skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My co-founder does all of this, and I am eternally grateful to him for it, because it's stuff I hate and would be awful at. Even if he worked less than me, which he definitely doesn't, keeping my schedule and mind free of these worries would be worth it.
Interesting.
So, what became of Goyer and Cormie?
I'd like to hear more about their experience.
yr. 2000 was early days!
Textbook Price Comparison Engine
This is a project of mine that I spent the past several days on. I know that the idea is not original, but as a college student I've witnessed that most of my fellow students still ignorantly pay sticker price at the campus bookstore. Thus, I figure it may be worth it to compete in this market. I'm submitting this in hopes of hearing your thoughts on my site and the concept.
Semi-related.. I saw a paid app recently that had hundreds of reviews, yet it wasn't particularly popular. The trick? The game gave you a code that you needed to share with other players in order to progress, and the review section seemed like the logical place to do that.. so the users often reviewed the site while sharing their code to be typed in by other players :)

That's the way to do it.
I think negative reviews have a far stronger effect than positive, anyway. If I'm checking out an app that looks good but I see a bunch of negative reviews about crashing, etc, there's no way I'll buy it.
I am not sure I understand in depth enough about SEO to fully understand this idea, but it sounds good in concept.
ILike, Lookery, Google Voice: Recent platform lessons from app developers
The problem with increasing the price of gas is you hurt the poor most of all. Honestly, jacking up the price of gas isn't going to change my driving habits at all, but doubling the cost of gas (for example) will absolutely impact the budget of a lower income person who is commuting to work in an older car. They can't afford a newer car, they can't afford to move closer into the city, and there isn't public transportation available. They have no options other than to cut back on things like food and braces for their kids, etc... (sure some folks blow lots of money on cigs, big screen tvs, beer, etc... - but honestly the majority of people who are just scraping by, are doing their best).

Figure out how to make it affordable (while being safe) for people to live closer into major cities, and you'll have a real impact on gasoline usage.
By that logic no one should bother voting, in which case the entire system would fail to work at all, obviously a flawed outcome. Thus voting does matter, so you should vote. Worrying about the probability of your vote being the winning vote is pointless, there is no winning vote. If the election was decided by a single vote, then every single vote counted and as mattered just as much as the last vote.

While your individual vote might not statistically matter in choosing the winner, in aggregate, it most certainly does. Voting is not an individual thing, it's a collective thing and judging it by the individual is simply the wrong approach.
I don't see anything wrong with using a formula to communicate when the formula is State conclusion first, then how that effects current status, what to do next, and finally why all this happened.

When I give research updates, I basically follow this format. I don't give a long explanation of what I did, leaving people guessing at the outcome, and only at the end presenting my numbers and finally, my conclusion. I state my conclusion first, the numbers I have to back up that conclusion, then go into why I think these numbers are correct (what I did).
As a project manager managing multiple projects, I often need status updates from my team. I find that without a standard structure, people often fail to convey the most important information. I ask my team to report status in the following manner:
1. Of the things that were expected to be done at this point, what is not done?
2. What other deliverables are in danger of not being done in time?
3. What is being done about items in #1 and #2
4. Of the things that were expected to be done at this point, what is done?

I'd love to receive feedback about this process. What has worked for you?
The phone call reporting it is. I imagine his son put in the "bull is dead" bit to be funny - which it was. But when I've had to make similar phone calls, I always start with "I'm okay, but..." It tells the person on the other end the most important thing first: I'm okay.
_why Sighting
According to this:

http://whereintheworldiswhy.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/looking...

The person writing this had a blog hosted on why's site.
Ask HN: What would you do with a Class C IP block?
Coding
programming channel in IRC DALnet
The funny thing is that would-be novelists have same illusion and face the same failure - except the ideas of writers don't have to be as original...
I just remembered that I had a full list of those whose work I used as inspiration on the original jquery.com site (including Simon Willison, Dean Edwards, and the Behaviour library).

http://web.archive.org/web/20060203025710/http://jquery.com/
All the "environmental destruction" is natural. But, to the degree that we even can choose, we should think about whether it's desirable.
mashable is usually the last tech blog i read because the content is not too helpful and most of it is just cliche.

For more knowledgeable readers mashable just doesn't go deep enough.
Then we need to get rid of old people. More funding for developing anti-aging and regenerative therapies.
I'd guess you'd be in his target audience. Someone who's already comfortable with complex causality and relationships between seemingly-random facts.
Ah, reading your post again - We're special in that we can decide what effects we want to have - indeed we may be only special in being able to decide we don't want certain effects. We might not be special in being able to decide we won't actually create them. Human beings, as devastating as fire ants but with more regrets!
Great submission. Pretty relevant to Hacker News, since writers and startups work in the similar high odds environment (like NNT's "Extremistan"). Circumstance, timing and luck have at least as much influence on the ultimate result as merit. (Though, unlike writers, startups can have investors financing their attempts. Some writers have it in the form of advance payment. I wonder if there's a YC model for authors..)

