skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and it's getting old.

Sure this article's partially about feminism, but it's also about academic integrity, which I think falls well under the purview of "Hacker News". Not to mention the fact that CS and programming are often the focus of gender difference issues by feminists.
It may be different in other parts of the country. In Florida, the property taxes alone were more than the cost of renting a similar place. So for a $300K condo you paid almost $13,000 in taxes to the city to pay for water roads, schools, etc.
Read the source code for arc.arc, srv.arc and news.arc, and you'll probably learn something new about programming. I did, at any rate. Apparently PG isn't just some investor who can't hack... :^)
Hmm, yeah, I guess you need to be able to electrify your entire sample in order to look at it with an STM. How much current do you need? Could you sputter silver onto the surface of the chip or something?
What do you have in mind? I can do objective-c/mac/cocoa/iphone stuff. Until recently I was working with a startup, where I wrote the beginnings of a Pandora-like music streaming service.

I'd love to join another startup.
This is one of the sites Yahoo is throwing in the memory hole later this year, right?
I'm working on getting our bootstrapped genealogy research site ready for private beta: http://www.genlighten.com.
what beat it
Working my day job at http://recursive.com.au

Current side project is http://twitterscribe.com, an archive for your tweets that exports in PDF and CSV. (Yes, another Twitter-related app.) I have some things like OAuth to integrate, then we're going to publish custom books of your tweets.

Hopefully that'll bring in a bit of money, then I can move on to one of the other ideas - either my "tag the world" location database, or a "social networking inspired" enterprise intranet. I'm thinking the second has a better chance.
How do you build your own for a fraction of that? That sounds pretty awesome!
I'm working on newer and better software for controlling stage and club lighting. It's still in the early stages, so the final form of the product(s) isn't clear to me yet. A likely initial release will be aimed at the club market, currently dominated by Martin LightJockey since a decent offering there won't require any custom hardware.

I'm using Haskell and functional reactive programming. I intend to expose some sort of programming language (probably graphical) to the user so they can extend the effects engine[0] in ways I probably haven't thought of. Internally, I'm going for a very abstract design so I can build several types of control interface on top of one core.

[0] To oversimplify a bit, effects engines in lighting controllers allow the application of functions of time to any of several attributes of an automated light. A simple example would be a sine wave applied to tilt to make it swing back and forth.
I spend most of my time working at http://www.directsupplycareers.com/careers/ (if your thinking about applying I can refer so drop me a line) and I spend the rest of my time working on a maps/weather mashup.

Until I go to school that is then I split my time between them.
The NHN comments are well intentioned, but boring reading, and bad for the signal-noise ratio. I think the guidelines are fuzzy enough that reading a debate about every edge case is tiresome. Your NHN is another person's "of interest to hackers" so I'd rather flag and let the mods decide.

I agree on your ideas about feedback, but maybe more elegant and help the community grow is if mods left "why killed" comments on the edge cases, but volunteering other people to do more work is easy, so I try to avoid it on principle :).
Suggestion: turn off the ajax that auto-submits as soon as I "lift up" my pencil. Alot of symbols require more than one stroke.

Instead just give me a "done" button.
My wife is a beginning fiddler and currently uses www.learntohear.com. [She cares a great deal about ear training and music theory.] She likes how your site lets you choose songs that correspond to specific intervals.
Why would they give 1gb away for free?

They probably decided to compete on a numeric basis with the other 15,000 undifferentiated Store Your Big Files Online sites. Competing on numbers is the same as competing on price, i.e. stupid.

OK, maybe that is a little harsh.

But if you reduce yourself to competing on numbers, any numbers, you'll always be at the mercy of the biggest fool in the industry, who will one-up your numbers. Additionally, the customers you get because your numbers are momentarily the best are disproportionately pathological customers: they have no loyalty to you, they have loyalty to The Best Deal, and when you are no longer The Best Deal they will move to the guy who is.

This is the same problem that plagues webhosting at the low end. $10 at our service buys you 1 GB of hard disk and 1 GB of bandwidth. No, wait, $10 at our server buys you 2GB/1GB! No wait, $8 at our service... and before long people have bid it down to stupidly low numbers (< $4), a million people are on a box, reliability is terrible, and folks are churning madly.

I think the key for selling commodities like this is to figure out how to decommoditize your product. MP3 players were commoditized, then Apple came out with one which was a status symbol. Hosting is largely commoditized, but Slicehost has a scalable product which merits non-commodity pricing.
Recently put together http://www.twitpare.com as a fun app for all.
So, what are you predicting for the future?
It sounds like a business venture, is what it sounds like.
I'm doing a NSF `Research Experiences for Undergraduates' thing at school... the project is trying to help out with an optimizing compiler for Linear Algebra kernels.

