skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some random ideas off the top of my head:

Pulling Power (personally I think that has potential, tagline: power up your pulling prowess :D)

Seduction (maybe a bit to risque sounding)

Pickup Bible (too religious? but would track well on searches for "pickup lines")

Mr. Magnetic (as in magnetic for the ladies :D, maybe not)

Entrapment (this one might have legs too)

Captivate Her (maybe drop the her?)

Datemaker (probably not suitable for this kind of app)

The Opener (in PUA circles the opener is a line/routine that opens a conversation)

useful?
Shouldn't the authority figure giving the indirect order to volunteer be truthful and inform his subordinates that it isn't an option and that not participating in the "volunteer" activity will have consequences and name those consequences to the subordinates? Indirect mandatory volunteerism is in itself lying. Fight fire with fire.
That's ridiculous. These are reports from users. True, they are purely anecdotal, but that doesn't mean it's some conspiracy perpetrated by a competitor.

Think logically about this. Apple is not infallible. They can and do make mistakes. Glitches are very common in new gadgets and overheating is always a problem when you're dealing with components that generate heat. It's only made more difficult when you're dealing with a small, enclosed device with components tightly packed together. This is a plausible and very familiar story. Could it be possible that some people are having real problems with overheating?

If the new iPhones are, in fact, overheating Apple should be called out and given an opportunity to respond. Automatically assuming that any criticism of Apple is a ruse designed to discredit them is not only foolish but counter-productive. How are they supposed to get better if their own supporters are willing to overlook and excuse their mistakes?
This looks to me like an area that could benefit from some automated infrastructure.
RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Google to name a few. Not to mention News.com.au who will make money from running the actual story.

Still, even the three I mentioned won't really benefit too much as there still is no clear #2 competitor for the iPhone.

One of the 'reports' was someone who buried their iPhone under a pillow and took a nap. I don't know about you but a music device, under a hot pillow with a hot head on top for a couple hours smells like a recipe for a hot ... anything.
(author here)

danielh was pretty much spot-on... The lyrics are stored with a time offset and indentation level (sort of like a player-piano roll) and the list of tweets is updated periodically by the server.

On the browser side, I'm using jQuery and the YouTube chromeless player (http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html)

When the page is loaded, I take the lyrics information and generate a sparse array where each index represents a tenth of a second. Then I start an interval timer that runs an update function once every 100 milliseconds. That updater gets the current video time from the YouTube player, converts that time value from milliseconds to deciseconds, grabs all entries from the sparse array between its last run and the current time, and inserts them onto the page (with a 200 ms fadeIn animation).

To be perfectly honest, there really isn't much code involved at all. Most of the development time was spent figuring out the time offset of each word. There was no fancy technology used there... it was just a brute force effort (though perhaps the Mechanical Turk could have been of use?)

I haven't had any coffee yet this morning so please let me know if my explanation was incoherent or if you'd like more info.
I was under the impression that the "degraded civilian" properties of GPS have been disabled for some years now.
Yaar: The Pirate Bay fires its Video Bay cannon at YouTube
The Death of Macho
What does this article add that we did not already know?
"Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent"

Hmm, make something people want. I heard that somewhere else too.
Someone on the somethingawful forums OCR'd it. Easier to read: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=315...

Someone from Goldman Sachs responded: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/26/goldman-sac...
Many people in this community think Atwood is a retard because he writes about stuff he's not an expert in, and because he uses Microsoft products. I venture to guess that many people here think he's not of the caliber of programmer that YC invests in. He has clearly proven them wrong.
Social Origins of Good Ideas
Your claim only makes sense if everyone else involved sat around idly during the time that they would have been working on the project he 'packaged.' I seriously doubt that would be the case.

Obviously the project Seth proposed provided some marginal benefit over their normal work - and he is entitled to the lion share of that marginal profit he generates. I just don't buy that marginal profit he generates comes close to approaching the total revenue of the package.

It's the exact same as me claiming the content producer is entitled to the lion's share of all revenue - since without him there would be none. If people weren't working on this content producer's project, they would be working on something else with someone else.
No. This is very fundamental. Either you value truth or not.

The whole assumption in this article is that the boss is powerful and the employee is weak. I can think of no better way to demonstrate your weakness than by being scared to be truthful.

It's possible to be creative and tactful without lying, but ultimately, you either give up the day, b/c you value your job more than proving a point, but don't lie and compromise yourself in order to have your cake and eat it too. Then you're no better than a scammer who values money above all else.
Not remotely, but they're pretty scummy, like the investment banking industry as a whole. What makes them worse than most others is their connection to politics, which allows them to get all kinds of favors.

