skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who wants to help build a home inventory tracker?
My idea is simple: built a Web 2.0 app that allows people to track the stuff in their home/garage. That way if/when it gets lost/stolen/burned up they know exactly what they had. You can use the info to file an insurance claim faster/better. Or you can use it when you sell your house. Or we can build a system to update you when/if there is a recall on an appliance you own. etc...

I can do the programming (I ♥ RoR) but the design side leaves me befuddled. :) Any budding design wizards want in on the action?
No silver bullets. To borrow a phrase: The price of the freedom of good architecture is eternal vigilance.
When I did it back in 1999, we raised angel money right after we had a team & a short business plan with a powerpoint but not even an alpha product yet. Our idea required enough development work that we couldn't really manage while keeping our full time jobs. (http://web.archive.org/web/20001019030551/http://emfocus.com...)

And from what I've seen of the relatively new seed investment firms, you can approach some just as early - an idea, a team, and a plan (sometimes as short as a few pages). Some would prefer that you not even incorporate yet.

It was 1999, though, and likely less formal relative to the more mature market now. Back then it seemed most angels were friends or family of the founders. The boom was so strong that getting early investors was no more difficult than talking to friends who liked to invest. You could also work with an incubator but we didn't call those guys "angels."
Systems that are too small to use RSA routinely use ECC.
http://googlestore.com/home.asp is the USA+Canada official Google store. Probably it runs an older shopping cart script written in MS asp.

http://google-store.com/index.php is the official Google store for the rest of the world . It uses osCommerce!
The electron cloud is noble (i.e. all filled shells/layers).

But the nucleus has it's own shells, and those are the ones that need to be filled for it to be stable.

However not as much is known about the nucleus shells, how many in each level, etc. Read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shell_model
Looks official but they do not use the official Google checkout!! See http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/google-store-does-not-use...
Firms Unaware of Web Domain Changes
You got downmodded (I think) because it's way way too early to worry about how much energy they take to make. Lets first make them - for all me know by the time we manage it, fusion reactors will be cheap.

But I bumped you back up since I don't think your comment deserves a zero.
That dead time isn't necessarily waste. Time to ponder is a good thing.
Ouch, no thanks. I can't think of anything more mind-numbingly boring than trying to catalog all of my possessions for insurance purposes. I'd much rather just walk around slowly with a videocamera, and leave it at that. I can't think of anything on the design-side that would make this a winning proposition.

Sorry!
I think the majority of celebrities that are established celebrities, will realize they don't need the bs and just stop (like reznor is doing).

It stops being fun for them and it comes down to business. If they are not getting enough out of it to put up with the crap, they will stop or pawn it off on PR people to do it for them.

Same reason Obama and the likes don't watch cable news.
When (a) you're ready for the distraction of fund-raising, and (b) you think an intelligent person would be convinced by what you have so far.

You don't usually need a formal deck. Ask the investor.
Spam is not automated anymore. Automated spam doesn't get through modern countermeasures such as human-detection and bayesian filtering, so it is not worth considering. The spam that you actually see today on most sites is hand-pasted by real human beings (at least the stuff that makes it onto my site is. I'm sure you can still find plenty of phpbb sites that are overrun with the old sort).

It's hard to do anything about because they'll simply strip the content of an article that would fit well on your site, and stick a link at the bottom. Or maybe they'll skip the link for the first dozen blog entries until they think they've gained your trust.

Real spam (versus the wikispam v1agra stuff that gets automatically swatted down) is tricky. And these people are a lot more motivated than trolls, since they get paid when they get a working link on your site.
All abstractions are leaky, including design patterns.

The trick is knowing when to use them and when not.
Ask HN: what unwanted domain names are you sitting on?
While thinking of ever more imaginative ways to punish domain squatters following yet another abandoned hunt for a domain-cum-product name, I finally became aware of the irony that I am sitting on a few decent domain names that I'm not using.

