skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Product idea - like it or hate?
Hey hey hey! I've had a product idea for a web app for some time now. I'd really love to hear your input on this.

Basically it's time management for students. We all know that most students are pretty bad at time management. Now what do you think about a web app that would cost $10/semester for students and they could either send a message via cell phone/twitter it via cell phone with the message (example: "math test 101 #next friday") and that would be added to their personal timeline. They'd get sms/email alerts when they have a test coming up.

SO, they can either login to the web app and update it simply by typing a human message like "do homework for #tomorrow", or send a twitter message with that content and it'd be added to their personal timeline.

Please tell me what you think about this idea. Do you like it? Would you use if (if you were a student)?

Thanks,
Emil Hajric.
That would probably require a more advanced manipulation of the phone. When they trigger on ring, it's probably just using the power to the speaker or something built-in.
Yes, we did that too, all the obvious ideas we have tried at some point in the last decade.

Having the users police each other works as long as there is no abuse of that power, as soon as they figure out how to game the system you get 'cliques' that will do such funny things as ban all the gays, all the old people, all the women and so on. Pretty soon there'd be nobody left.

I'm 100% convinced that it is possible somehow though, just that I haven't found it yet so please keep those 'obvious' ideas coming, maybe one of these days someone hits the jackpot.
Interesting! I'm not familiar with KiokuDB or Moose so I hope you don't mind a couple questions:

- what is the return value of $self->data in the example you link to?

- do you store the digest or calculate it each time?

- where can I find an example of the digests being used? I looked around the repo a bit but couldn't find one.
I've been thinking about this grand invention for quite a while. Imagine it: a man-powered vehicle like the unicycle, but with two wheels. I think I'll call it a double-unicycle, but it's not quite as catchy as I want it to be. I'm still stuck on how to transport the kinetic energy of the pedals to both wheels, though - I'm thinking some sort of double chain system, where the pedals drive both unicycles. Seat placement could, perhaps, be problematic as well...
Ah, no problem. Thank you!
Ask NH: Any talented graphical designer want to join me? i'm a programmer
Hi,
I'm a programmer lacking the skills of a graphical artist I would like to join forces with a graphical artist to work on a couple of projects and make our own business come to live. anyone wants to join me? please reply with email if yes if you have a link to previous works please I would like to see. Thanks.
Seems like that would entail something in the phone that could see if it's connection to the base stations had unexpectedly fallen to almost zero. Assuming this is how being jammed works. This is probably quite hard to do on any non-sdk'd phone, so it might not have come up yet. Iphone prices probably need to drop a bit more...

Cleary a dedicated radio detonator could be programmed to work like this, but then we are talking improvised here.
Ask HN: Any talented graphical designer want to join me? i'm a programmer
Hi,
I'm a programmer lacking the skills of a graphical artist I would like to join forces with a graphical artist to work on a couple of projects and make our own business come to live. anyone wants to join me? please reply with email if yes if you have a link to previous works please I would like to see. Thanks.
I like how in one of the examples of an entrepreneur who was able to get a supplier to front some initial costs, the supplier happened to be her father. That must have taken some tough negotiating!
Or any of the millions of old, used and classic cars available almost anywhere, typically for not a lot of money.

...I'd love to ride a bike to work, but I don't think the company would appreciate it if I showed up a day late for work every day...
Mozart as well. Also Bartok, Wagner, Stravinsky & Prokofiev are frequently played.
It's not really about the idea, it's about getting it done.
"Iranians are some of the most active internet users in the world, particularly when it comes to blogging, social networking, and similar activities."

That's true. That's why I expected some of the bloggers I know to go "green". Also they write mostly in Farsi usually, they rarely focus on the English speaking public. So I know quite well how the Iranian people use the Web. Btw. do you know the Iranian Digg-like social news community Balatarin? My blog has been popular there twice.

Also I do not refer to user names but the avatar and the language of the tweets. Most of them were saying "Where is my vote" etc. immediately as if in a concerted/planned effort.

"The tinting of avatars to green was a movement by others to support the Iranians, not a move by Iranians themselves. Although, of course, it is inspired by the use of green by Iranians in real-life to support their candidate."

No, the allegedly Iranian Twitter users started it. The "Where is my vote" crowd did it first.

"Moussavi represents a small shift from Ahmadinejad"

Exactly. People rarely flock to the streets and risk their lives for a small shift. So there is something inherently flawed with this "movement".

The revolution will not be tweeted. Whatever we have witnessed on Twitter it was just a faint echo of the real events.
The hardest part is actually getting the person to WANT to manage their time. Once that happens there are tons of ways to do it. Consider the iPhone. It's just as easy to enter something into the calendar as it would be to text your server.

