skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You linked me to a source control repository instead of a product page.

Have you never downloaded apps from SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub, etc? It's really not that unusual or difficult.

There's a download button, but it seems to want to give me source code.

No, the download button gives you PNGSquash.tar.gz, which contains PNGSquash.app, the application, not source code. Since you are opening it on an operating system other than OS X, it opens like a directory when double clicked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APP_(file_format)

reading comments here, it seems that the source is actually only compilable on a Mac.

Yes, it is a Mac app - at the top of the page it says "Description: A PNG compressor app for OS X." And no, it does not require compiling if you download the binary (the huge "Download" link next to the logo).

In short, you have not produced an App.

Yes he has. Witness all of the comments from folks who have used it.

Even if I wanted to use your product, and had the right system to use it on, I couldn't.

You could learn to do it in a few seconds: http://guides.macrumors.com/Installing_Applications_in_Mac_O...

That site will need to describe what it does (which, incidentally, your github description fails to do)

Again, at the very top of the page: "Description: A PNG compressor app for OS X."

provide me with a prominent Download button that links to an installer or at least an executable.

That is already the case.
Actually, Microsoft uses Hadoop. But that's only because it recently purchased the semantic search startup Powerset. Not only is open-source slow to reach the Microsoft back-end, but so is, well, the cloud.

Actually, Microsoft's Dryad project is significantly more sophisticated than Hadoop. Using Hadoop is not exactly a compelling example of how technically sophisticated your organization is or how much you utilize "the cloud", anyway.
Howard Hughes And The Atomic Bomb
Colonise Mars?

Coming from a man who's been in space, that is a stupid claim to do without first colonizing the moon and learning in the process.

Walk, run, fly.
Reinventing Interaction
If you haven't already, you should check out the labs stuff - http://www.seomoz.org/labs - which do things no other tools (that I'm aware of at least) can do :-)

And yeah, I know I'm biased, but I'm also very excited to have an article of mine posted to one of my favorite sites.
Self-Service Nation: Why Targeting Small Business Is Good Business
If you scroll down there's an executable download, description and screenshots. Kind of counter-intuitive I know (although there is at least one other app doing it http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash), but there isn't really any other way to do it on github. It is Mac-only but I don't think that disqualifies it from being an app.

I have registered a domain name (http://pngsquash.com), but it currently just redirects to the github page because I thought that was adequate.
Nonsense! Go and read some Robert Zubrin.
The heading/article should rather be:

Intel’s Everywhere. How Did That Happen? (nytimes.com)

And it suddenly becomes obvious: you need a case for the chips, preferably with the least margin possible for .tw - Quoting Otellini is not an accident. Those who had the doublethought of going ARM/MIPS are suffering hard.
Can you recommend a good video streaming service provider?
To be honest I don't think google is being entirely fair here.

Google provides me with a service. In that respect I don't care how that service is provided and on what technology that is based. It could be a giga-cluster of retrofitted Commodore 64s thrown out in orbit to save on real estate costs, kept in place by a reinforced fiber back down to Google HQ. As long as the service works, I wouldn't care less.

This gives google complete freedom in their implementation, so they pretty much built up their own infrastructure from scratch, for a very specific purpose.

Microsoft on the other side delivers software, general purpose platforms which you can deploy and build your own solutions on. Granted, they got the whole internet thing a little late, but I can't blame them for trying to exploit the technology they already posses instead of ditching it all and starting from scratch.

With Microsoft's solutions, I know I can make them do whatever I want, on pretty much any x86 hardware, and I know it will work. "Google OS", for a lack of better name, I doubt would be particularly useful for the general public.