As for "A Web server and worth-of-mouth is all that you need to reach an audience of 50 million", I think this is telling of the time this was written, in 1996. Seems to me we've since discovered that reaching a large audience online requires similar amounts of luck or self promotion as it did pre-Web, perhaps with cheaper costs.

(BTW, I always thought this doers vs credit takers is the main underlying theme of The Wire. The conflict between the McNultys and Rawls's of this world.)
A different approach:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/unicode_samples.html
This reminds me of that YC funded recruiting company (forgot the name--help!) that closed up shop and had their postmortem featured on HN recently. The conclusion was that HR departments aren't a profit center, so there's no motivation to innovate.

Maybe there should be a RFS for a better way to measure HR performance; that way, at least the pointy-haired bosses could be yelled at by their pointy-haired bosses when they score below industry average, or worse than last year.
Except you don't actually know that no harm was done. What if this person that this happened to was married (that is not a fun conversation to have even if it didn't happen), or because of what was posted they lost their job. You have no idea. I am sorry this isn't a joke it is vandalism.
It's one extra year, take it. The companies you mention, they all work with large amounts of data and are generally working on problems not many other companies are dealing with. You may learn some math or comp sci theories that could one day help you with an "Aha!" moment while on the job.
I'm so glad to see Devo didn't get left off the list!
I just made a resume on here to try it out. I like the concept, but the styles need some serious work... Keep at it!
If you're ever out of things on your to-do list, you have a big one still left: make your site #1 for the search query "learn chinese".
Spirit Sol 18 Anomaly
your idea is great, but i agree with most people commenting your website design needs to be touched up.
Apple TV Set by 2011?
That doesn't fit the "conclusion first" advice that makes sense to clarify a situation. Problem is, an irrelevant conclusion was chosen. A better alternative following the advice would be something like "I'm OK but the car is wrecked."
For this proof to be complete, it needs to be shown that the trapezoid sequence fills ABC triangle in its entirety. I.e. that for every point between A and C there is a trapezoid in the sequence that covers it. Not hard to do by any means, but the resulting proof is not going to be purely visual anymore.
If you lived in a small neighborhood (or some apartment buildings, if the walls aren't too thick) you could start a little ISP. Or you assign all of the devices in your house an IP address, and even break down the ranges (e.g. N to M are for kitchen appliances.)
While I agree with you in principle that IRC is underrated, it is not a real messaging system as is.

First off, it is inherently synchronous, not asynchronous.
On top of that does it lack a bunch of core features, namely persistence, and delivery/ordering guarantees.

The former can be worked around by implementing your actual pub/sub heavylifting in the form of irc-bots. But the latter is a killer that cannot be solved without significantly rearchitecting any existing ircd impl.

Disclaimer: Yes, been there, done that. ;-)

If you're interested in high performance messaging beyond AMQP then I suggest to take a look at the spread toolkit. It doesn't have persistence either but is pretty good otherwise.
Yeah, you got me, ok. But somebody would say this eventually, I saved this somebody's ass, didn't I?
Just Americans. I'm in Canada paying my rent online.
Hijack Any Ruby Process with IRB
I'm saying that the entire purpose of a life, any life, is what value you give it. If you like trees, or unicorns, or puppies, or whatever -- that's really all you have: your definition of yourself.

Right, and not what other people think of you or your opinions. Unless you also consider a purpose of your life is what other people think of you and your statements.
The part about the $1 million VC money. But perhaps it wasn't you who made it up.
I never said that this was a joke, funny, not vandalism, or even not a horrible thing to do. Your example of a person losing their job over this is a good argument that harm can result from this kind of vandalism. However, I do think there is a distinction between an event causing someone to lose their job and their boss making an incorrect assumption about an event(in this case, that their employee actually posted an untoward message) and firing them. It's still horrible to break into someone's account and cause "them" to say something which will cause them to lose their job, but the vandal is not the only one at fault in that situation. No employer should fire someone for a post on facebook that appears to be written by them without first at least making sure. Realistically, they might.