If you want to develop a boiling hatred of the investment banking industry, look into how these firms handle IPOs. If the banks were behaving ethically, IPOs would be priced at the company's fair value, meaning that having an allocation in the IPO would have zero expectation. In practice, IPOs are known to be 10-15% underpriced, meaning that the IPOing firm raises less money than it should, while the bank has a positive-expectation allocation it can use to pay favors to clients. Moreover, it's a bad idea for an average Joe to participate in IPOs at all; if you're a nobody, banks will let you in on losing IPOs but never allocate you into the good ones.

Another sad truth is that the "nice" (in relative terms) investment banks were Lehman and Bear, both of which died. Lehman especially was known for having less of a BSD (not the OS) culture than the other banks. It was also obvious even in late 2007 that these banks would be the first to fail (if nothing else, because they were less prestigious and would be hit first by panic-driven activities) while Goldman had enough of a lifeline to benefit from the inevitable "stop the bleeding" measures for which other banks would be too late.
I thought the implementation looked very nice, although I hadn't played by those rules before. Well done.
If the New York Times had a policy of never publicizing kidnappings, I could respect their policy.

However, it appears that they are entirely hypocritial on this topic: I've read TONS of articles in the NYT about people being kidnapped.

I guess that the alleged danger to the captive is only a motivating force when the captive is one of their own. When it's a mere aid worker, or military contractor, or something, then the calculus changes.

Color me disgusted.
iWingman
Ok, more info from my friend: the device is very hot, the radio transimtter appears to be always on (if you bring the iPhone near to an FM radio you'll 'hear' the sound of the phone transmitting forever, even in standby). He can call but can't receive calls, sms, ...
Very odd. I've an iPhone 3G and I didn't noticed any of this problems even after the 3.0 update indeed.
>These are reports from users<

Users, like blog authors, may or may not be independent. They can have agendas of their own or be hired/paid to say certain things.

Also, I sure hope it is not true (or at least not an inherent issue in the design). I have a 3GS on my birthday list and am really excited to upgrade from my iPhone EDGE.
The story of Mel (1983)
Ask HN: Review our startup - Classlet.com
Brandon (HN @snprbob86) and I met at Google two years ago. We became fast friends and decided to do a startup. Luckily, we attended the same university, so we spent a few short weeks hacking up a prototype.

We interviewed for YC summer 2008, where we presented a similar vision of Classlet.com, but with a very different plan of attack. We were not accepted, but pg and team encouraged us to keep at it. Their expert opinion? "[Ultimately] what put us off was the difficulty in selling it to universities. This is one of those cases where existing solutions suck for a reason."

At the time, we both had well-paying fulltime job offers on our desks and graduation was fast approaching. We accepted them so we could bootstrap, but it also forced us to move to opposite coasts. Life got real busy real quick, but we kept working at it.

In October, I went to Brandon with an idea for a simpler approach with the explicit goal to initially sell to teachers directly. Long distance collaboration significantly slowed things down, but one Sunday at a time we built Classlet Assignments.

I'm now planning on moving to Seattle near Brandon to make bootstrapping easier and we are going to apply to YC again this fall. Whatever happens, we'll keep at it, but would appreciate any feedback you guys have.

Thanks.
its probably gets 110mpg based on the % of fuel that is gasoline. ie the fuel is 99% ethanol and 1% gas so the car runs a regular 20mpg but because only 1% of that fuel is gas it gets a magical 2000mpg (20/1%). Their probably doing something shifty like counting the ethanol as free energy and therefore not including the ethanol burned in their MPG calcs...
> Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Mr. Wales and asked for his help. Knowing that his own actions on Wikipedia draw attention, Mr. Wales turned to an administrator

Sounds like Jimbo broke both the "sock puppet rule" AND the "three revert rule".
Thereby breaking the current behavior of the spacebar, which is to scroll one window-height? No, thank you, I use that all over the place.
Engineering Student Builds Real Transforming Robot Car
One of the weirder things I saw in Germany (and I'm not using this to refute your argument, just an aside) was the apprentice carpenters going around asking for handouts.

There's an article here about them:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,416564,00.html

I found it to be just plain weird.
Visual history of the Firefox UI
Thanks for checking it out. Yeah, mancala is a genre of games. This is actually kalah, but most americans know this version as "mancala." If the site catches on I plan on adding Oware...which is my guess of the version that you are used to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah
Maybe because it is not applicable on a large scale? Not sure if it could become feasible to grow the bone marrow outside of humans, but I guess it is not feasible yet.
It can't help that the only time I've heard of this so far is from this publication... Which appears to be a small-time local publication.

It's not even on their front page.