I don't think it's surprising for a platform tailored for one specific goal to perform better than general purpose platforms in that specific area, but that hardly means that the other platform is worthless.
Is everyone a "hacker" now?
Ask HN: why is Google's StreetView is so awful in US, and so awesome in Europe?
I couldn't answer this question myself by googling it.
Just compare:

Why does NYC need to look like this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=bh+photo+video&ie=UTF8&sll=40.706010,-74.001274&sspn=0.096553,0.011645&ei=oaBHSs68GZPMMbnJ6bEJ&sig2=pRDX296Zs7VzKAr2SCYaDw&cd=1&cid=40752898,-73996373,7885407876687864647&li=lmd

... Compare that to London:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=London,+UK&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.60973,83.583984&ie=UTF8&ll=51.496454,-0.142479&spn=0.007721,0.040812&z=15&layer=c&cbll=51.496467,-0.142476&panoid=Qb4nLCuQrwtkMWTjdt6MzA&cbp=12,44.86,,0,9.35
From what I hear, it seems like reprieving the shuttle isn't really an option. It's so out of date and unsafe that NASA isn't willing to use it anymore.

Sure there are problems with Ares, but isn't that what engineers are for?
Hack yes.
Hashtags (#brand, #name, #topic, etc.) have become the de facto means of doing this. I'm not sure what a tool could do to make that more effective.

I think the magic of Twitter has partly been its ability to be anything people want it to be. Just like Zombo.com.
110 miles / gallon = 2.14 liters / 100 km
is it me or are celebrities dropping like flies this week?
I'd hazard a guess that the title here is making fun of the claims elsewhere on HN that Michael Jackson was a "hacker" in his own way.

(I'm not sure which would lead me to a lower opinion of the submitter's taste: if he actually thought that "infomercial hacker" is a good way to describe someone who made infomercials, or if he thought pretending to think so was the best way to criticize the idea of calling Michael Jackson a hacker.)
First MJ, now Billy Mays :(

At least he had a good sense of humor about his job; there's a funny video he did with a radio morning show where he orders food at the drive-thru:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtYdDK1uTDI
Try using the http://smush.it/ web app.
District Department of Transportation - Fenty launches bus app.
Perhaps Google deployed StreetView state-side first, and then they refined their technology for Europe. Just pure speculation, though.
well marketing is related, and you gotta admit the dude could sell anything
1.1billion citizens will go into second largest citizens' database (India)
Why not link to the original content:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/27/ps3-owners-get-boxeed-hul...
I understood the article to be focusing on Microsoft vs. Google in terms of their approach to the same set of challenges in the web sphere. ("Google has questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure")

In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains (versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).
thats an unrealistic assumption, if it does happen, it'll be gradual, and he can easily switch from aggregating nytimes to some other web news source
In my opinion what the newspaper websites really don't like is not linking, but quoting.

Quoting some idea from another source with attribution is a very common thing. But this practice has specific implications when applied to reported news. I saw the following practice on blogs like Huffington Post or news aggregators: they take headline and one or two paragraphs from a news article, provide a link to it, and optionally add their own content to it. Technically it is quoting with attribution, which is perfectly legal.

But as we know, the news articles are usually written in a dense form, and to produce just the headline and one paragraph is sometimes very expensive, for example when a real reporter had to go there and gather the facts.

And then, some blogger or aggregator just take it and gives back just a link - and the news websites doesn't feel that is an adequate compensation for the work needed to produce that headline and paragraph.

And, more often than not, the aggregator or blogger earned enough money to survive (since what he did is not that expensive), while the news outlet who did the reporting didn't earn enough to operate.

But of course, on the other side, it's not a fault of the blogger or aggregator that they didn't earned enough, and that's where the newspapers get it wrong. I just wanted to provide the perspective from the "other side".
Is it simple, clean, and provide a lot of whitespace? Is it based on only a few solid colors and provide an intuitive and quick method for completing its task? If so, I like it.

