date. A site that would tell me the cheapest time of the year to visit Paris from London would be a lot more useful.

Slightly tangential, how do you access flight price data? Is there a company providing the feeds? How much does it cost?
Ask HN: Starting a new business venture in new markets and industries
I'm looking to transition from web development to starting a new business venture, not necessarily within the tech industry.

I figured going into contracting and freelancing for web development would be a step towards owning a business, as I would be burdening the common business responsibilities of accounting, sales, customer acquisitions, branding, marketing, etc., while still being in a market and industry I am comfortable with.

Having recently read E-Myth, Illusions of Entrepreneurship, and The Business Road Test, I now have a different perspective on starting a business venture. I've noticed the main emphasis and primary factor for success is deciding which markets and industries to go into.

My question is, if this is true, where do I begin this process of doing research on markets and industries? Of course googling and possibly paying commercial services for data is one method, but as a first time entrepreneur attempting to go into new markets and industries, I find it very hard to really find concrete information, data, and whether or not it really is the right time and idea to go into a specific market and industry.

Are there certain markets and industries you would recommend? Right now financial concerns (living expenses, financial barrier to entry for a specific market/industry) are not a problem, but obviously going into a market with a lower barrier of cost would be less risk, especially for my experiences of creating a business.
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Who's Chris?
I like it very neat and simple.

One comment: please do expand the currencies you allow :) I liked the idea but wouldnt use it because Im in the UK

(and yes I know I could use $ and mean £ but it doesnt feel as slick :))
Germany gets Internet Censorship
We know officially have a secret DNS blacklist.

:(
or that she needs teaching a lesson for takign things she cant afford (an important life lesson she apparently needs :))
I think there are two pillars on which to base such a decision.

1) What domain knowledge do you have and what do you like to do?

2) What's changing in the world and in the markets.

I'm convinced that personal knowledge of what's lacking in a particular business domain is invaluable. If you have that knowledge you know what people want and that trumps everything else.

If you don't know anything outside technology itself you could read the paper and look which sectors are in turmoil. I think the best sectors are the ones that are most mature and the ones that are least mature and growing fast.

The reason why the most mature are interesting is that the competition is weak. The competition there are the slowest most bureaucratic behemoths you can imagine. Look at why Apple or Google (or Skype to some degree) could so easily topple the powers of the media and telecoms industries. These industries are very mature, very slow to react and very convinced of their old broken ways. Or look at what happened in the airline industry. That's what you want.

[Edit] Just one example that I have come across recently. I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in europe the postal services are broken. We used to have state monopolies that were slow and didn't innovate but package delivery worked.

Now, the sender often contracts private delivery companies like DHL and they optimise exclusively to the sender's benefit (that's their customer after all). I received a computer from Dell recently. I was told to wait at home from 9 AM to 6 PM. That's outrageous. If I missed the delivery they would try again on the next business day and if that didn't work the package would go back to the sender. They knock, wait for 30 seconds and then they're off. If you're in the bathroom, that's your fault. You cannot collect the package anywhere. That's a broken system that needs a new business model and new logistics ideas.
Government looks to increase web surveillance
Yes, but this also gives you more legal leverage in most cases.
Reading about this made me feel physically ill. I'm going on a trip to China next month. It seems I'm already there.
Vonnegut is light reading that leads to deep thinking.

Doesn't teach anything deep, but can put your mental gears in motion quite well.
IIRC they were Pope's nephews.
why does Google want or need to own a piece of a biotech company?

Honestly, I think this is part of their "index all the world's information" strategy, which is why it is coming out of corporate pockets rather than Brin's own bank account.

Human Genome data would be up there with health information that Google is already trying to gather with their Google Health product (https://www.google.com/health).

I would suggest there is at least some minor correlation between the two, even if it is distant.
Well, but you're not going to see a company saying, "We don't want to do X because if we do X we'll be responsible for the illegal stuff on our servers." – they're not going to admit there's illegal stuff on their servers.
With Apple's tools, they use a separate APN for tethering. This is like having another router (you can have another APN for MMS, for instance). All your iPhone traffic gets routed through your normal router, but the tethering traffic gets routed by your iPhone to the tethering APN.