For a personal project I've been working on compiling Scheme to JVM bytecode; I'm fixing bugs in my syntax-rules implementation right now. My code isn't so great but I'm hopefully learning a lot!
Please recall the hacker credo "Information wants to be free," then re-read the article.
Yes, which is why we have Archive.org.
Block ads. They are bad for you.

Unless you like to enjoy newspapers, television, free content sites, Spotify, or the like, of course.
Thanks! http://about.validator.nu/#pitch seems to be using a RELAX NG schema instead of a DTD, which is fine, though it's not clear where the schema actually came from. The draft alludes to "Criteria that cannot be expressed by a DTD, but can still be checked by a machine", and that's a good sign. But I can't find any formalized list of those criteria, and that's really not.

And sure, there will always be overworked or ignorant authors who roll out slipshod work. But I at least want it to be possible to expect better, as it was not before we had the first DTD for HTML.
thanks for checking it out. if you guys have any questions feel free to contact me. the songs are the main benefit. I couldn't master the higher intervals until i associated songs
I would attribute that to the poster not knowing a whole heck of a lot when he bought his hardware, or about the availability of various fixes for the issues he's having. There is a vast amount of information out there. The DVD not working is of course due to him setting his BIOS exclusively to SATA instead of compatibility mode. The audio, if its even close to a new motherboard, should be able to be solved quite easily with http://code.google.com/p/voodoohda/ or HDAEnabler. Some of the stuff he does is unnecessary. A lot of newbie mistakes. The only thing interesting is that it's an i7.

ETA: Written on my faster-than-a-mac-pro-and-only-cost-800-dollars-hackintosh.
Here's a link to their html and js in .tar.gz format: http://bit.ly/10hSUR. Have fun!
H1N1/A seems to be taking over seasonal flu in the southern hemisphere. Chances are that if you get the flu over the next 6-9 months, it will be H1N1/A. What this means in terms of actual number of cases and fatalities depends on the rate of mutation and how quickly the vaccine becomes available.
This clone is advertised as costing at least $209. Kindle 2 currently costs $299. As far as I can tell from the sparse details provided, content is added to this via a sim card.

If you've used a Kindle before to get content, it's readily apparent that the killer app is the large library of content you can one-click buy online and instantly appear on your device over its always-on wireless cell connection. Virtually all Kindle books have roughly the first chapter free for download, so you can easily sample everything available pretty much anywhere your Kindle can get a cell connection (you can buy books from the Kindle, no need to use a PC). You can also use the (free) internet access from your Kindle to read webmail, browse, etc.

Given the lack of proper connectivity and presumably no support for Amazon's DRMed books on this clone, it's not really a competitor, per se. At best, it's an e-ink reader, which has an overlapping target market, but lacks pretty much everything that makes Kindle so compelling. And $200 for a 'dumb' reader seems pretty damn steep.
Exactly. They write, "Customers with less than 1GB but paying our full subscription fee were our most profitable customers."

Shouldn't they have known how many paying customers were below the 1GB threshold and been able to anticipate all that lost revenue? It seems like it should have been obvious from the start that the 1GB free was too high for them. Why not 250mb or 100mb or 50mb or whatever was below where all those high profit paying customers were sitting?

Freemium, as I understand it, is about providing a useful free service but with constraints that are hit by serious users fairly quickly. Useful enough that the product is usable and will entice a user to want to pay to keep using it, but with constraints enough that it won't be useful forever if they keep using it (i.e., they'll hit the limits and have to pay). Seems like for Phanfare, 1GB was way too much space -- users were finding the service useful, but never hitting up against that constraint.
I respectfully disagree for one reason and one reason only. The insanelymac forums have guide upon guide for all sorts of hardware configurations.

There is a hardware compatibility list that gives you a good starting point for buying compatible hardware.

Finally, the use of Boot-132 in conjunction with Chameleon has made setting up a completely flawless 10.5.x install pretty simple compared to what it used to require.

Although, you might be right. I am very conveniently forgetting the 2-3 days I spent tinkering with broken installations a year ago. It takes time to learn some of the stuff, but for most of the folks on HN I would assume you'd have little trouble getting it working after a little reading and googling.
Also America's size...
Testing mining and simulation products written in C and .NET for a mid-sized software house.
IMO, there are two big reasons for freemium.

- To create a large community with network effects that increase the overall value. Here it's hard to charge anything at all, especially if you have any kind of competition. Once you have lots of users, you try to think if any of them might be willing to pay for something.

- To give out a Super Sample. Get free users, when a small percent will convert to paying members. This is Chris Anderson's 95%/5% freemium. Here the line is fine.