Regarding the case of a married person, if you don't trust your spouse enough to know that they're not having anal sex with some other man, or at least enough to consider that less likely than that their account was compromised, you shouldn't be married to them.
How much time did you give them to respond before posting your story?
Rent them out?
That would be perfect for when somebody contacts you by email about millions of dollars to share. Once there's a real physical handshake, they would have no way to back out of that deal! Too much honor at stake!
I really like this idea, though probably the other sites would be the same shown in the search results. Usually when people are looking for something, they just orderly open the search results.
How would you know who's a criminal?
Control structures are high level abstractions around common patterns found with jumps and conditional branches. Many such patterns have been identified, ranging in complexity from simple loops and conditionals to non-local returns to cooperative multi-threading.

To assert that there is no possible good use for GOTO implies that every conceivable control flow pattern has a more clean and intuitive implementation using only the high level control structures.

When you consider the variation, from language to language, in the selection of control structures available, the conjecture seems absurd. At the very least, GOTO is a reasonable compromise when forced to use a language like C, which lacks structures for such common patterns as exceptions, among others.

What is certainly worse than using GOTO is contorting code to use high level control structures in counter-intuitive ways, or worse yet, implementing ad-hoc control mechanisms using conditional variables. For purposes of readability, an informatively labeled GOTO is greatly preferable to such obfuscation.

Fortunately, we have versatile languages like LISP and Ruby which provide a rich library of control flow abstractions and allow us to create our own using closures. For the rest of the world, let them have their GOTO.
It certainly is not appropriate in every circumstance, but it can make a lot of sense for larger applications where you might have different people or even teams responsible for different parts of the application.
devise a numeric code so that users navigating across the ip's are receiving an "important" message. the website navigation plays along with this "choose your own adventure" game.
I agree that's a better phrase based on the rules, but stating what happened ('car crash') rather than the result ('car is wrecked') conveys more information (ie. why 'I' am not already home).
Either works though.
> Religion and ignorance, in all their forms, are a curse upon mankind and should be mercilessly eradicated.

These attacks were not on religion, they were an attack on religious people. This is the equivalent of saying "Communism should be mercilessly eradicated" and immediately killing as many citizens of communist countries you can find.

APPEND: ...while ignoring the Politburo!
Original link: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/james_dysons_uphill...
O'Reilly's attempting to fix Government caused me to suddenly remember Buffett's saying "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact."
From their searches of course!

It comes up in criminal cases all the time -- when you're googling "age of consent laws" or "how to dispose of a dead body" it's pretty easy to establish premeditation, though that doesn't help with 'pre-crime'.

The GP may have been focused on finding known fugitives on the run.
So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ...

And that's it.

They have access to "the world's combined knowledge" and a zillion PhDs, and that's all they can do?! It's shocking. But it's not, really, because the data are basically useless without annotations.

So let's go to Disneyland and pretend we have a genius NLP engine or an annotated web. Then,

1) 360 on a company/product. In particular: who are all the stakeholders, and how do they feel? I'd sell this to e.g. analysts. Same thing on people's online identities.

2) Memetracing. I'd sell this to advertisers. (So, we follow historical product releases and see exactly what memes spread about them and how, and through who. Related to (3) on ismarc's post)

3) Rumors (this would require your feed to be real-time). I'd also probably sell this to stock traders (the idea here is to monitor e.g. forums frequented by GE employees to guess scoop)

OK, so those are basic. More interesting:

4) Organization-tracing. If you can label social graph edges with influence levels / information intakes, you can start playing with predicting organizational decision-making (behavioral economics / game theory ..There's a TED talk about this).

5) Games: procedural content generation that looks really real, i.e. worlds full of people whose identities are plausible, whose interactions with others are plausible, etc.

Those all require some analytical / NLP firepower on a scale which I don't think is really doable at the moment. The problem is that bags of words are meaningless without a social context - the data are pretty worthless unless your computer can figure out who it's important for and why.
Ask HN: What's the best way to retrieve educational data?
I'm working on a project right now that requires a lot of data about higher education institutions to even get started. I need the following information about colleges in the US: State, Name of College, List of Departments, and List of Department Designators (CPS for Computer Science, BIO for Biology).

How would you go about farming this data? I've thought about submitting specific requests to Amazon Mechanical Turk, but I wasn't sure if there were any other resources out there that might be useful.
Just get Adobe Air working. Doesn't have to be on an iPhone, just needs to work offline, and re-upload my progress. I study Japanese, but only on my way to Japan.

The flight takes 9 hours. So I bring my Casio e-dictionary with stylus and audio, and for 9 hours I intensively review JLPT words, sentences and kanji. By the time I land, I've regained about 90% of my abilities from the previous visit 6 months ago, and a sleep and then 2-3 more hours the following night get me back where I was.

But .. I have an Asus EeePC that lasts for 7.5 hours. Your product seems much more efficient for learning characters than my Casio. If I could use your product for 7.5 hours and learn as much as I get from the Casio in nine, that'd leave time for peanuts and a movie. So .. put it on Adobe Air (and get Japanese support!)
I really like Joel's point about reaching out to Chinese community centers. This gave me some good ideas for what you guys can do at Skritter so let me elaborate.