I really buy into the whole design-for-your-product idea. I also really appreciate clean lines and a lot of whitespace. Good contrast, like tasteful transparency, can do a lot to make your site look professional as well. Most importantly, though, your site has to be useable. If you have a 4 MB background image and use MySQL with all the defaults, I don't care what your site looks like, its gonna be too slow for me to use.
Entrepreneur and master pitchman Billy Mays dead at 50
you're joking, right? Charles did analysis too, but up-front, and apparently better than Alan.
Does the App Store violate net neutrality?
And getting promoted or transferred before the project is killed.
Physicist Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the tracks.
A car that does 377 mpg: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/351903_needle20.html

But that means: hardly any chassis, no gearbox, aircraft tires, the engine is wrapped in asbestos, driving a constant 30 mph, etc., etc.

This car is in the Guiness book of records.

Edit: BTW, I'm not claiming that means the car in this article is also plausible: if it claims to yield a constant 55 hp, then it can't do 110 mpg.
someone had to write it down. brilliant. perfect question to ask is if you can't build the tribe, then what?
This is absurd. If a website wants to block linking it's easy: just use http_referer and/or dynamic urls.

Nobody does that because it's horrible business practice and a easy way to isolate yourself from the rest of the web. Regardless, we certainly don't need the government to enforce a behavior that individuals could easily adopt on their own.
Exactly. I bet Hulu would love to be on the TV, it's the content owners who don't.
I have a question: How do you link to their articles? Do you write your own anchor text, or do you just take those from the website?

If you take their headline (or even portion of their article), they might feel that you do not give enough compensation back to them. Producing a headline is also a work, and good headline carry some actual content. So you just take that content and don't pay for it. You just provide a link, which cost you almost nothing.

This was just to describe how they might think about you.
I think what they need to do is make an instant on/off engine mated to an instant on/off transmission.

Right now, even when you are going down hill, the car slows down because of transmission friction, and you end up hitting the accelerator to maintain your speed.

If it's instant on/off, they can afford to let the car go in neutral when the driver isn't accelerating, so you won't use up fuel fighting the transmission. Same goes for instant on/off engine. If it can be turned on instantly, there is no reason to keep the engine running when you are just rolling along
It was a better story than the OP.
The designs they are talking about are nice - as magazine covers
It sounds like the author works on Unangband full-time. I can't help wondering how he can afford that with a free niche product.
I think that enterprise teams typically follow strict syntactic coding standards and then check off the "maintainable" and "readable" requirement from that alone. Additionally, they generate mountains of bloated Word and PowerPoint documents and then consider that responsibility fulfilled. They end up with an incredibly expensive, over-engineered mega-application that exacerbates rather than solves the intended problem. Don't think that this doesn't happen.

There are only so many things that you can force upon a team of programmers, and overall quality and cohesiveness aren't among them.
A video site from the Pirate Bay guys using HTML5  and Ogg Theora/Vorbis
I'm aware of this, but this is the exact sort of caveat that he failed to mention in his lecture, despite promising his audience that he would tell them exactly his understanding of the situation.
It certainly would, good point, that's yet another issue with his metaphor.
That is what I thought might be the case as well, but if you watch the lecture, you'll see that he takes the time to insist that he's not giving his audience a watered-down explanation to "help" them understand.
TMZ: How a News Site Gets International Traction from Local Intimacy
Well this is how I watched hulu, I guess that is over now though and they've probably lost quite a few customers.

Maybe youtube shows will take over at some point and we wont have to worry as much.
A bit more reputable source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obit_billy_mays
"It sounds like the author works on Unangband full-time. "

From the page linked to,(emphasis mine)

"I'm a IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. I've just emigrated to Sydney, Australia with my wife, and spend my free time at the moment developing Unangband and blogging. I also write as the Amateur for GameSetWatch."

I guess this could be interpreted to mean he is not working and all his time is "free time" but it doesn't sound very likely. It sounds like he has a fulltime job and is working on unangband parttime.
Two questions:

1) why isn't the URL linking to the article on Popular Mechanics? (which is a lot better than this article)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4322647.ht...

