skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case?

An asset is a resource that you create which you can later harvest for money. For example, let's say you are an event promoter. In this case your asset is your mailing list, because having a list of 300k people willing to read about your events allows you to go to night clubs and ask for $20k in exchange for sending out a blast to your followers.

So once you decide that the asset you are creating is the list of people willing to hear about your events, there are any number of ways you can go about creating this list. You can sign people up who go to events, run contests, find local people on twitter and start conversations with them, create a website and run google ads to get people to it, etc.

The point is that smart entrepreneurs don't start with ideas, because ideas usually fail and once they fail you're fucked. Rather, they come up with an asset they know is valuable, and then come up with 50 ways to build that asset, knowing that some of them will fail. This way even if some of your ideas are only hit 10% of your target goal for growing the asset, at least you spent that time growing an asset that you can monetize in the future and you don't have to start all over.

Business ideas are for chumps.
"They're most definitely not equally important. There are far more examples of successful businesses built on the backs of mediocre ideas but with great execution than there are of ones built on the back of great ideas with mediocre execution."

That may be because genuinely new ideas are hard to come by today. There is also a lot of risk associated with them. Execution, although it has its pitfalls, largely depends on timing and effort.
Quote "I've learned that if you are not self-focused to some extent, the 40 ft wave will pick you up, drop you in the sand and drag you out to sea. OK, that's a bit dramatic, but it can feel that way."
I'd argue one's genuine style and force of will to pursue their passions are anything but narcissistic. Once a concept takes off, you can let go of the reigns and let the greatest folks do the job. They'll be here long after your gone and still plugging away with a vision you helped found.

If it's important enough, you'll make the sacrifice to build a lasting entity dedicating to solving a problem or inefficiency. Just recognize the end of yourself and the beginning of a larger community that forms the extent of a business (or non-profit foundation) you start.

What else can inspire us to work so hard, but something aligned directly with our passions and internal compass?
Yes, but nothing about whales.
> Instead, command-line executables could be given a specific tag, and the command-line would be able to execute any application that has that tag.

FWIW, plan9 allows you to control which portions of the filesystem are mounted into the visible namespace of a specific process.
Concerns raised as L.A. looks at Google Apps
Yes, it would. But this comes from a game developer, being one myself - we often need DEBUG builds that are relatively fast, because you develop your game mostly in such build (well not real DEBUG, but almost). For that reason, anything you can do help the compiler even if it's not optimizing is good.

For example overriding operators such +, -, for say matrices/vectors might seem good idea (off course inlined, etc.) - but in DEBUG it creates such overhead, especially if it's nested. Instead use simple function call.

Check Mike's page (cellperformance.com) - http://www.cellperformance.com/
Boston Dynamics now has version of their BigDog robot for use in education
won't this spam the crap out of people?

or are you doing the smart thing and just sending people a single email "We've found a new match" with a link to the craigslist search results, sorted for their search preferences?
Not bad at all. I had the same idea and was about to implement it, but you beat me to it. The only suggestion (small one) that I have, is that once you register for the first time, and it suggests you register again for another keyword, the city drop-down menu changes back to default. Generally speaking (although not always the case), the requester would probably choose the same city for every keyword search.
I suspect they'll have offline functioning that's cached locally and sinks up once a connection is restored.
Top 100 in his category? Or top 100 overall? I find that impossible to believe overall, and not surprising by category. There are a lot of less popular categories.
Palm needs a homerun, but bunted with the webOS SDK
My thoughts exactly. How quickly will you end up on a spam blocker list?
Isn't microsoft pushing out a web version office, wouldn't that imply a working version of excel within Chrome OS next year?
Continuing our long, invisible thread…

2^6 = 64, but I have red, green, and blue pixels, so times three, but subtract two because all the blacks are the same.

I suppose I'll need to write a small article on this with some pictures. In the process of researching this I was impressed with how useless macrophotography of a screen was. Small changes that are obvious to the human at a distance are invisible when looking at the individual r,g,b elements up close.

I'm away from my camera that can output RAW data, maybe with it and some numerical image analysis I can tell if there is multipixel dithering going on, but my human eye isn't going to tell, even from magnified pictures.
I'm not usually one of the anti-DRM frothing at the mouth folks...

but this screams out EPIC FAIL.
I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph. :)
Getting paid more for over-testing probably has something to do with it too.
Repeating myself: I think most startups underestimate the value of sales, marketing, biz dev.