The important point about freemium is that it's interacting with a competitive environment. You probably cannot become a major photo/video sharing site without being free, because others are. This is a result of low marginal costs.
I was also very dubious about HTML 5 until I attended a talk last May given by Mike Smith (http://sideshowbarker.net/). Slides here (for what they're worth without the talking to go with them):

http://www.slideshare.net/sideshowbarker/html5-and-xhtml2/

Previously I was quite pro XHTML but now, not so much. Mike mentioned in his talk that he did not think that XHTML 2 specification would ever come to fruition and it appears that he was correct. The XHTML 2 Working Group's charter will expire at the end of this year and not be renewed. So it's looking more and more likely that HTML 5 is our future.

Mike seemed like a knowledgeable guy with his head screwed on right. I don't think he and the others working on HTML 5 would be doing anything to set the web back. I'm sure there will be good options for people to validate their HTML 5 mark-up.
The Basics of Car Buying
A personal car is an absolute necessity with the present public transport system. Car buying is an important decision. There are many things to consider while buying a car.
How were the people renting out the properties able to do that for less than their property tax?
Benchmark: Flickr limits it's free users to 100MB a month of uploads. It would take a Flicker user 10 months of maxing out their usage limit to upload as much as a Phanfare user could, 10 minutes after signing up.
Not ground-breaking, but this is one of the more detailed instructions I've seen.
Interesting Point:

We lost the ability to effectively use CPC search marketing (google). When we had a free trial, it was easy to see which clicks were worth paying for. But with freemium, the conversion funnel was so long (average of nearly a year before the person needed more storage) that any attempt to optimize price per conversion was hopeless. (Try adjusting the shower temperature with a 12 month delay between knob and temperature change and see how it goes for you. In control theory parlance, this is known as introducing a delay in the feedback loop)

It's very interesting. Anyone used to CPC lives in a world of certainty. That kind of certainty has rarely existed in marketing. The problem with that kind of certainty is that taking out risks eventually takes out returns. If you are selling a dropshipped commodity good, margins drop (cpc bids go up, prices go down) to more or less 0.

Freemium on the other hand, slots conveniently into the old world of TV campaigns & billboards. You have no idea if you did good or not. That kind of risk keeps out the number of competitors needed for 0 margins.
My friend's start-up sells RFID-shielding wallets, passport cases and apparel. difrwear.com
I'm working on two DNS Service Discovery related projects at the moment.

The first is a Wide Area Bonjour hosting service which will be of interest if you have a few Macs that you wish could find each other when they're not the same LAN. I'm hopeful it'll become my income stream in the near future: http://globalhostname.com/

The second is a Firefox extension that adds discovery and registration support to Firefox: http://bonjourfoxy.net/

Both are in the midst of heavy updates and any and all feedback on them would be appreciated - see profile for contact details.
Now for the bad news: http://www.genetic-programming.com/patents.html
> In the first months, working with a realtor, we never saw a house not listed on MLS

I'm living in a house that wasn't on MLS when our "buyers realtor" showed it to us. (We were looking at another house and asked the realtor to get us in this one.)Unfortunately, we weren't able to stop it from being listed, so we had competition when we bought it, but .... Yes, this is highly unusual, but since we're trading anecdotes.

> Second we we're always able to call a sellers agent and get a showing.

If the seller involves a realtor, the commission is due in almost all cases, so buyers don't get to make the "realtor or not" choice.
Yes, I disagree, but let's approach this from a different angle.

What do YOU think is so unique and valuable about pagerank and its applicability to social news sites?

From where I sit, it's just an algorithm to spit out a relative 1-10 ranking of a given pages authority.
Nice write-up, it gives me some things to look for next time I watch the movies, like Amidala's costume color.

Trek is a series of standalone 42-minute episodes written by different authors with different agendas. Wars is one man's vision and after the first movie Lucas had all the time and money required for the rest. So it's natural to think of Wars as a better "whole" than Trek.

But in both cases I find myself wishing the vision and writing had been better. Does anybody over the age of 5 think Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea well-executed? No, he was just a plot device. Trek's Wesley Crusher is equally grating in most of his episodes. ("Wesley" is not to be confused with the talented Wil Wheaton, who deserved a better character.)

But when I watch Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, well, I don't think the writing is bad or the characters contrived. Better vision, better writing, better stories.
I'm playing with keyword extraction algorithms in arc. Yesterday I discovered it was super easy to pull the classic porter stemmer C library (http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/c_thread_safe.txt) through mzscheme's foreign-function interface and into arc. That's not really about the language, but it suggests arc made a really good platform choice. Just by making mzscheme salient it's responsible for getting me hacking more on lisp.
You can use it to compute the importance of submissions and users in a way that is less susceptible to manipulation.