2) would someone care to explain what the point in colonising Mars is? Unmanned exploration of Mars would be a whole lot cheaper because robots don't need life-support systems. Moreover, losing a couple of robots is more acceptable than losing a couple of human astronauts. Sure, we could colonise Mars, but at what cost, and what for? In case Aldrin hasn't noticed, the USA is not in the same financial situation as in 1960.
A lot of it seems to be tricky math. It's not MPG, it's MPGe, the 'e' is for 'equivalent'. However, marketing guys have been playing those games forever, so no surprises there.

They're claiming E85 has 1/3rd less energy than gas, so they're actually getting 110*0.66 = 72.5 mpg of E85.

72.5 mpg is not as good for marketing hype, but it's still impressive.

He seems to be playing some games with the acceleration profile as well. If you 'gun it', you're in 'power mode', not 'efficiency mode', so the mpg numbers no longer apply. I'm not certain if this is common practice or not in these kinds of tests. It probably is.

I think he is mainly just taking control of the throttle away from the driver, and doing a "throttle by wire' system, giving you the most efficient (and probably painfully unresponsive) acceleration profile possible, when you're in 'efficiency mode'. I'm not sure if that buys him the whole 72.5mpg or not, but it's in his toolbox. <EDIT: Actually I can imagine such a system that wouldn't be too bad. When the user makes relatively small acceleration addition requests with the throttle pedal, you use your efficiency optimized acceleration profile to give it to him. When the user "stomps on it", because a truck is about to hit him, then you give him the requested throttle amount. I can imagine such a system would yield efficiency gains without being too painful to drive.</EDIT>

Whether there's something else in the engine that gives you the rest of the efficiency gains, or if that's all of it, remains to be seen.

Of course, we don't know if any of this is real, but if it is, it's a cross between "real" and "marketing real".
...then question some of the 'miracle technologies' used in Zubrin's infrastructure.

Yes, if we had Single Stage to Orbit fully reusable rockets and if all issues involved in living on another world were understood, Zubrin's plan(s) would be a shoo-in. However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!

Learn to walk before you try to run. Let's work on sustained outposts on a world no more than three days' travel away first.
Lost me on "Sign Up for preview".
I want preview for free, make a screencast or at least screenshots.
Yes I have the same thing! It's so easy to connect and the Mini fits nicely within my entertainment cabinet. Also I enjoy the full Internet from my couch; youtube, hulu, cbsnews, hacker news, etc, etc...

I guess ppl think this type of set up is not intuitive as they need a wireless mouse or think they won't be able to read the text from 10' away. I use a wireless handheld mouse (gyration) and firefox mouse gestures add on to motion down to enlarge text when needed; few clicks and text is large enough to read.

Well this is the solution I've used for years and I prefer it over any boxee or whatever. Those don't give u the full Internet.
-social proof your service, so it looks like you already have a tribe (reddit)

-make something so useful that a tribal following is inevitable (duckduckgo)

-make a viral app that caters to human vices (hotornot)
Initially I thought: "ehmmm, thanks Captain Obvious?", but I guess there is a point in your life (or at least in the life of nailer and me) where this isn't as obvious.

Now learning can be both gradual and sudden and although I learned this particular lesson gradually, it seems someone else may learn this with a sudden revolutionairy flash of insight. I now consider this obvious, which makes me wonder what other things I don't realize now, but will think obvious in five years time...
I submitted the Wikipedia link so we could take a moment to learn a little from his life's work. After all, this may be the last time most of us hear about Billy Mays.
It's sunday, there's nothing else.
This is cool, I was actually thinking of making the exact same app a while ago.

1. Log Activity -> Tracker should default to the tracker I just clicked from, instead of "Select tracker", duh!

2. Date: This should not be that big. It should just say "Today" in text, and then have a button to edit it, if it's not applicable.