AT&T can then see from their side how much data you've put through the normal APN and how much through the tethering APN, and charge you accordingly. This is also how some of the other iPhone carriers charge you per MB, or give you a monthly xGB limit.

The tethering hacks you see now just make the iPhone use the 'normal' APN for tethering traffic, which AT&T can't distinguish so easy. They might still be able to do it with deep packet analysis, but that probably costs a lot of money and might not be worth it.
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female photography has captured the interest and delight of the public for centuries and will definitely continue to do so with the emergence of new technology in the field of taking pictures.
Intel’s bullshit filter exposes disputed information on the Internet
How to fund your startup from customers
That's absolutely right. So you want to deter everyone according to the severity of the "crime", right? Why do you want to deter poor people more than rich people? The damage is the same. If you punish one person with life long poverty and the other with a small reduction of pocket money, you won't achieve what you want. I don't want wealthy people speeding just because they can afford it as their speeding is just as dangerous as everyone elses.

It comes down to the concept of cost that you are using. What is cost? Dollars? I don't think so. It's how much of your living time you have to spend in order to pay for something. That's what fines should be related to.
Sabre and Galileo are the companies I can think of off the top of my head. I don't remember the pricing.
However, except for the AppStore, are there any portals that are really that good on bringing in customers? Granted, I have checked Kongregate for a while, but by now I don't feel much like going to their site just to see if they have any new games.

I am much more likely to play another game if it comes up as a recommendation on HN or maybe Twitter or something.

There are also different kinds of games. Maybe the average crappy flash game is a hard sell (and I went to the PopCap site which was mentioned as the star of flash gaming in the article, and I still don't think those games are very good - though maybe calling them PopCrap would be a bit too harsh). But some multiplayer browser games might be in a completely different category, people might join because their friends join and so on.

Game can fulfill a need, too - which is also why many people get into games development, because none of the existing games satiate their needs. It is just that the need for yet another desktop tower defense or tetris clone might be on a sharp decline.
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But this is really just a debate between a guy who happens to sell business plans and a bunch of guys who happen to sell un-business-plans, soooo...

It's better than that, this is a debate between a guy who happens to sell the same business plan that 37Signals gives away:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1599181908/187-6998830-4936328?...
google H1b
And another point. I also want to deter companies from frivolous law suits. If big corp sues a small startup for patent infringement and that startup's existence is on the line, I want to be the suitor's existence to be on the line as well. Equals risks, that's what civil law suits require, otherwise it's a market and not justice.
The best site I have ever found for planning air travel is this: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego

I have been using them since before the web (seriously, you could telnet to their system on a vt100).

Unfortunately you can't actually buy a ticket from them! But it will spit out the gobbledygook that a travel agent can use to book exactly that fare, or once you have the specific flights you want to be on you can go through the pain of trying to get the flights on a commercial site.

Of the commercial sites, I prefer orbitz as the least sucky of the lot.
Tethering is free (and currently available, I tried it out) on Optus in Australia. I don't know the situation with the two other Aus iphone carriers.
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The pricing is completely unreasonable. I looked at it a while ago, don't remember the exact figures, but they are based on a very weird system of contracts that severely limits access to this market.
Don't put unreasonable restrictions on usernames.
I believe farecast did something like this. They were bought by Microsoft.
However, except for the AppStore, are there any portals that are really that good on bringing in customers?

In aggregate, yes. The major casual gaming portals can sell millions of units of the games they feature most aggressively. If you're familiar with Mystery Case Files at BigFish, that series has sold 2.5 million units last time I checked.

However, it is a zipf distribution. (Popularly known as the "long tail" these days, and you really don't want to be paying 60% to be the tail.)
On Scaffoldings (in programming)
I'm not even reading a post that starts with "37Signals, a great Web app for project management". That just shows that the guy doesn't even know what is he talking about.
Iranian elections and aftermath: Twitter’s best coverage
Definitely. However, I don't see how financially destroying someone's life such that they might never recover from it is in any way a reasonable way to deal with a one-off copyright infringement on 2 dozen songs. My understanding is that she wasn't selling them or passing them off as her own.
I think he doesn't have visa issues
Is it possible that someone could write a summary? I personally loathe watching long videos, and the slides don't reveal much.
I happen to live in Romania, which (still) has lower income. I'm also freelancing right now and not very hard, so my income this year is lower still.

