skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where do you look for ideas? I don't know any VCs or Angels personally, so what is it like to be you? Do you belong to an Angel's group, scan Craigslist, or rely on your network for introductions to people with ideas in need of funding?
This should be the Java equivalent of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) built on top of the CLR.
I feel great encouragement upon seeing that his blog brings in $1500 a month. The writing is mediocre. "Now grab your balls and jump." But apparently it provides enough value for enough of an audience to get the University of Phoenix, Dianetics, and the author of an ebook on how to pick up women in parks, bookstores, and clubs to pay him some decent money.

Rereading that, it looks sarcastic, but I don't mean it that way. Something that holds a lot of us back from getting into business, including me, is that we don't tolerate mediocrity anywhere in our lives. We don't eat at the Olive Garden, we don't listen to Britney Spears, we don't settle for junky cameras or poorly exposed pictures, and most of us won't even use Windows. For us, it's either minimalist or excellent—either ramen noodles or home-cooked Indian food (and even when we make ramen noodles, they come out surprisingly good). But the majority of actual b2c transactions consist of exchanging money for mediocrity, between people who don't know and don't care.
Another cute thing about Wilson Hall at Fermilab is that the front doors faces precisely due north. Not because they were constructed with painstaking precision but because the physicists have redefined Fermilab's coordinate system such that north is defined as the direction Wilson Hall faces.
> Such a license would normally not have included a right to modify the work without the permission of the copyright owner (i.e., the original contractor).

There is case law to the contrary. See, e.g., Yojna, Inc., v. American Medical Data Systems, Inc., 667 F. Supp. 446 (E.D. Mich. 1987): An outside software contractor, at the request of a hospital corporation and its subsidiary, developed a computer program for hospital information management. The court held that the outside contractor was the owner of the software, but the subsidiary had a perpetual, royalty-free license to use and sublicense the program, including the right to unrestricted access to source code for purposes of developing new versions and enhancements. The court also held that the license was an exclusive license within the health-care industry. See id. at 446. [Copied from something I wrote a long time ago.]
The consumer cost of an iphone is not based on 'cost+' as it is in the rest of the phone segment, it's based on 'cool' and that is not directly related to cost. So they manage to do something that most people can only dream of, to disconnect the real cost of your offering from the value perceived by the buyer.

That's pretty much the only way to make a killing, everything else will end up somewhere between 0 and 30% margin.
accounts that deal with higher volume in processing get lower fees. this is the case with most places.

i imagine they're using paypal because its a bit easier to do account-to-account stuff with them, based on my (limited) understanding.
Could be possible if you are talking a 4chan poster's brain.
Why recession and deflation aren't over
Or: take shrooms.
Might over right when it comes to online content
It's very infrequent that a scientific study's findings can be reduced to a headline without losing important information, especially when the headline is optimized for iconoclasm. This is no exception.

The study found that organically- and non-organically-grown foods showed no difference in nutrition. To assume that the food's nutrition is the only health-affecting factor between organic and petrochemical farming is silly.
Um, what? No! This is exactly the type of logic-wrangling that happens with bad mental models.

It is not going bankrupt on that code, When you go bankrupt, there is a huge penalty to your credit! If you stop maintaining code that no one uses, the drag goes away and there is no downside!

Deleting code is fun. Going bankrupt, not so much.
Article sounds interesting, but I want an actual page of text, not a flash layout. Here's links to each of the articles for those like me:

The God Chemical http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042407...

The God Spot
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1042915...

Spiritual Virtuosos
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043104...

The Biology of Belief
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043517...

Near-Death Experiences
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043970...
That doesn't really sound like great advice. Human reaction time is about 200ms (http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/rttest01.html if you wish to verify this for yourself), whereas the blink duration is 100 to 150 ms. By the time you reacted the blink would be over.
That's very interesting - I have seen myself as a self-funding founder than an angel but given my lack of compelling ideas, perhaps that's where I'm going wrong. Perhaps I should do more networking to find other people with ideas where I can add execution skills and perhaps some funding.
I would argue that the term Podcasting has already been genericized.
There could be something there, I imagine more than a few companies would pay very generously to trim 7 months from their timeline. Of course the cost of all that white board paint might add up :)

I'm a nerd, I've had my share of overnight music blasting pausing for the occasional ping-pong game pizza eating soda pounding programming sessions. I've even gone several months working > 60 hours a week, but still thats not near the intensity of this. My point is, it sounds like they have all their needs met except for one... for me I have a girl friend to take care of it, what do these guys do?
If you can stretch a cable across a "chasm" chances are that you can pop an I-beam in there instead. That would solve that problem.
To assume that the food's nutrition is the only health-affecting factor between organic and petrochemical farming is silly.