Most startupreneurs secretly believe if they build it they will come, all you need is to email bloggers and ASK HN: Critic my web app. Even if you get that spike in the short term, it does not mean the traffic will sustain. Doubt it? Check the startups that presented at Techcrunch40 or 50 for that matter, and check their compete numbers against their business model, this will give you a good idea of their revenue.

Two, to three tech guys is ideal, but having a CEO ("chief everything else officer") to do everything from copy writing, to cold calling customers and the press, to setting up affiliate programs etc, testing landing pages, blogging, fund raising etc.... is necessary. This one person needs to sell, create distribution deals and sales channels for tomorrow, get customer feedback to drive product development etc...

Too many startups with a great product fail. And in several cases it was due to customer acquisition. What is your customer acquisition strategy and cost per acquisition? Most products are not viral. ( By viral I do not mean something that can be fwdd to your 300 facebook friends, but something that users will want to show their friends, coworkers, family. For example HN does not have SHARE, EMBED buttons, yet I consider it viral because I just can't seem to find enough smart people to tell about it.)
It would have been even more ironic if the book had been Fahrenheit 451.
Does anybody know what happened to the owner's annotations?
It would, or it might, but there are edge cases where it won't, and it's good to give the rights hints to the compiler (and then again every compiler is different).

http://www.cellperformance.com/articles/2006/04/programming_...

Though my favourite article from his site is this one:

http://www.cellperformance.com/articles/2006/06/box_overlap....
Actually I agree that folks who want a really great set of speakers probably should go for a reputable brand of studio monitors and appropriate amp (these days some studio monitors are powered and need no amp). You'll get better accuracy and less hype (marketing and/or frequency response, or both) than from high end audio speaker manufacturers. I'm suspicious of most high end "audiophile" products, because there's so much superstition and snake oil surrounding the business. Magic cables that cost hundreds of dollars, electronics suspended to prevent vibrations from altering the sound (this is sane for speakers and mics, not sane for solid state electronics), light switch and cable jack covers that claim to improve the sound of the room, etc. All with obscene price tags. A good set of studio monitors and a good amp isn't cheap, but most of the money you spend goes towards important stuff; like high quality components and a good design.

Folks are always amazed by the audio in my living room...it doubles as my office and home studio, and I have an obscenely overpowered Hafler amplifier driving a pair of Tannoy System 600 speakers. Those little speakers can shake the house, and they do it while being really precise and clear. I also have bass traps in all the corners and have made more than a passing attempt to make the room balanced and non-reactive, which is something most music consumers have never experienced (a good sounding room is at least as important as the speakers you put in it). It's still not exactly a studio experience, but it's pretty awesome for Rock Band Taco Night. I also just bought a projector and an 80" diagonal screen for our booth at OSCON next week...Rock Band Taco Night will never be the same.
If not their methods - their hardware was definitely a new thought at that time - Low cost commodity hardware etc; when it was cool to spend 10k on a server,
Yes. I was a geek growing up, but thanks to my size I was also an offensive lineman on the football team.

I was perfectly happy to pound on any obnoxious bully picking on a geek during PE class since the football coaches could keep me from getting into trouble. Not once did I get one to stand up to me. They really are cowards.
Showed them to a coworker, that was his first response.

I sit among a large group of conspiracy theorists at my work.
I use Open Office EVERY DAY. Let me say this.... succinctly:

OpenOffice the single worst piece of open source software available in any official repository. It is buggy, unfriendly, bloated, unreliable, and generally behaves in manners that do not make any sense. Crash and burn one boot, load fine the next.
How not to handle customers
I was just speaking with someone this morning about setting up CG updates to look for freelance gigs. Great start. Web workers will need to track several, if not all, cities though.
Sony Reader allows you to categorize your materials, while amazingly, Kindle doesn't have any hierarchy, just a long list. As a bonus, the Sony Reader doesn't have wireless DRM to remotely delete your books. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

(I have both devices. The Sony is more usable while the Kindle DX handles full size business and engineering PDFs.)
He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright.

Not that it matters, as you pointed out.
My guess is that it is actually illegal.
What I do not get is how amazon can be so right on the DRM issue with regards to digital music and be so backwards on the DRM of books.
I glanced at this paper, here's my basic understanding:

Given an end goal, and a list of web-services, automatically compose the data "piping" required to reach the end goal. Do all of this using AI.

Can someone confirm this? If so that's pretty amazing and I will be giving this topic a deeper look.
My First Failed Startup
Dupe, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710506
My guess is that they either play nice with the publishing companies, or not at all.

Believe me, amazon hates this as much as you do. They had to credit a bunch of people's accounts for the books. Amazon is a company. One that spends money. The publisher is not the ONLY person that is seeing a taste of the $9.99. They're out the money they had to give to sprint (is it sprint that provides the connectivity? somebody correct me if I'm wrong), and every other cost that was covered by the money you spent on the book.