So I could pretty much go up to your driveway, take your car, and if caught pay back $500 or less. Because of course this is what I can afford to pay.

No, there is a much simpler way. She should pay to the order of magnitude of the loss she caused RIAA. A bit more actually, for deterrence. Which could be something like $1 for each song downloaded and $1 for an estimate of each song uploaded from her computer. This is not the real damage, because of course not every song downloaded would have been bought, but as an order of magnitude it's pretty much ok. You don't need to go counting incomes to make it right.
> That would be a pretty good argument except for this woman's particular circumstances.

Should her circumstances also be taken into account if she robs a bank?

Justice is personified as being blind for a reason. You break the law, you pay the price. There's no: you broke the law, but factor X and Y should increase our leniency. That's a recipe for chaos I'm afraid.
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Or blame the populace that lets bullshit like that happen?

(I might go to hell for suggesting this but... what the hell)
Well said.

And if you're going down the "justice not blind" route, why even stop at income? "Your honour, I may have just killed a man but let me assure you that my high school years were very traumatic. I was bullied and got bad grades."
Mobile network operators are notorious for being conservative and extremely difficult to work with. If your business depends on their cooperation, you need all the help you can get. It might not help in every case, but in that example I strongly suspect that they'd be having a hard time to get the carriers to even listen to them without VC backing, never mind doing a deal.
Thanks for that. I checked them on bing, the UI does not do their product justice. It look like yet another cluttered travel web site.

Another thought, how hard is it for a travel website that I use frequently to infer that I am from London. I booked lots of fligts in and out from this city. Why not make it my default location after while? Cookies and data mining anyone?
> Investing in Interactivity is a great solution to survive.

How do they make money from it? It's definitely cool, but I certainly didn't click any ads there. And making that stuff costs money.
Video of nascent uk hackspace based in london
Ask HN: Snack like RSS feed ticker?
So I've come to love and rely a lot on Snackr (http://snackr.net/). It allows me to keep track of my favorite feeds in a fairly unobtrusive manner very conveniently.

However the app is not perfect and _was_ in development until sometime ago when the developer seems to have just stopped developing.

So do you folks have any suggestion on any similar app? Any hackers developing an app similar to Snackr? I would love to try out your app.

My main gripes about Snackr:

1. It consumes far too much memory
2. [Important] It tends to utilise far too much of CPU bogging down the system sometimes.

There are smaller issues but nothing that I can't live without
Ever Downloaded a Copyrighted Song? You Owe Infinity Dollars
There's another issue that folks rarely talk about (or maybe even understand): Game development is a "fun job". Fun jobs have tremendously more people doing them than the market will profitably support.

Like being an actor or a musician or an artist is the fantasy of coffee shop employees the world over, making games is the job a lot of nerds want to be doing. In fact, so many people want to be doing it so badly that they'll do it even if they don't get paid (much) for doing it. Thus, you don't find a lot of people getting rich doing community theater or playing in a garage band, but you do find thousands of people doing it, anyway. Fun jobs only pay the bills for a small number of the most successful practitioners of the craft...and often they are so successful by virtue of skills other than the craft itself.

On the other hand, building your bingo card software would not be a "fun job" for the majority of software developers. Building enterprise software is not a "fun job" for most software developers. Building systems management software is not a "fun job". At least, not for enough people that there are thousands of new products entering the market every month competing for the attention of the available buyers.

Add this to all the other issues you've mentioned, and it adds up to games being a lot like hopping on the bus for Hollywood. You're probably not going to be a star, and the industry will still have a hundred more just like you to chew up tomorrow. Of course, most of us aren't exactly destitute. If any of the folks here make a game and it fails (I've started building a brain games company in my spare time, so I've voluntarily entered this market, knowing enough to know that the odds of it being profitable are astronomically against; so I'm one of those folks), we'll still be working on other stuff and making a good living doing jobs that are not "fun", by most folks definition. I only spend a couple hours a week on my games-related stuff, and 10-12 hours per day on my real company.
Google and Facebook release Farsi translation tools
From Taking on CSS3 to New Government Regulation