skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How should we promote our web-based startup for as-free-as-possible.
Folks, We need your help with suggestions/feedback on how to spread word about our project. We are one month old startup based out of Bangalore and have a team of 4 people spread across India.

Thanks,
cc
Microsoft LifeCam Cinema goes 720p
Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain (video)
This slide is taken out of context to support the author's own ideology. First off, this slide describes only one of 13 criteria used when deciding on alternatives. This is certainly not the focus of the presentation. This presentation is showing the multitude of objectives that NASA decision makers must take into account when deciding on the future of their program. This is strictly an exercise in Multi Attribute Decision Making [1]. In general, with MADM techniques, you frame the objective as a weighted combination of criteria that you meet with appropriate weightings. We have no idea what "weights" (i.e. importance) were put to this criterion of maintaining workforce.

What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets.

As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do?

[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+dec...
To me this is the beginning of consumer HD. There's still a storage issue which needs to be solved but storage companies tend to keep plowing forward. Having HD in a webcam is one step away from the cell. phone which itself is one step a way from ubiquitous HD video.
A link or description of your startup would be a good first step. :)
"To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show up."

You do realize that this is the developer's classic response to a usability issue? The user is just clumsy/stupid/lazy/ignorant/blind/stubborn [pick one]. I'd agree that you can't make UI decisions based on one person's reported problem, but the correct response is not "RTFM" but "This issue should be tested in a usability lab with a reasonable cross section of the target market".
> Selling products?

If they're interesting products, I think that's cool. We're capitalists here:-) No spam, though, of course.

Affiliate links?

Why not, if it's an interesting product? I don't begrudge one of us making a bit of cash for showing us something cool. On the other hand, if someone's spamming, throw the book at them! It's pretty clear that 'frisco' is a user who participates in this site and is not a spammer, though.
Yet noone cares.

However, if you showed me a flash plugin that won't crash, would work with every browser (including my Konqueror) and wouldn't eat 99% CPU, I'll go WOW all over.

Because Flash is everything. Youtube. Conference videos. Anything else, you name it.
From the About page: Super User is a Q&A site for computer enthusiasts
Four Tet or similar, or silence.
>> I wonder what the repercussions are for religion?

Very minimal. Most people who are serious about religion don't base their faith on science in the first place. So when scientific understanding changes, it doesn't shake their faith a whole lot. Me for example - I believe in God for reasons independent of science. Any scientific discovery that seems to contradict what I believe doesn't make stop believing in him. It just makes me reevaluate what I believed and why, and if I still have reason to believe that.

For instance, I've always believed that if God's creations are infinite, and he put his children here on Earth, I'm sure there're planets elsewhere that he's created and made as beautiful as this one. And if one day someone found an asteroid with amino acids on it - that doesn't diminish my belief. It just makes me think things like, "I wonder if that's how God put life here". Nobody said God did it all by hand - maybe he just did it through natural laws.

I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted.
Have you read either of his books?
Up (in the short-term)
Here's a simple but critical one that I got burnt on:

They demo their new top secret product but won't let you touch the keyboard or mouse for "proprietary reasons".

It was really slick and exactly what the market needed. I remember gasping several times during the demo. I really wanted to be part of that!

Big mistake.

What I didn't realize at the time was that it took an incredible effort just to make it demoable and only certain people knew how to demo it without breaking it.

The software never worked and never could. It had to be scrapped.

If you can't actually use some part of what they're building before you commit, move on.
I don't think it does anything for religions, they are by definition faith based.

As to your other question. We have known that amino acids exist out there for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite

And there's a reasonable theory that these compounds form naturally as the the stuff out there tumbles down the entropy stairs, so to speak.