This is from a Chinese San Franciscan's perspective, so it maybe a little skewed. But there are lots and lots of parents who are worried that their kids are going to grow up to be illiterate. It's very common here for parents or grandparents to pay for Chinese language summer school for their kids or grand kids. One marketing/sales perspective is you could appeal to this demographic (the parents and grandparents of users). This would be one demographic where they will just pay for it and keep up recurring payments regardless of actual usage.

Chinese community centers are one place where you could reach them. Most of these organizations have websites now and contacts.

You could even try talking to some of these Chinese schools to see if they'll buy a few subscriptions.

One weakness that I do see in pursuing this route is you guys lack a Chinese version of your site. If you want to try to penetrate this demographic, you will need some marketing material in Chinese.

P.S.: Ugh, okay I hate to contradict myself in the same post but giving it even more thought I realizes that many Chinese kids not interested in learning Chinese. This misalignment of interests is probably not one that will cause the kind of word of mouth growth you are looking for. But could be worth a try if you've exhausted other ideas. Chinese communities are very tight knit, so any market penetration could have fast traction.
Tell HN: SHDH34 going on now, hacker heaven.
First time at SuperHappyDevHouse and I wasn't sure what to expect. Colleague told me not to get excited and that there'd be way more partying than coding. Not true. The house is lined with tables with laptops everywhere. Rows of coders working on projects; some in the pool out back; there's lots of awesome here all around. Friendly group, great time. Come say hi.

http://superhappydevhouse.org/

http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse34
I don't think it's listed in one place - I would get a list of school from Wikipedia or the Dept. of Education (they must have a list somewhere), and put it out as a MT task. If you do this, do a search for how to properly use the service, as there seems to be a certain etiquette and way to interact with the Turkers to get best results. One example of the kind of post I mean is http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/09/mechanical-turk-now-..., but I know there have been a few others posted here.

If you don't want to Turk it, you could put it out on craigslist or Kijiji as a freelance contract, but I suspect this would be more trouble than any savings you'd get over MT.
> There is outstanding ambiguity in DMCA and related laws

Sorry, I'm a Canadian. That being said, (a) You folks have this crazy idea that your laws reach around the world so that if someone breaks, say, the password protection for a document format in Russia he should be arrested when he sets foot on American soil, and (b) You folks have been putting a LOT of pressure on our government to bring our laws into compliance with whatever your media companies desire.
That has far less to do with TC being principled than it does TC being on good terms with YC.
Here's a better solution: replace the suburbans with Priuses instead of buying into Godin's tired, second-hand false dichotomy. Some of us are wired for arithmetic, actually.
Wow, that is so cool. Anyone have a video of it in action? That's gotta be pretty trippy.
This was already submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778694

Please don't modify the submitted URL to bypass the duplicate checker.
I've oft thought that was the failing of most college programs. You're asked to show all your work, but rarely is the explanation for your decisions given nearly as much weighting as the actual outcome and how you got there. In reality is what you actually learned.

Switch over to the real world where 'cheating' becomes 'teamwork' and problems are discovered rather than verbosely outlined. Communication becomes the face of your reputation. While the ability to deliver may be the heart, no one can see it without closer inspection.
This is the technical equivalent of: "Hey, I found $100 what should I do with it"? 255 addresses ... woo-hoo.
It was him who called it an indisputable fact.
Oh I absolutely agree. Karma is definitely little more than an odometer and not useful for reputation purposes at all outside of an individual comment, and even then it doesn't say a whole lot.
Neat stuff. I love (now) archaic hardware.

One thing that I've always wondered - does having computers that are vastly less understandable/accessible mean that kids growing up with them end up learning less?
"So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ..."

There's actually a lot more that's done with it. Google Flu Trends. Google Zeitgeist. Google Squared. Google Suggest. Refinements. Spelling suggestions. Sitelinks. Wonder Wheel. Everything on Labs.

The limiting factor is more the ability to present the data to users without making them confused. It's pretty easy to run an analysis and get some data, but pretty difficult to figure "Okay, what problem does this solve?" and get that data in front of users in a way that actually solves the problem.
Such a massive privacy violation. How would you feel if you searched for "age of consent laws" to lay the smackdown on some Reddit debate (http://xkcd.com/386/) and the Feds came knocking on your door?
Survival? Where are Jews hunted nowadays?

I'm talking about what the Jewish community currently uses. It seems sorta sad that they would adopt the same attitude toward 'Jew-ness' that the Nazis used... In a Helsinki-syndrome sort of way.