This was a horrible horrible move for all parties involved.
Because B-Tree indexes perform orders of magnitude better on smaller lookup values, like say an integer, than they do on large (and even worse variable length) strings. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, but two big ones are the raw computation time it takes to compare two strings is much larger than the comparison of an integer that matches the register size of the machine. Second, the depth of the B-Tree is dependent on the key size used for the lookup.

As I said above, if you are using the materialized path for the type of problem it's best at solving, the speed differences won't matter so much. But that's primarily because the tree's aren't particularly deeply nested and/or that tree table itself isn't overly large. So in essence you are trading computational complexity for ease of use on smaller sets of data. In many cases that's exactly what's needed. On the other hand, if you will be modeling very large trees, or will have a huge number of them, nested sets are more efficient in terms of encoding and storage, as well as lookups and retrievals. The down side is that nested sets are more complex to setup and work with, and make understanding the structure of your trees more difficult.

IMHO, it's important not to fall into the trap that one technology/tool/solution/data structure will solve all of your problems. It's good to know the pro's and con's of different solutions and which problems they are most efficient at solving.
this is great, very simple and straightforward!
Fonts are a really bad example for the (otherwise valid) "fuck IE" mindset -- Internet Explorer was the first to support downloadable fonts, by a margin of at least 5 years!

The only problem is that you have to convert the font into an arbitrarily different format, ans Adobe and the foundries would have screamed bloody murder (as they are doing now with @font-face) if you could just use plain TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Webkit has supported @font-face for quite a while, Mozilla is the real straggler here -- they repeatedly refused to implement it for a decade, and when they finally did they added a bullshit same-origin policy. At least they didn't introduce a second stupid webfont format!
Does anybody know if amazon actively checks the books put on your kindle via their email service? There are a number of books that I own in dead-tree format (some of them, multiple copies in dead-tree format) that they don't offer in the kindle store.

This sort of move really scares me; I have been contemplating moving some of them to the kindle (I have the books in .txt format).
or the Readability bookmarklet :)

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
> Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals.

Are you a marketer?
The real question is whether Hoagland and the rest of the face-on-Mars/giant-towers-on-the-moon crowd will say these pictures are really alien structures on the moon that NASA is trying to pass off as the Apollo landing site...
It isn't amazon, it is the publishers.

Somebody commented on my blog about this the other day, and nailed it pretty well: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/
Why I don’t worry about competiton
Great! I'd like it if it remembered my city so I can add a few search terms in a row.
>You should try talking to people who were abused by their parents, or rape survivors.

Don't compare bullying to rape. They are not in the same class. That's not to say that bullying isn't bad, just that rape is on a different level entirely.

>It's telling that not a single one of these invitations contained an apology.

Is it? True apologies are usually given in person.

>Victims of abuse are usually more affected by it than perpetrators.

Ergo, the victim is best advised to take steps to cure themselves, regardless of what happens to the perpetrators.

He's the angry one, not me. I'm only pointing out that it is better for him if he isn't angry. I care little about the feelings of his bullies, to be honest.
I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon"

Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.
> Please don't compare standard bullying to sexual assault. The two experiences are not comparable.

They're not the same, but, yes, they're comparable.
Unfortunately the browser isn't the only place to access user-generated content. Take for example a Twitter client, just by nature of being a Twitter client and theoretically having access to the public timeline with mature content is enough to get a 17+ rating. Or...name any app that would need a browser built-in, presumably because the user would come across many links while using the app (and of course the dev wants to provide a better user experience via not having to quit the application)...where would the links come from? It wouldn't be just the browser that needs restricted.
There's not going to the reunion, and then there's posting fuck you's on the internet in a sad rant.

I'm not commenting on his decision to not going to the reunion, I'm commenting on the fact that he's still very upset by these events. It's in his interest to let it go, but I don't expect him to be best friends with all his bullies.
You continue to speak as if "human interaction === high school reunion". No. You're either rationalizing or thinking fuzzily, though I'm beginning to trend towards the latter.
Electric Sheep
http://community.sheepserver.net
Only if you equate bullying to be only its most extreme forms.
Krav Maga for the +1. They teach you straight from the get go that it's about survival and nothing more. It's brutal, but the education is worth it.
A similar case, in which a comma allowed an escape from a 5-year contract:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838...
EBay's Browser Highlighter Firefox extension / plug in 
On my site we noticed that some of our users had some JavaScript problems which was affecting content editing. After a bit of nosing around we found the problem was a Firefox extension called The Browser Highlighter.