And here's where it gets interesting, if it's true that the building blocks of DNA are fairly common in the universe, then it's a reasonable assumption that DNA based life can emerge with some frequency.
Indeed. And I'm not convinced it would take less battery power to build a working cell tower.
Would you care to point out few incentives for doing more with less? Government programs/departments are NEVER about doing more with less.
Didn't they used to jump in, either over the side door or through a window, both feet would reach the footwell at about the same time; arguably from the angle of attack the right foot might be first to the pedals. I suspect it's more to do with gearbox placement or similar.
Well Thanks, @javery

Site Url
http://www.indiameme.com/

Short Description:
As a bloggers we are all passionate about the news and daily on goings in India, it is really hard to catch up with the best stuff in news and blog. I also faced simillar problem a while ago and decided to wrote a program to grab the best of stories around India and show it on easy to read simple page.
Indeed, it turns out to be pretty easy to make amino acids, and they're everywhere. Take hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, zap it with lightning, and you get amino acids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
The moon landing was pushed by Cold War politics (and funding). Those projects take huge amounts of money, and NASA had them. After that, the interest tapered off.
Yes, you are right, this is just one criteria out of 13 but it still boggles my mind that this criteria is even present in the list. Can you imagine a for profit corporation evaluating project based on such a criteria?

Even if I were to accept your point that it's important to retain existing people for the knowledge they have, it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10%.
Talking to an operater to make a call is a long, slow, and complex process. The only advantage is people are used to the interface but, it's not inherently simple. And it has other usability problems for the spanish speaking etc.
"This issue should be tested in a usability lab with a reasonable cross section of the target market"

That's the thing. It was. And it works for everyone I've ever met, including my wife and my parents who are the polar opposite of 'technical'. I'm not making baseless claims of the user being [insert one of the choices], it was based on my (rather extensive) experience with the device and users of it.
Intriguing! I wonder how a student from Gates U. would be accepted in the job market? Would there be a bias like there is today towards technical schools like ITT Tech and others? Or would the clout of Gates be enough to overcome that? I think it would be a great way to preserve the Bill Gates legacy though which might appeal him.
How Can You Learn More About To Keep Your Man Hooked
When you fall in love with a man, having him hooked to you is not going to be easy. All relationships start right but may be after sometime they may not love each other or has found somebody else or the relationship is no longer interesting and finally the relationship ends.
My point was that you can find the information online or in the manual if you don't get it, which this guy clearly does not. Some people have habits when it comes to devices like this that are hard to break. If you're one of those people, read the manual.
I look for a framework which satisfies 80% of my criteria. This saves me about 20% of the work.
Interesting idea!

The home page is neat and clean. One thing I noticed: "Launchly Blog" text in tab on mouseover becomes hard to read (dark font on dark tab). It renders differently than the other tabs, so perhaps it's an oversight.

"Iterative feedback & powerful analytics service for new websites" doesn't quite do it for me as a catch-phrase/title. Maybe something like "Founder roundtable for web-app startups."
If a coders moral rights are inalienable to the extent that some right can be asserted after he has license away those rights then he cannot create open source software under certain licenses. If he can later demand attribution then he must choose a license that includes teh possibility of attribution - yes I can see this could be a problem. Do you know of any specific jurisdiction in which a creator can't license away the rights needed?
More Information from an interesting POV:

http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n...

http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html
What have you found that suggests that there is a god in the first place?
Small bit of info from the FCC:

"The manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless transmissions is prohibited. 47 U.S.C. Section 302a(b)."

http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/index.htm?job=operations_2&...
"Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?"

A certainty. In fact, we may one day decide that life is just one of the phases of matter, along side liquid, solid, gas, plasma, and Bose-Einstein condensate.