A better system might be one that focuses on the teachers providing most of the input and the students subscribing to their teachers events.
My startup Classleaf http://classleaf.com leaves it up to the teachers to put in homework and tests and whatnot. (Also has email notifications in the development version, which can be sent to regular sms.)

I had a failed startup called Student Concourse (academic homework/grades/tests/events/everything management) and what we found out from it was that students don't like to take time to plan. Users used it for a day then they stopped using it because it was annoying to put in content.

It's easier for the teacher to put it in and for the student to receive the sms without needing to do anything but subscribe to the teacher's inputted class events.
There is a difference between planning to fail and failure-tolerant.

People and companies still need to have long term vision of what to do "in case" your product is actually good, your startup actually gets funded, and of success in general. This turns you into a proactive player.

If all one does is have a system in place that reacts when something goes wrong, then this is really being reactive.

I believe Andrew is missing the bigger picture.
It would be good to see the "classic" view of the main page listed on the "lists" link available from the bottom of several pages.
I tried this out (in the US).
Downloads don't work, printing returns an error "Printing has been disabled" and reading it with scribd is pretty inconvenient.
I guess the point is that you can read it for free if you're willing to put up with a lot of inconvenience.
Dyndns gives out homelinux.org subdomains, so probably.
I really like the idea of being able to customize TC for whatever specific requirement is needed. That's something that most data stores are not very good at (and some may argue should not be good at), but it seems pretty powerful when it's there.
It's probably a lot cheaper and easier just to wire it directly and go find a house to camp out in until the vehicles pass.

Not all IDE's are designed the same way. Hence the "I".

The easiest one would just be 3-4 AT mines linked together. This one looks to be anti-personnel/light vehicle, as fuel/air won't really defeat most armour.
This reads like a text book architecture astronaut...
Why focus just on students? Maybe make a general calender/sms applications, then do small customizations for different groups.

You could have a student calender or a family calender.
You're probably correct. I doubt that even Jobs and Ive are superhuman enough to build the right product at the beginning. I do wonder how they do this with their culture of secrecy. Any focus group they run must be quite small or they must be splitting up their focus group tests.

For example, I remember reading a story about someone testing out the iPhone UI alone in a contraption in a box as opposed to the real hardware.
The problem with contract to hire is that it sounds great (atleast on paper), for the company but for the employee - most people interviewing take it to mean that the company wasn't super impressed with their interview and wants to test them out, and they could get kicked out at any time.

Think about interviewing for a job (not from an entrepreneurial mindset) - what you're looking for is the safety and security of a job and what the company is giving you is a contract position that can be terminated at any time without severance or notice.

It is a great idea but there is stigma (possibly unsubstantiated) associated with it.
California small businesses fight for their cash
Realism to the Smartphone Hysteria, part 1: Scale
MakingOf Credibility
I want to manage my time, but I always forget that I have better things to do when I have a moment to sit down and waste time on reddit or comic books. I wouldn't mind a service providing an interstitial before a blacklist of time-wasting sites with my interactive to-do list on it, perhaps with a lens flare over the more urgent items or something. That isn't this program, but it'd be useful to me.
Yea, but then you would be nearby when a few dozen pissed off Marines jump off the other trucks in the convoy. Plus air support, tanks etc. The last thing insurgents want to do is be anywhere near the actual fight.
"So would you say that the US State Department should have supported the efforts of the Iranian government in quelling dissent amongst the election protesters?"

No. What I'm saying is: The US State Department should keep out of Iran, especially after supporting the last bloody dictatorship (of the infamous Shah) the current rulers have abolished. The thugs who tortured the Iranian people still live in the US and wait for the US invasion to come back. Compared to back then Iran is now a really democratic country. Back then there were no elections at all, he ruled like a king.

Thus any interference of the US government in Iran is very suspicious and far from genuine interest in democracy etc.

Also as I stated above this movement wasn't very "grassroots". It was the old clerics against the young militarists.

I'd love to believe there was genuine support for the people of Iran but to believe this is more than naive, not after the invasion threats to Iran in recent years and the whole history of anti-Iranian policy in the US. Don't forget that Iran has even more oil than Iraq.
I would second your thought. I worked for a enterprise software company that had developers building the product, a maintenance team that fixed bugs and 3 layers of support.

The only people who knew what was going on with a huge product were the developers who actually wrote it.
But you had to go thru so many layers to get to the developers, irrespective of silver or gold or platinum support. I would never ever pay for support of another product that comes from a big corporation.