This extension was created by eBay and it injects some unwanted JavaScript into the page which can affect the JS in your site.

What follows is a means of detecting this extension so you can protect your code from it.
Amen.

I was picked on, and I learned to fight.

Everything in life is a cost/benefit trade off.

If it's fun to push you around, and the cost is low, people will push your around.

If it's fun to push you around, and you land a few dozen punches before the fight is over, the cost is too high, and the abuse stops.
Cool.

Might get spammy.

I don't see a revenue model anywhere. Nor a marketing model. Pull out the checkbook for adsense?
This site will likely either get down down for TOS violations - or its spidering IP will get blocked by craigslist.

If anyone on hackernews wants a (more powerful) ruby program/lib to do this exact thing (with multi-city amd regex search support!), I recommend you check out craigwatch/libcraigscrape : http://www.derosetechnologies.com/community/libcraigscrape
But it's not about refusing to support them completely. Also, the difference between trying this strategy today and even 2 years ago is that CSS now has features that would be compelling to end users rather than just developers. Users couldn't care less if developers want to use Safari/FireFox/IE8 because they support display: table. But users are becoming more demanding in terms of user experience and as they realize that the alternative browsers let them have nicer typography and cool desktop-like animations/transitions they will begin to demand this kind of thing.

For a while, some die-hards will probably try to use Flash to mimic the experience that HTML5 and these new CSS features offer. But I think the uptake of Flash amongst new developers is less than that of standards-based practices. Simply by virtue of having more developers supporting the standards based approach, I think Flash will eventually be eclipsed until it is relegated to a niche, kind of like how Google Maps is everywhere now and MapQuest is dying.

There is this big assumption that users are resistant to change. I'm inclined to believe they're resistant to unnecessary change. We just need to make them feel compelled to change and users will do so. For the first time in a while, Safari and FireFox actually have compelling features to users that IE does not. That changes the landscape quite a bit.
I've noted, over the years, many sites that scrape craigslist data for one purpose or another. They run for a few months, get popular, get noticed by craigslist, get shut down.

Do you have ongoing communications with them to avoid this fate?
I do high performance systems research - half of the time using the Cell, coincidentally - and I've learned to just write straight-forward, idiomatic C/C++ as much as possible. I'd only perform the kind of optimization the author suggests if I knew for sure that code was my bottleneck.
Anti-trust had no teeth last decade because of the 'privatization is good, private enterprise can do no wrong' economic orgy that just came crashing down, and as a result IE has held the internet back a decade. Just THINK of where we would be if Netscape had won.

The political climate has shifted in the wake of the housing crisis, so... could a class action suit have some teeth? Think of all the money lost in fixing IE-specific bugs that only exist because Microsoft used its monopoly to shove an inferior browser onto every desktop, and then refused to put resources into developing it, to ensure they continued to make money on rich client applications and their operating system. Think of the cumulative cost of fixing IE bugs across our entire economy.

Microsoft owes the American people billions for IE. I want a class action suit against them. There are IE-specific bug billing records that surely amount to billions of dollars at companies across America. Companies would line up with invoices to web developers to join the suit.

Microsoft owes us all money. They must be stopped, and they must pay.
They bullied you the way they best knew how, and now you bully others the way you best know how.
This is amazing. Thank you!!
No, your community is not dying.
The most logical reading of the or is that you are allowed to display the content as many times as you want, and those displays may either be on the screen or in another manner that has been authorized by Amazon.

That said, I'm sure their lawyers will be able to spin it as meaning that they grant you the right to keep the copy as authorized by them.
The main teacher definitely knew how to fight (Mike Winkeljohn, look him up), but I'm definitely with you on questioning the type of training and the standards by which belts are rewarded. The problem is that a lot of karate places are not really in the business of teaching kids how to fight.

It's a lot like Boy Scouts. The parents want to see progress, and so the belts are handed out to any kid who checks off all the requirements, which mostly consist of memorization and a minimal standard of physical fitness. It's a business, and doing that works better for the real customers: the parents. It certainly works for the OP even though his kids are obviously not learning how to fight ("His Karate dojo is wonderful, and he loves doing it. It's actually a very gentle dojo..."). A lot of kids love to do it anyway. I was just disappointed that my main purpose for studying karate was mismatched. I'll also grant that there is a small element of "getting out of it what you put into it" as well.
Oracle owns a bit more than the name -- they have full copyright over the mainline source!

They are the only party that can sell commercial licenses to the mainline GPL code. All community forks will have to be GPL-only.