[Edit: When I posted this comment, the link to this submission was the Gulf Bay Area news or something like that.. It was a small gulf-state publication; NOT the BBC. I'd delete my comment since the title and the link have substantially changed, but there are replies, so I won't.]
the easiest way to solve them is to start a new country.
5 reasons oscommerce is a nightmare
Coffee is grandfathered in, like aspirin. Aspirin probably wouldn't pass FDA screening today, because of the stomach problems it causes so many people.
Basic guide to starting an EC2 instance. Missing some details from the official "getting started" guide (but I guess that's the point).

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2008-12-01/GettingS...
What if your 1950 was less expressive and more cryptic to understand, and the 8800 was very verbose and easy for a newbie to pick up?

So you can't measure less LOC means it's better, it really depends on the quality of the code from a maintainability standpoint not just the size of code.
Report: Sony considers adding phone to PSP
Yes, but I believe they still reserve the right to restore them whenever they choose.
Clickable: http://www.classlet.com/

Also, maybe you should include a description of what Classlet actually is (in addition to the history of it).
I was waiting to see someone say that.
Simple and easy to understand. I like your website. I would agree with YC's expert opinion, in that your biggest problem is attacking a market where the dominant player is fairly entrenched. They do suck though, and maybe this is your greatest opportunity. Good luck!
Already a top story on the main HN page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678849
That's the way the world works.
GPS is used for all these things. It's even used for automated landing systems: http://www.freeflightsystems.com/gps_landing.htm
I think the word in the US is "trade", as in learning a trade.
Your comment deserves to be a direct reply to the orignal posting. The current comments are tipping the scales in favor of Alan either by directly supporting overweight processes/solutions, or by demeaning the total comparative contribution of Charles (which has the same effect).

For people who just cannot make the jump and understand what the author was saying, re-read the article, and instead of Charles playing Space Invaders, have him reading Hacker News instead. I think you'll see it takes on a whole new meaning for you.
can you tell us more about your startup idea? You explained a lot about how you got started but i'm not sure if you really pinpointed what your idea is.
One of the main problems behind getting the universities to switch is because of how heavily invested they are in a product. For example, I go to Penn State and they have a whole team around supporting our system (Angel). Penn State even modifies the code base to support our school specifically so they would never switch over after all the time/money invested. But good luck, I never even go on Angel anymore because I hate it so much.
How to Land That Startup Dream Job
Subscribers pay much less than the newsstand price, and you can haggle down from the advertised subscription price as well, so I think your estimates are way off.

The factoid I remember, although I can't cite a source offhand, is that the cost of printing and delivering a daily newspaper is just about equal to the cost that the consumer pays, and the rest of the newspaper's income is coming from advertising.

If ebook readers were more widely used then it might be practical to run a newspaper by selling an online-only edition (perhaps making everything free on the Web after a 48-hour delay), but I'm not sure we're there yet. Also, I suspect that the first publisher to offer news in this way will be some upstart who is not encumbered by the sunk costs and contractual obligations surrounding a paper-and-ink newspaper.
One of the reasons why highways and thruways are relatively safe is because of an enforced social contract (e.g. if you speed, you may get ticketed and if you drive erratically, you may put your life and other people's lives in danger)

With software, there is no such powerful peer contract. Software is not yet as good at self-healing (e.g. braking suddenly) if something unexpected happens. How do you handle a system exception safely and robustly at 65mph?

Automated cars are a pipe dream. Automated auto-pilot for cars on highways (e.g. automated platoons of cars moving in lock-step until they reach their exit) a.k.a Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will be persistently hobbled in adoption because failure of the interface between humans and machines is dangerous at highway speeds. Recent ITS research has focused on trying to academically prove MITM attacks cannot work for certain ITS systems. Also, most people like freedom to drive whenever, whereever they want.
No the super douche parent move would be to simply buy your little brat kid another phone and forget about the old one.
Keep living your life with your head in the clouds and I'll keep living mine in reality.
Steve Blank: Agile Opportunism - Entrepreneurial DNA
Wow! Lots of people here don't identify with Charles.

Let's change the story a little and see if the response is any different...

"Back at Consolidated, Charles spent some time thinking about the problem. His fellow employees noticed that Charles often sat with his feet on the desk, drinking coffee. He was occasionally seen at his computer terminal, but his office mate could tell from the lack of typing (and his always-interesting commentary at lunch) that he was likely reading Hacker News."
The New England Journal of Medicine is not a small-time local publication. And this is exactly what the article is about - it should be BIG news.

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue7/index.dtl
Good point. Wasn't sure if it was better to see if we designed the site well enough that people could figure it out without us telling them.