We went opensource with our products and every developer responded directly to questions from customers. It made a big difference to the users.
I'm in a similar boat. I guess a follow up question to the OP, are there communities similar to this one focused on UI (not just Web)?
Quit charging per hour. Start charging on a per project basis.

In the long run - you'll make more money. And will find clients who won't quibble if you take an hour more to get the job done. No time pressure - better output - and better pay.
Depends who your target is. The channels you listed require a bit of tech savvy, my mom is not going to file a bug report.
My comment was mainly to point out the lack of context, and could have been clearer. But mental stamina may not be a good thing emotionally, that isn't really explored. The term mental stamina is fine, since that's what the study was about, but the first paragraph over-emphasizes the value judgment in order to antagonize and stimulate argument. So with an article like that, don't expect the responses to be intellectual.

Could you elaborate on your definitions for "early bird" and "night owl"? My everyday semantics align with the article.

An early bird, to me, is someone who likes getting up early and usually does. An early bird, according to the study, is someone whose natural circadian rhythm is shifted earlier in the day. A night owl, to me, is someone who regularly stays up late. According to the study, it's someone whose natural circadian rhythm is shifted later in the day.

In everyday use, night owls include people who stay up late and sleep late because they like getting hammered. In everyday use, early birds include people who force themselves out of bed at the crack of dawn with an alarm clock and a cup of coffee. In every day use, the terms apply to people who may spend significant portions of their day engaged in physical activity. None of those people fit the definitions used by the study (as I understand it, anyway)
Unix apps use userhelper symlinks and pam service files (which may invoke group memberships) as equivalent to Windows UAC. Userhelper (or gksudo instead) is either off or on. There is no 'on for particularly sensitive operations, off for others' levels per Windows 7.

Also no Unix has a shell with object pipelining. Ie, you can run 'ps | where starttime < 2 hours' on Unix, you'd need to screenscrape using regexs (ie, sed / awk / etc). Powershell provides a separation between presentation and data that's quite refreshing. There are nix equivalents of this concept, they they're unstable and have very few commands available.

There is not a single driver on Unix, proprietary or OSS, that provides proper perfectly crisp DPI scaling for all applications in X. Nor do I believe this would be handled at the driver layer, but more the GTK (or QT etc) layer as it is for MFC in Windows.

Neither granular access control, object pipelining, or application DPI scaling are driver related.
That's a big part of my point.
Each distinct interface for a given share is resistance in parallel. The fact that IRC then was (and now is) a single point of contact --you have to be on a network that both supports the only protocol that IRC uses and reaches from you to the server-- means sharing text remotely from anywhere in the world via IRC is more difficult than a heterogeneous system like Twitter because there is only one resistor in parallel here: the network from your computer (if you have a computer and are connected to such a network) to the IRC server.
This is no conspiracy theory whatsoever, this is just politics as usual. To believe that the US does NOT engage in covert actions in Iran is more of a conspiracy theory. They readily admitted it several times.
Check this out e.g.:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552784/Bush-sanct...

When people can't say anything of value they resort to the conspiracy theory shut up technique and attack others on a personal level.
Speaking as a college dropout, who dropped out due to lack of money and immediately got a programming job, I would like to stress the importance of college. As far as the social experiences go, you will rarely ever be in an environment that is anywhere near the social level of college. As programmers we tend to get jobs where we are locked in on the computer all day off in our own world. I have definitely made social connections from working, but no where near the level that you get with college.

I agree with some of the other posts that you will not likely learn things in college that you don't already know or couldn't easily learn, about _computers_, but my recommendation is to ignore the computer curriculum in college (unless the program is outstanding) and pick a completely unrelated topic that you enjoy. Your college degree will be a piece of paper that no one cares about, so make college about you, not about getting a degree to impress someone else. This also has the advantage of keeping programming fun, a lot of programming classes and homework take topics that are very interesting and make them tedious and unenjoyable.

If I was to go back to college and start over right now, I would double major in physics and linguistics, and minor in greek/roman history and in philosophy. You can still take programming classes, but ignore the earlier classes, figure out the materials, teach yourself anything you need to know, and test out of those classes so you can just take the classes you are interested. There is also a lot of interesting math classes you can take.

(EDIT: typo)
It seems the organizations that are participating in this are still stuck in a 20th century media monopoly mindset. They really don't get the Web, and in the case of the American companies (Dow Jones, etc.) seem to be angling to regulate the clock back to 1987, when they didn't have to deal with more than a handful of competitors, and pesky things like fair use, hyperlinks, and Google weren't a concern.
Apple designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, talks about his work
cell phones have this neat little 'buzzer' in them to alert you during meetings. It's a little motor with an excentric weight attached to them, when the motor spins the weight will cause the phone to vibrate.