What do you suggest would be a verifiable health-affecting factor that would differ between the two forms of farming?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Charlie Nutter of JRuby did a (very long) post about invokedynamic on his blog awhile back: http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic...
Wall Street’s Reaction To The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: Not Good
Strange how the study doesn't address the main reasons why I would tend to favor organic foods: less pesticides, its the only way (at least in Canada) to control GMOs in what you eat. Of course there would be other environmental reasons as well, but it still remain based on monocultures.
I guess they have done this with the portion of the rat brain they are modeling? Can anyone confirm this?
What happened to E-Gold is that they tried to be hereos to their clientele and went out of their way to refuse to cooperate with Uncle Sam. Opening a foreign bank account and calling yourself a foreign entity does not save you; Saddam and Noreaga each owned an entire country :-)

What he can do is what most freelancing websites do: show tangible products or services changing hands; make sure the amounts stay low, make sure you're not paying out U.S. citizens without reporting their income, etc.

A tangible good or service would be something whose price is market dictated and doesn't seem too outrageous, the delivery of which you control.

It's OK to facilitate the sale of a domain name for up to $1000, and require that the seller wait a certain number of days, then transfer to a U.S. or EU bank.

However, it's not OK to setup an auction room for impossiblystupiddomainthatnoonewouldbuy.com and have one buyer start bidding at $10k. That's a rigged auction.

It might be far easier to setup an escrow service (if you can even survive the bad name the escrow industry has) and just deal with people in the U.S., taking SSNs from all the payees.

We tried something like this a while back but it wasn't worth the trouble.
Oh wow, this begs the question: How many HNers are climbers? I'd love to organize a climbing trip somewhere! I'm in MD but just came back from Seneca Rocks and planning a trip to NRG or RRG this fall. I was literally reading that post earlier today from another climbing blog I read.

edit: or the Gunks if someone else leads. I don't think I'm comfortable yet at the sharp end of the rope.
Talking paperclip inspires less irksome virtual assistant
"There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found."

To add to your point, "no evidence of any extra health benefits" is different from "evidence that there are no extra health benefits".
Turns out you'll do in a pinch.
It would be interesting to see a statistically significant number of data points on this test. I wonder about variability of the max load on the used anchors vs. new ones. I think I'd prefer a known max load to one that might be greater, but is unknown.

Is anyone making anchors designed with a notch?
Earlier Hacker News thread on same press release:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727824
my corp-job is actually pretty awesome.
In a way, I am glad that Apple is now rejecting apps from huge software companies and their business partners.

In the near-term, you are right that this might create uncertainty for the viability of businesses leveraging the platform. But nothing will hasten Apple smartening up than having large companies with deep pockets clamoring for change in the App store approval/rejection process.
Also, this study looked at the people eating the food, and ignored the people growing the good. Obviously, farmers are exposed to pesticides (and other petrochemicals) in much greater concentrations than consumers....
And if you do, be sure to visit the museum on the 15th floor of the High-Rise. It has some great information in it.
Off the top of my head, other questions to consider are:

• The environmental effects of different methods of farming and food production.

• Are toxins more or less present in the food produced by different methods?

• Is the food more or less pleasurable to eat?
What exactly is the point of quoting part of the article without adding any comment of your own?
Exactly. The article avoids the "truth" as to why most people even eat Organic. The health benefits in eating organic are in what you aren't eating (e.g. pesticides, etc).
This is nothing to be proud of.
I'm surprised they are willing to broadcast that they:
- we're able to convince some amateur developers to work slave camp hours
- didn't hit the goal
- on top of these two, they spent 3x what they normally do.

I can't see http://about.letmego.com/letmego/content/career_opportunitie... getting many visits.

Just my opinion of course. What would the inverse of this scenario be? A start-up that has remote workers and saves 3x the amount of money of keeping everyone in one spot, has flex hours, and hits the targets.

That would be something worth blogging about.
The article only seemed to be talking about the levels of nutrients found in organic vs non-organic foods. I would certainly suspect that the levels of pesticides and other such chemicals could also have a huge impact on health.
Nutritional science is broken. Boiling (pun intended) fruits and vegetables down to their individual nutrients is the only way we know how to measure their supposed benefits -- but nutrients don't act alone in foods, they act in combination with everything else in the food. But since we still can't measure that, we don't.

Also, reductionist nutritional science makes it possible for Lucky Charms to tout health benefits on the front of their box by listing individual nutrients. This is profitable for the food industry.

For more I'd recommend "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan.
No, you don't get to bastardize my stuff anymore
Interesting article. I think using viscosity to compare languages or frameworks is counterproductive, but the general idea is useful when talking about software architecture and development.