Then, I wondered, if one of the parked domains I've come across recently is held just by someone like me, not maliciously or out for profit, but just as a by-product of a non-startup startup, an abandoned weekend hackery project or whatever really.

So, rather than set up www.domainnameswap.com (partly because the name is parked ;o) ), how about a thread where we have a rummage down the back of the sofa and throw in any parked domains we'd be willing to give/swap away. If there's a match up, the relevant poster is contactable via their HN profile.

[Note: this idea may tank, but it's got to be worth a try. My fingers are being worn shorter with each fruitless domain search]
Online Stationery Company Gains a Fashionable Following
Firms unaware of upcoming extortion by ICANN and how much protecting a brand will cost in the future.
I recently closed some money with angels and your results will surely vary (so take all of this this with a grain of salt):

* It's never too early to pitch an angel. IMHO, angels are generally comfortable investing before you have real traction - smart angels have told me that they invest in people, not ideas. So, the takeaway is that you want to start talking to angels early - let them know what you're up to and, if there's mutual interest, you'll get to the next level.

* Your deck should include the Kawasaki 10: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html Though, don't whip your deck out on the first date -- I've had more success by having informal coffee/lunch meetings first. If they want to know more, that's when you send them the deck.

* When in doubt, remember this: "Ask for advice and you may eventually get money. Ask for money and you'll often get advice."

Finally, if you want to continue the conversation offline, I'd be happy to help -- feel free to email me.
Google is likely outsourcing the operation of the store to 3rd parties. Makes sense, as it would probably be more trouble than it's worth for Google to sell the stuff themselves.
Actually it's probably classic ASP. ASP.NET uses the .aspx extension.
Outstanding result. Compliments to both the student and the Chair of the CS Dept at SJSU.

Not only was the matter resolved properly, the Chair also managed to stop it from "escalating" until lawyers had to get involved.

Instead, the Chair successfully "hit the pause button", reflected on the issues, got some expert advice, and then communicate the result clearly and definitively, so everyone could close this chapter and move on.

Even for the prof who initially complained about the student posting code, this is a good result. It lets him know how he should update his course in the future, and what limitations on students posting code is reasonable, or not reasonable.
I'll go first, hoping that karma is more than an int next to my name:

lancelist.com / lancelist.net / lancelist.co.uk

bookafreelance.com / bookafreelance.co.uk

flatplan.net

zeditorial.com / zeditorial.co.uk
Thanks for the comments, robryan. Yes, I agree with you, nothing beats a real object --that's why the idea is that the recipient of the letters can buy a real book (printed on demand) to keep all the letters. We've shipped a few, and people seem to love it!
You are absolutely wrong about this. MS Money was a great program that innovated quite a bit.

The Money team was one of the first Microsoft Groups to realize the web was a paradigm shift. They did two things that are noteworthy.

First, they very early on integrated themselves with banks (sort of a Proto Programmable Web). Most people don't realize Money was connecting to banks a year before Quicken (who offered imports of files but no direct connect)

Second, they realized the web was also a UI shift and wrote a shrinkwrapped app as a web application (I suspect not making it a shrinkwrapped app was beyond their power). In fairness they were clearly inspired by Quicken's use of hyperlinks in program but they took what Quicken did and went one better.

You can see a lot of that from this screenshot (note it's 2002): http://images.sudhian.com/articles/ShuttleLinux/PartIV/MSMon...

MS Money was actually a revolutionary product in many ways. So much so that people didn't realize how revolutionary it was at the time.
I don't think that's quite right. The systems you're thinking of are almost certainly not too small to use RSA -- rather, they're too slow to use RSA. As I wrote in the article, ECC has advantages where speed is an important consideration.
Ask HN: where to learn best practices beyond algorithms?
For example at the moment I am interested in message queues, multi process web spiders and stuff like that. I don't think it is covered in the normal algorithm books, but I would like to avoid to reinvent the wheel.
My first thought when I saw this:
"Djikstra is spinning in his grave."
It is official. When I did some (read: lots of) volunteer translation for Google years back, I got an email from Marissa Mayer asking me to pick out something from the store as a reward.
But a barcode scanner can't connect to the internet. It's pretty obvious that at some point someone's going to write an app so that you can snap a barcode and compare with prices online.