This is almost tailor made to set stuff off by remote. Beta test using the ringer, when it's all good make it hot by switching your profile to 'silent'.
Amazing! Now all we need to do is convince potential victims to use PS2 keyboards and we're golden.
I very much agree with the article, but would genuinely like to hear any counterexamples.
Look out for cyclists - on awareness
Dang. Now I have to wrap my keyboard cable in tinfoil hats.
"slow but sure it adds up" nice quote :-)
How does he manage to do it, without cranes or pulleys?
I heard a while back that they would intentionally use fake products for testing to see what group leaked the information. Kind of like having a watermark in the review copies of the movies given to the academy and sundance.
I had really obnoxious experiences with Akamai, Limelight and Panther Express. Technically - their services were fine, it was just all the other layers of people I had to deal with that was a pita.

http://www.bitgravity.com was my fav.
Ask HN: Coping with impending success?
New account, longtime HN user.

I think I'm about to get called up to the big leagues, and I find myself oddly nervous. I don't get nervous around the famous/powerful people in my world, but I am, perhaps, a little too used to being a relative nobody, myself. I'm comfortable with the scrappy underdog role to a fault. Now my efforts are beginning to bear fruit, and doors are beginning to open to me that haven't been in the past.

I don't want to mess it up. I need to relax. I suppose time will tell if I belong at that stratum, but in the meantime I was wondering if any of the more successful readers of HN remember this point in their careers, when they were on the brink of succeeding in a bigger way than they had ever succeeded before.

Can you share what it felt like, how you coped with it, and how you took the opportunity for all it was worth, rather than messing it up?

Any replies appreciated...

----

Edit: Also, even if you're not a superstar, have you ever personally known anyone with a big opportunity, who blew it? What mistakes did they make? Or, if you know someone who dealt with their opportunity stunningly well, how did they do it?
So, is that a win? How much is engineering (which I don't discount, it's a reasonably good site) and how much is $100M in advertising, to count for 8% over Live Search's numbers?
just wow...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/co_photobug/2501965309/in/pool-...

Thank you very much.
I'm not that big of a MS fan, but I really really hope Bing gives some serious challenge to Google. Its good for users to have a few choices than just one.
I think there are two things about the internet, that are pissing off newspapers.

1. Power-Loss

Newspapers do not dominate public discussions any more. This is nothing new and the melting adrevenues are just proving the pint to all those few that didn't already knew it.

2. Being forced to be engaged

Newspapers still have a chance, because quality still matters. The question is how to organize a profitable quality-producing workflow. There's no ultimate answer yet, but for the publishers it is already humiliating enough to be forced to do anything (see point 1).
As a Norwegian developer, $50 sounds incredibly low. You can't get a lot of contractors to do something for you for under $150. But the cost of living is higher in the metropolitan areas here than in the U.S.
Interesting, thanks.

I do want to make it clear I wasn't trying to attack the study so much as explain why people get upset and respond to something like this with anecdotal comments.
What is the technology behind this? It would be a perfect feature to integrate into a project I'm working on, but would rather have it inhouse then possibly overwhelm or upset a 3rd party.
I recently (about 4 months ago) quit my job as a Marketing Engineer, which I had taken when I graduated with Mechanical and Electrical Engineering degrees. I am now supporting myself full-time with my consultancy while I work on my startup (http://www.ratemystudentrental.com), which offers a Web-based rating system for student rental housing, with a management system for landlords and a private-label housing portal for universities.

I also just recently launched a new service that spawned from an internal RateMyStudentRental system I had developed, after a few people who incendentally saw me using it just "had to have it." And that one is called http://www.leadnuke.com.

I'm also trying to finish getting our band's first album mastered (just finished recording and producing), so we can post it on our site for downloading (http://www.moirocks.net).

And my new goal I just set for the next six months is to transition from running in typical cross-trainers to being able to run barefoot :-)
Good point. But Bing is a good search engine, we just have to wait for 6 months to a year, before making any serious comparisons with Google. If it is the $100M, it can take it only so far.
You mean it is not a conspiracy theory to imply that US agents faked twitter discussions to make the world think the Iranians was protesting? :-)

>> It looked very staged and not spontaneous. They could have been US government agents

I am sorry, but that is just not sane.

Edit: Like this, then. It is well documented that Iranians were protesting until shut down by violence. Can you give a reason why anyone would have an advantage to fake that the well documented protesters would fake twitter discussions about it?! It do sound like a classic Middle East conspiracy (and USA/Israel are the evil behind it!)

I really hope you're a troll.
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