For instance, I used to manage some poorly architected Java apps where even trivial changes incurred painful re-architecting because the app was poorly written. And I've managed PHP apps that are extremely well-organized and are very simple to add functionality to.

The other thing I'd mention is I like your idea about hitting the wall where improvement freezes b/c the implementation time is so great. I think it's a good fit for the technical drag model -- that is the point of terminal velocity!

It's another good-fit for the metaphor; eventually you can only drive forward a product by making the team bigger because your project hits its terminal velocity (or top speed) for the given "engine" size (the team).
I too am from MD and a climber too. It would be interesting to get a poll going to see how many people here are interested in climbing.

Also figure I might as well inform you of an organization for local climbers in DC area one of my friends has started: http://www.dcmetroclimbing.com/
I would much rather bind it to the most impressive you have written.
A great job for this is hotel night auditor, where you look after the front desk, and do some accounting overnight, but have a lot of free time too. Not bad pay either generally.
I always wondered if you need less than two seconds if you're behind a vehicle that can't stop very fast (e.g., a large truck). Your superior stopping rate could make up for the decreased reaction time.
Good jobs! I am glad finally someone make this! And I hope your service booming!

The point is to show only the important changes in the surveillance video. And it is right to target market for babies, pets and burglars watch.

I asked my friends 3 years ago when I saw a Panasonic internet surveillance cam (though the price of cam then was around $200) and they though it would be great to have this type of service to watch kids and pets at home when they are at work. And I thought the whole video has to be trimmed to only interesting part. And I thought that can be a good way to team it with my uncle's surveillance camera manufacturing business. They are good in hardware but they need some killer apps to expand demand for surveillance camera in consumer market.

But one of my friend said that people already did that. I just can't find it cheap enough for consumers. So I decided to work on other products.

I get a lesson from Anateus: I need to trust my own instinct more than advices from peers.
I don't eat organic vegetables because I believe they are significantly better for me health-wise. I do so where possible because they're tastier (having not been engineered to retain excess water to increase weight for sale) and MUCH better for the environment.

I do limit myself to organic/all natural prepared foods though due to lack of preservatives. See In Defense of Food as to why. There's very little doubt that stuff is awful for your health.
That's fair. Context is important here. I had facebook basically consuming twitter's functionality in mind. I was also attempting to point out how little innovation many ideas actually contribute.

Digression :: Has anyone noticed that myspace has recently ripped off a lot of facebooks features too?
'Verifiable' is the tough part. That is not my job.

But if I were to give it a shot, I might investigate the effects of pesticide runoff on the farming environment, and those who live around it. Or animal farms' antibiotic carpet-bombing's effect on drug-resistance of pathogens. Or the effects of farming chemical production on those who live near the factories.
Vol Libre - a CG animated short from SIGGRAPH 1980
Erm... Doing 27'000 hours of development in private, without any customers beta-testing early versions of the site, seems completely insane. Why would you ever do that? I mean, if you really don't have a choice at all, because the project is that big, then fair enough (but in that case, don't do this as your first start-up - do it later when you have access to funds and people).

Imho the CTO/CEO of this start-up should have figured out a way to get something out there and test the concept for at most 1/10th of that cost. Much smarter, and cheaper, than trying to cram developers like chickens in a coop.
Steve Jobs (allegedly): "Real artists ship."
Not only that: it showed that there is little or no difference in nutrition for the specific nutrients studied - despite the fact that nutrition does not reduce to a few vitamins and minerals.
Add a few staged infights and you pretty much have Hacker Big Brother meets Shattered (reality TV show where participants didn't sleep for a week), with a dash of Apprentice (you'd have to throw out a coder after each week), Dragons' Den (have nice closeups of bad feature pitches) & even Startup.com.

God, Channel 4'd be all over this. I'd best pitch the idea to them quick!
Excellent counter.

In Omnivore's Dilemma, he notes that there exists evidence that the old idea about nutrition being reduceable to just three basic components is likely to be wrong.

If you don't know where to look for evidence, it is quite likely you aren't going to find it.
Gossip Cop: Patrolling Celebrity
I would edit the title as "Insecurity - the movie". Not everybody sees where the link goes. Example: Google Reader on Opera for Symbian.
Modern anchors and carabiners are designed to take the load on its spine, which maximizes their strength. However, that's not always what happens nor are the ideal conditions of the lab are what climbing equipment is usually exposed to. Carabiners and cold shunts can take 25-30kN where a 200lb climber exerts less than 1kN force statically. The issue is not with holding weight, but taking on dynamic forces in the event of a fall, so much so that ropes have to be retired after roughly dozen UIAA factor-2 falls[1] because they lose their dynamic properties.