Your barcode scanner may be faster but that's much more convenient.
Yum, It's Starting to Get Tasty
"Freedom isn't binary. Everyone has to answer to someone."

The second sentence seems to suggest that freedom IS binary. Or that there is no such thing as freedom?
I do like this. Might even try it as a gift for a friend of mine, too.
Flaws in China's Mandatory Web Filter
Wouldn't it be better to (also/instead) allow the person who starts the book the option of sending that hard copy to them?
This Week on Github: iPhone Development
Benefit-Driven Metrics
on your tour screen, create proper thumbnails of the screenshots, don't make the browser download the huge files and scale them itself. it's painfully slow and the scaled versions aren't readable.
Randall message was "freaking awesome", seriously I can't believe I never read his work before a couple of days ago.
Get past the dancing man analogy and read the rest of the post. A++ on all counts for someone who is motivated and desires nothing more than starting their mission/business/movement!
Agreed, check out http://www.crayonphysics.com/ for a novel approach to integrating this type of interface into the market ("Get 'em when they's young")
I sure hope he doesn't take that guy's class or any of that guy's friend's classes. He may find his work held up to a higher standard... I think the prof was pissed cause the solutions being posted meant he had to do more work. I am all about free speech, but if I were doing my degree there I wouldn't want to antagonize the faculty so much.
Good idea.

Although I've also had luck just emailing the contact for a domain, and finding they were willing to give it up. Worst case scenario is some squatter overvalues it and won't sell for a reasonable price. But it is always worth asking.

I even had one person randomly email me offering $500 for one of my domains. I didn't reply right away, and two hours later, he upped the offer to $1000. I had the cash in hand by the end of the day. Easiest money ever.
The End Of The Cult Of The Astronaut
I am not interested, but I know of another hacker that you might want to be introduced to that made an app with a similar purpose for the iphone.
Some interesting tidbits such as the fact the moon landers could land on autopilot (feature never used), autolanding of space shuttle never used etc.
why not try portmanteus like tradomains.com? (trade + domains)

its available

EDIT: I could have bought it, but I figured steve could use it, so what say everyone give it at least an hour for steve to buy it before someone snaps it up?
8t.org

lowerca.se
... But it could tie into an idea I had for people trying to simplify their lives and sell their excess posessions:

If the inventory could be tied to either a custom sales/swap site, or even craigslist or e-bay, it could actually manage your possessions and help you make money off the stuff you no longer need.
It would be great, yes. Our concern has been that the price of the book depends on the # of pages, and we don't know how many there will be in advance. More importantly, we don't know if enough people will write, to make a physical book worthwhile. What we're planning to do is give that option to the person who starts the book, and let them specify that the book should be printed only if it has 5/10/15/20 letters...

Thanks much for the suggestion.
I was being a bit tongue in cheek re registering domainnameswap.com.

But as for the domain/name I do need, I've been trying all kinds of mashing together, while being constrained by the agreed critera (number of syllables, etc). No joy. Yet.

[EDIT: thanks for the thought, tho, knightinblue]
I think the best place to learn is cold-hard experience. It doesn't have to be your own experience, of course. Look for open-source projects that utilize similar concepts, and see what they did.
awesomeopossum.com
I have always been skeptical of what prophetic capabilities of economists. Their predictions on rise and fall of the greenback, oil prices, share market performance have mostly fell flat on face.