Submissions by more important users would themselves be more important before anyone else votes on them.
This is completely awesome and something I've been looking for, for a few years. Thanks!
I'm trying to solve, once and for all, the problem of hacking music on a computer, using Lisp and a couple venerable libs. You'll all be the first to know when I release the alpha (very soon).
Your .org sounds like a possible .com
hmm me too. you guys wouldn't happen to be in the bay area would you? i've got a couple of ideas that i want to pursue, just looking to build the right team.
> Income before taxes: $63,091'

Some taxes are paid on income, other taxes (such as sales) are paid on expenditure. Other taxes (such as property, including cars) are billed directly or lumped into something else (rent).
It'd be a lot less work to just buy a legit Mac. ;-)
A small business selling stickers: http://www.supplycrate.com
A ventrilo status website (taught myself codeigniter): http:///www.ventstatus.com
A ajax risk clone (using codeigniter and learning jquery): no domain
Docley (http://docley.com/): Simple Document Management
> By the way, don't you guys in the U.S. get a salary report for each paycheck you receive?

Yes we do. Most people ignore it (just like you). They figure take-home is their income and that any refund that they get after filing is "free money" to them and not a zero-interest rate loan to govt.
If surfing is that important to you, your health, and your sanity, then I'd say move. Regret is painful!

But just don't straddle startup + job for too long (more than 6 months). It just doesn't work. A startup without full time effort is practically a waste of time. It won't get the attention it deserves and is much more likely to stall out. Plus it really sucks to straddle like that.

The other commenter about the super-frugal approach is pretty good advice. That's essentially what I've done 3x now. One right out of college with a monthly burn of ~$1000. Once after .com crash in NYC with a burn of about $2000. And once when I was single in Atlanta, about the same. $24k will get you a year of startup time at those kinds of burn rates. If after a year you can't generate cash flow for expenses or borrow against a strong pipeline then it's time to move on anyway.

Also, don't do it alone. Ever. Just not a good idea. 2+ people minimum, 1 biz and 1 dev.
> The average 'consumer unit' spends 4.8% of their income on gas/oil.

That's only counting direct expenditures. Gas/oil is an expense for almost every other cost as well, especially food.
Love the shirts. Wish you the best of luck.

How about taking it one step further, and giving viral video content creators an affiliate cut in the shirt profits. With Store front widgets, that could be placed anywhere. Transitioning into a platform.

We do sketch comedy, and I could see us using a service like that.
I've been slowly creating a site to help japanese students learn kanji reading and context at readthekanji.com. I'm quite happy with it as it gets much better with every release and I'm learning a lot as I go.
Charging money for a service isn't wrong, so why apologize?

Amen! Charging money, from day one, is a great way to clarify your relationship with your customers. You're not buddies, you're not a charitable institution, you're not the welfare office: you do X really really well in exchange for money. That doesn't exclude people from having warm fuzzies for you, indeed, doing X superlatively well is a great way to give people warm fuzzies just for paying you money. (See: Apple, Starbucks, etc.)

Same with raising prices. Prices. Increase. This is a fact of life. Rather than groveling about "economic necessity" or coming up with a list of 15 reasons you're worth the additional money, just increase your prices, put a slash through the new price, and say it is on sale (at the old price) for two weeks so get while the getting is good. After two weeks, "the new price" is just "the price".
San Jose was one of the fastest growing cities during the late 1990s. Does it really matter if Silicon Valley got a little richer/smaller?
Incorporating a non-profit hackerspace in Baltimore, Maryland and preparing to sign a lease on a workshop. http://baltimorenode.org
This is an important issue in and of itself, but I want to point out that such problems are not limited to this field. See the comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623420.
On my nights and weekends, I am trying to get the pieces aligned for a mobile news startup, and stumbling on the back-end challenges (not surprising, considering I am not a hacker).
Working on Neybor, an Automated Real Estate Marketing platform: http://neybor.com.

Working on PHP framework as well that I use for Neybor and other projects at http://phocoa.com.
~25% straight off the top (obviously changes depending on income). In CA another 10% for sales taxes. The 6-7% the employer pays that you don't even see.

On top of that the government inflates the currency every year by 3-5%

this isn't even taking into account the fact that producers of goods pay all these taxes as well, so that tax gets factored into the price we pay for the item even before sales tax. I'd say that another 5% for this is being conservative.

all told taxes suck 50% of our productivity out easily.

if you got a 50% raise tomorrow you think you couldn't afford private security, private schools for your kids and replacements for all other government services with greatly increased quality and lower prices?