I don't think making grooved anchors and cold shunts makes that much sense because in the event of a fall, the rope or carabiner supporting you to that shunt is absolutely not guaranteed to stay in place. I can say I've taken a few 20ft whippers that knocked the protection around.

I think what's much more important is climbers' lucidity on the rock and following established procedures. Whether a piece of protection can support the weight of a large truck or a large truck and some tires is less important than whether a climber followed all the proper procedures to minimize their risk exposure.

Failed equipment accounts for a negligible percentage of all climbing accidents.

[1] http://www.theuiaa.org/
A PCB laced hamburger and one with no such contamination are going to have the same nutritional content.

Really though, part of the point of organic food is that it dumps less crap in the environment. Even if the direct impact on human health is non existent, less fertilizer runoff means fewer low oxygen deadzones at the mouth of major rivers, which means more fish, etc.
When you "go bankrupt" with code, there's often a huge penalty to your user experience. Presumably that code existed so you could do something and make things better for your users. If you take it away, or even stop maintaining it, you're doing less for your users.

This is why I like the "technical debt" metaphor more than the "technical drag" metaphor. Technical debt acknowledges that there's an outside user who's presumably paying you for the project. You can choose to satisfy them better now, but it's at the cost of satisfying them less later, or even regressing and making things more painful for them as you take away debt-ridden features. Just as how financial debt lets you invest now and satisfy the immediate customer better at the price of paying it off later.

"Technical drag" implies that forward motion is inexorable, and the only variable is the rate. This is not a given in software; I often try to use old versions because I know that new ones will be slower, more cluttered, and buggier.
A Protocol for Visiting China (or DEFCON)
>Summer Holidays at the North Pole

Wait about 20 more years for this one.
One problem with that concept of adding developers as increasing the size of the engine - I don't think it works like that. When development freezes, good developers end up losing interest eventually, so in reality what probably happens is that your productivity decreases - so in fact you probably start regressing, if you let yourself hit that point.
I climb at Earth Treks Columbia twice a week. I have been wanting to organize a climbing trip for HN folks to introduce people who are new and meet people who already climb, and now that I know there are at least some of us @ HN, this is more and more a possibility.

edit: thanks for the link!
I don't know, what's a consumer to do? I read this, and then the side panel has links to three previous BBC News articles:

- Organic produce 'better for you': £12m study shows organic food contains more antioxidants and less fatty acids.

- Organic food 'better' for heart: 10 year study shows tomatoes contain more antioxidants.

- Organic veg given health boost: research shows soup made from organic veg contains six times more aspirin (?!)

Many of these kinds of stories seem to have the grubby handprints of PR companies all over them. Are antioxidants good or bad? I don't even know any more...

Until I know any better, I'll be sticking to my trusty two criteria:

1. Does it taste good?

2. Is the price in line with the taste?
A. I just can't shake the idea that the market for mainstream web apps is saturated.

B. I can't find any ideas for niche markets because I'm not involved in any niches except for programming and anything for programmers is definitely a saturated market.

C. Cofounders I've come across have always flaked out. Granted I may have too but I think if just one of us had been persistent it would have been enough.

D. Don't want to spend my savings.

E. I think that's it.
"...there is not sufficient research on the long-term effects of pesticides on human health"

Sounds like the tobacco lobby of yesteryear.

Given the fact that cancer is on the rise and I have a choice between food treated with carcinogens and food not treated with carcinogens, I'll take the food not treated with carcinogens, thanks.
I'm currently a graduate student. I could drop out after I get my master's degree, or finish my Ph.D. I realized that doing a startup sounds great, but if it failed, as is very likely, I would regret walking away from grad school.
"Not having a cofounder is a good reason not to start yet - but it's mostly a good reason to go and look for a cofounder, rather than a reason to cancel your start-up plans altogether"

I completely agree. But in the meantime I am doing some fun stuff, (working on AI algorithms and such when I am working and now doing a 6 month "technical immersion" type thing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700891) and so that contributes to the "I'll do a startup sometime,but not just yet" feeling.

I guess I should change my reply to "Why aren't you doing a startup yet?" to "lack of a business focussed co founder and meanwhile I am doing other interesting things, which doesn't leave me enough time and energy to go look for one".

Thanks for that suggestion. It helped me clarify my thoughts.
As is typical for science reporting, the headline makes a broader claim than the article itself: "Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority." (emphasis mine)
Then you must be older than me, as when I learned to drive in 84 it was 3 seconds. I think is below one now.

I sometimes do a 3 second gap just to see how fast people will fill it up.. which is instantly.