Remember how the league of global economists were forecasting that oil prices would shoot beyond $200 in no time. Until the oil price took an u-turn and plummeted to around $40 within six month.

very good at explaining past events. terrible at predicting the future.
obamanutpunch.com

poofilter.com

lawgician.com
Yeah, I bought lancelist.com from a very nice vendor after approaching him out of the blue. Shame I never got to use it.

Shakes fist at UK employment laws (but that's a different story)
Fiat World Mathematical Model
The Birth of the Quants: When theory met markets, the results were gold.
govevents.org

mobpoint.com & mobpt.com
That is good, because it is so easy to sell to them.
Yea, I've had the same thing happen to me with a name that I posted on Sedo :)

For what it's worth, owning a domain and not developing it is not "domain squatting" which is defined by law as "registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

There is nothing wrong with owning a domain and not developing it. It's the same as making a speculative investment, just like in real estate or any other asset. We all wish we were there in 1990 to scoop up the best names, but just because we weren't doesn't make the smart people who did unethical.
groopvine.com

phreshy.com
I do not understand your reasoning. Firstly, I am not representative of HN as a whole, and secondly, I am a huge FOSS fan. Explain?
You're partially right. I tried both Quicken and Money last year.

As a s/w developer, I could immediately see that Money was suffering from years of neglect. I predicted that it would soon be cancelled and that was one of the reasons I stuck with Quicken (though it too sucks).

Due to the reasons you articulate re: Money's early web focus and my hunch about years of neglect, I think that Money's cancellation had much more to do with internal Microsoft priorities than with the rise of the web finance software companies.

For financial information, I want multi-decade records. With a web startup, I have no assurance that all the time I spend entering and categorizing stuff will pay off if the web guy goes under with my data. With a desktop program, at least I can keep going on for a long time with the old version (I'm still using Quicken 2007).
"I always feel like I've lost a little bit of myself..."

You shouldn't. Because you haven't. You are greater that then sum of what you have done. You wrote it once, you can write it again (not exactly the same, of course, but you get the idea).

They can claim your work as their IP, but they can't claim who you have become in the process.
Gravity mysteries: What is gravity?
When I first saw a term sheet from Fred, he explained it, item by item.

Yet another reason I am thankful for the opportunity to work with him.
Yes, you're right. It's just a bit frustrating as we approach a time when it seems like there'll be nowt left to register unless we cough up six figures for a .mycompany TLD

Clearly, I'm not in the my most forgiving of moods, tho
baddeveloper.org

coderepo.net

manphp.com

tweetbkp.com
- was going to be a twitter backup mechanism, but then i started working with the twitter api and quickly gave up that idea.
Some douchebag deleted it.

(just kidding just kidding!)
Despite how high the application price is, I really see this still being abused by domain-parkers in the long run. Any thoughts in that regard?
Quick run through and my thoughts:

* First off, the front page took an incredibly long time to load. According to firebug's net console there were 23 requests totalling over 2 mb and took 32.35 seconds to load. Maybe I'm an outlier here, but there has got to be a way to cut down on that. Just about everything I'm seeing is an image rather than styled text.

* When creating a new album, why do I have to give you my information _and_ the recipients info right off the bat? You could probably postpone at least the recipient's info until I'm done. (I haven't finished creating anything, so this may be moot, but what if I decide there should be another recipient as well?)

* It would be nice to have a 'check availability' function for the subdomain that the letters will live at

* ok I just created this album, got a subdomain, etc... and clicked 'write a letter for XXXXX' right--now you want me to enter my info all over again?! I just did! I understand now (hint: I didn't get this point from your front page. The page shown right after you create an album is much mroe informative) that this is for multiple people to collab on some letters for a special time in somebody else's life, and you need to get all those people's info too. But you should probably remember me since I filled this stuff out not five minutes ago.

* What if I want to attach links, videos, files, etc... rather than just images?

* How do I get back to the root url of my newly created album after I have successfully written a letter? I see no navigation bringing me back to XXXX.fromabirdie.com/ from XXXX.fromabirdie.com/letter/thanks

* from my albums root url, I would like to see (at least a preview of) the letters already written, not have to click a link to another page. The whole reason I'm here is these letters, why make me jump through hoops?