Classlet makes handling assignments easier for teachers and students. We've got a whole bunch of features that most of the competitors don't have:

1. Students never need to register, only the teacher does
2. Students never even need to visit the site, they can do everything through email
3. Anything that can be passive, is. In most other systems, you constantly need to check if you've gotten a grade or if an assignment has been posted. We don't make you check, instead we let you know by email (and working on other channels too)
4. The teacher can do all of the grading within the web browser. They don't need to download a hundred individual doc files and open each one in word. Instead, they do it all from one page.
5. We keep a timeline for each student for each assignment. You can see any submissions they've made, if they submitted late, if they submitted an older version, then a newer version (teach has access to all versions), we mark if it was submitted late, etc...
6. And we try to make it easy to facilitate a discussion between the teacher and student.

Those are 6 of quick things off of the top of my head that set us apart from the competition.

Thanks for the feedback.
Does my reply to icey help?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018

Thanks!
Are we really this desperate for news fodder? With all that's going on in technology is this the best use of the BBC's time and resources? Because the kid seems pretty intelligent and while reading I kept thinking "If you're going to have this kid write an article aren't there topics that would be more interesting for him to write about? Like how he thinks the future of technology will turn out or what's the most significant technology he uses on a daily basis?"

Instead we get insights like this (which the BBC actually chooses to highlight)

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

Wow. If I'm ever stuck on a desert island with only a walkman and am jonesing for shuffled music I'll now know what to do.
That depends on who "we" are, I suppose. I hadn't heard of Gentry's work with the "ideal lattice" before, and a quick search of Hacker News showed no prior discussion.

Is this old news?
Semantic HTML5 elements are necessary for accessibility and machine-parsing of your content, which increases findability.

What this means pragmatically:

Screen readers will be able to more intelligently interact with a website. Navigation, for example, could only be read out loud when the user requests it instead of every time a page loads.

Search engines, when parsing your page, will be able to more easily get a general idea of what the page is about. Right now we can only tell headers, paragraphs, and lists; with HTML5 parsers will be able to not only determine the former, but also which content is more important.

The more semantic the markup, the more a machine-parser can figure out about the meaning behind a page.

It's the same argument as a mass of divs and spans (or tables!) versus h1s, paragraphs, and dls.

Ultimately, not only does it add context to your content, but it makes it easier and more concise to produce the markup: you don't need <div class="aside"></div> anymore - you just need <aside></aside>.
Use your own photos to print and send physical postcards
Hi guys,
I'd like to introduce you Postino, a new Facebook-based app that lets you create and send (worldwide) physical postcards made with your custom photos (uploaded from the PC or from the Facebook albums) and message. The photo can be cropped, zoomed and positioned inside an optional frame (themes include some seasons, Christam, Ester, kids party, new born, love and more). The app is very straightforward and fast to use (everyting is done via AJAX, so no page reloads and post-backs). You can read more about it at http://www.angurialab.com/apps/postinoweb/<p>There is also an iPhone version (with additional features, such as the ability to send e-cards in addition to phyical cards, draw a signature with your finger on the touchscreen, and include your GPS position with a link to Google Maps) available on the App Store: http://www.angurialab.com/apps/postino/. The cool thing is that you can buy some stamps from either the Facebook or the iPhone version, and then share the stamps between the two apps...so that you use the iPhone while on the go, and Facebook once at home. A Windows Mobile edition is currently being finished and will be released for free.<p>We're launching the Facebook app just now, so if you have a blog and want to write a review about it , it would be very welcome. We would of course be glad to offer some free stamps so that you can fully test it out. In that case contact use at http://www.angurialab.com/contact.aspx
Techcrunch has 13 year olds writing stories for them
Sacrifice your health for your startup
I was busy upmodding ivankirigin's comment when I realized I'm still 28, and have been on Twitter for over a year.
You're trivializing equity sharing.
He should have taken a cue from Abbie Hoffman and titled it "Download This Book". :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657859
iChatHerUp

YHelloThere

IceBreaker

QuickRomance
If I understand the story correctly, it says that 1 patient stopped having AIDS who was being given adult stem cells as treatment.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that AIDS has been cured. Based on researching this story, it is not clear that anyone else has been cured by this treatment.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS#Selective_availability):

On 19 September 2007, the United States Department of Defense announced that future GPS III satellites will not be capable of implementing SA,[59] eventually making the policy permanent.[60]
I doubt the BBC poured all its resources into producing this article. You're being a bit dramatic. Plus, I think it's just as important to remember and reflect upon technologies of past ages as it is to speculate about future technologies. Kids today should be aware of these things as it should give them much more respect for what we have, seeing how far we've come. I found the article interesting.
Thanks for the link. I'm not able to read it without a subscription.

Is the relevant article titled:
"Not an HIV Cure, but Encouraging New Directions"?