3. Work done -> Why does it default to zero?

4. I would think that instead of tags, a summary or "notes" field would be better

5. I look forward to seeing what innovations you come up with in the future! Love it so far, especially the graph & simplicity of signup. Keep me on your mailing list (zackster@, I just signed up). I don't want to use it until it's more feature-filled, but I don't wanna keep checking back to see... I won't remember.
That's an excellent idea! However, I posted the AP source to official confirm this tragic news.
Wow, neat. I'm not sure I should attribute all my amazement to Feynman, but it sure is lovely hearing that man explain things.
well they kinda do that with the prius, the motor will start up when needed using the high speed wheel motor which can start the engine much more easily than a starter motor.

I think the simpler route is to just use an electric motor for the power directly mated to the wheels. No drivetrain, it's only used when you need power (no idling) and it's instant on/off....
The problem is looking for a "newspaper replacement." That's limiting.

You could go report for a wire service covering a state capitol.

You could go report for one of the many B2B web sites and publications popping up to serve industries and audiences that actually have money to spend.

You could report for one of the many e-mail newsletter businesses that I know are thriving and growing.

You could cover real estate news for the blog of a realtor.

You could cover food news for the blog of a coalition of restaurants.

But if the only job that will make you happy is covering "important stuff" at a newspaper supported by advertising and classifieds that aims at a general audience and maintains a stance of complete objectivity and impartiality, you're closing the door on many opportunities that would employ the same skillset.

The reason these opportunities are not obvious is because people keep looking for something that works just like a newspaper. If it works just like a newspaper, it won't be a viable business.

If the NYTimes goes under, it'll be replaced by 100 blogs of varying quality and focus. Someone will be rewarded greatly for stepping in there and aggregating them.

Did you know there used to be dozens of newspapers in Chicago? Every immigrant group put out its own paper. Is it so crazy to think we might be returning to that model for a while?
There isn't even a need for the <head> and <body> tags at all. This is valid HTML 4.01 Strict:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html lang="en">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Here's our title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheet">
<p>Here's our body

And this is valid HTML 5:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Here's our title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheet">
<p>Here's our body

(From http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080429/best-html-template/ )
It's all UGC. If the user posts the same headline as on the original article, that's what appears. If they write their own, that's what appears.

It's just like sharing links on Facebook or Twitter.
Interesting. I figured the most likely explanation was that you were investing in growth. I just assumed you were more like McKinsey, less like Amazon.

$1,000 an hour! Definitely gives me something to shoot for! I've noticed that in my SEO work, too: the first 10% of the work (planning and strategy) seems to have many times the value of the next 90% (the research and implementation). It's just tough to charge wildly different amounts for the same person's time. I guess doing just that first 10% is a solid solution.
I'm not talking about compromising or dumbing down your product. A very hot hot sauce is remarkable. A sort of hot one is boring, and no one, not even the geeks will talk about it.

Hot-hot-hot sauce is dumbing down your product. What about flavor? Reaching for yet higher levels of capsaicin content is simple, the result primitive. A complex, well balanced flavor is much harder to achieve, and has a much higher reward. (And less excess discomfort the day after.)

I'm a geek and not even particularly knowledgeable about hot sauces, but still, let me talk about Baron's hot sauce. Very plain label. Good treatment of the aged peppers. Tasteful addition of a strong garlic note. IMO, wonderfully flavorful. In contrast, there's "Heinie Hurtin Hot Sauce," which has good comic traction for marketing. Colorful cartoon on the bottle. Nothing remarkable in the bottle, IMO. (No, I'm not an expert, all of this comes from eating at a neighborhood burrito place with a selection of 6 hot sauces at any time.)

As always, appealing to the wannabe segment of the fringe is easier, because they have a shaky grasp of the fundamentals and therefore are easier to manipulate with shallow marketing. (The guys who reach for "Heinie Hurtin" for the bragging rights.) The clueful part of the fringe is much harder to reach.

Semblance is easy. Substance is hard.