Sorry if I sounded a little brash at all, I just did a really quick run through and jotted my immediate thoughts down. Of all of these issues, I would say the speed of the front page loading should be a major concern. Is anyone else having it load this slow? Besides that, I really do like the concept and can see myself using it not as much for my girlfriend's birthday, but possibly for a cousin's graduation or for a coworker who is moving on or retiring. Right now I'm working as a student developer for my Uni's Residences Dept, along with a handful of other people, three of which are graduating in a week. I think being able to set up one album for all three of them would be great, rather than having to do one for each.

Once again, I really like the concept, and hope to see future iterations be born, because I think it has a lot of potential!
falsifi.com

mktpost.com

lidly.com

ride-radar.com
very good at explaining past events.

They aren't that good at that either.
I really related to this comment.

What I do find though is experience at university does vary greatly. I had a fantastic module on Software Quality. The lecturer in question has been working in the real world before he became a lecturer so had many practical examples of software quality, but he was also able to quickly gloss over the irreverent stuff.

I really did enjoy that module, and recommended it to a friend who was a year below me academically at the same university. Unfortunately the lecturer in question left the university before my friend started the module. As a result his experience with the same module was vastly different than mine. The replacement lecturer was very much into mathematics and didn't have the real world experience his predecessor had. As a result a lot of time was wasted on the maths of how to calculate cyclomatic complexity. When I did the course about half an hour to an hour was covered on how to calculate it, when to use, why you'll need it and so on. Plus there was further reading in the lecture handouts. When my friend did it he had to spend about 9 hours running through just the maths. He told me it was very detached from the real world, there wasn't much connection to when you'll use it.

I've had a few good lecturers and a few bad ones too.
For me I find the good ones know how to practically apply things.
I know what you mean. I have dozens and dozens of these names, all really good names that I like for startup or related projects. I dont want to give them up becuase, like you, I HATE trying to find new names. I also hate domain squatters, so they arent filled with BS Ad's either, just a brief message saying "this was for a project I was or will be working on... if you are interested, let me know.

My list is too long to post, but you can check it out at http://btlventures.com/domains/ . I'm happy to lease/loan these domains to someone on the cheap who wants to use them for a good project.
Gravity mysteries: Why does gravity only pull?
While I'm not as unlucky as a .museum user, I use a .me address as my main public contact address, and you'd be surprised at the number of well-designed sites that don't think it's a valid email.
Of course these people will still be trotted out whenever someone wants a new law. Every politician loves having people who can justify any policy they want to enact without fear of contradiction.
Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?
The terminal on the left is a very nice touch. Looks like someone's hitting the DoD with a cybersec cluebat.
Oh and I forgot to mention that it is no fun trying to convert local time to New York time...
quicklibs.com

datafeel.com
Well, I guess, they indeed are good at making things up. especially when they have the benefit of hindsight.
adstreet.net

alwayscontact.com

ballerscholar.com

bccmark.com

betterword.net

cardcurrent.com

mbawall.com

picturethenews.com/.net/.org

recofriend.com
great point -- the prof is just being lazy. It would actually be a nice idea to build a website so that students could post old quizzes, homework assignments, etc., to help force profs to come up with something new each time.
what3va.co.uk (i don't know what i was thinking, but someone might have a use).
i would love to hear your monetization strategy. :)
I'm not. This is the peril of the Internet. No self-reflection, and unpopular views are suppressed.
dcrowd.com - I had the idea to make a portal type of site for D programming language, maybe even expand it from the start to Development Crowd - hence d crowd being ambiguous. I even made a logo that I am satisfied with http://www.dcrowd.com/t_logo/dcrowd_logo_table.png

hmm maybe I'll make it, who knows. I have another project going on right now that takes a lot of time, so maybe after that.