Whether humanity ever finds anything more sophisticated than extraterrestrial algal mats before we go extinct is another matter.
It's a simple fact that people will never be as careful spending other people's money as they would be spending their own...
Apparently they are in wide use in Chinese and Indian schools.

http://pcworld.about.com/od/wirelessphonesvoip/Should-Cell-P...
How To Live In A Standard Shipping Container
For contrast with ITER, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 ("A Fusion Startup")
2. No top tools or only home brewed ones (IDE, Build System, …):

Well, emacs should be available on most platforms. ;-)
Now that you mention it, it does sound like an glorified trade (tech) school. I think the idea of having people with phd's teach at university is more for the critical thinking one gets out of class and not so much for their knowledge. When you get to the phd level, you are very specialized anyways and probably forgot most of intro to circuits (though you have to teach it anyways). University gives students the knowledge to think on their own, not sure you'd get that from Gates U.
Happillow: The Snore-Reducing Alarm Clock Pillow
How about url for your project?
It wasn't that great of an idea: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html
Why we should all use Cappuccino
A mixed economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy
The single-payer model for space flight hasn't yielded cost savings, higher productivity and more innovation? Hmm.
why is your site so hard to find the news? when I go to your homepage I see no news.
Ask HN: What should I ask companies during interviews?
Here are the questions I currently ask when I am interviewing at companies. What should I ask?

1. Do you write unit tests? Do you use test-driven development?

2. What source control do you use?

3. What is the most pressing problem you are working on this week or today?
The Great Annual MIT Mystery Hunt
Check out this presentation, it includes almost everything you need to know about scaling: http://www.coderholic.com/the-ultimate-scalability-presentat...
Very low on details, this method is. I'd like to know how exactly it works.
High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy.

Really?

I don't suppose it can be argued that they are. But it's far from clear that they should be, or even will be.

The field of post-secondary education is ripe with opportunities for new methods and technology. It's sad that someone tasked with studying this state of affairs can do no better than the stultified credentialism and admissions-essay mindset that afflicts the present system.
before reading this, I thought I was going to respond with some witty retort like "anecdotal evidence proves otherwise", but it's actually a very good essay.
"Full-Length Movies on Mobiles"

David Lynch has commented on how wonderful this would be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0
Inconsistencies are not such a big problem. A lot of real people are inconsistent.
Massachusetts Offers Developers Real-Time Transit Data
Generally we stick with caching, when that starts to give diminishing returns we add a web server. Database stuff is quite a bit harder, of course, we're been fortunate there so far :)
That doesn't go to explain the whole difference between business and government though. Presumably start-up owners don't view venture capital as their own money yet the good ones still spend it carefully.
Thanks for that link. Relative to the story, this would also bring up examples of companies like Armadillo Aerospace and the other small-scale space startups. One thing that you might argue the space startups are not necessarily doing that NASA is doing is scientific research outside of spaceflight-related topics. General Fusion (the company in mnemonicsloth's link) would seem to be a sort of hybrid of these two extremes.. though extremely risky business-wise.
One of the best questions (he is one of our project leads now :D) asked by an interviewee of ours was:

If I get a really great idea how quickly and by what path does that get to someone who can make a decision on it? And can I do the pitch myself?
[IANAL, this isn't legal advice either]

If you register your whole years posts as one work then a large excerpt from one post would probably not be a significant part of that whole work. Copying of an insubstantial part usually rules out the copying as being commercial - this is where lawyers earn their fee, what is an substantial part?

In the worst circumstances I can see such a registration meaning you get no damages at all as it supports the copiers claim that the amount copied is not enough to be commercial damaging.
Why yes, I can imagine that. Companies generally don't much like firing people. They quite reasonably prefer making better use of the people they've got.

Now, I doubt that any commercial enterprise would use the exact same criterion as (if we take this one out-of-context slide at face value) NASA is using here. So what we have is some evidence that one thing NASA tries to do is to provide jobs. Which is not remotely the same thing as "NASA is a jobs program", which is the idiotic claim being made by the originally cited blog entry.
But I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf options

Then you haven't looked very hard. Every CRM system worth its salt (including the free OTRS) supports this. Either by inserting a cookie into the initial mail ("please leave this line intact when you reply") or, smarter, by assigning a dedicated reply-to address to each recipient.

It's not rocket science and adding a "do not reply to this mail" speaks volumes about how little you care about customer service.
Geting promoted at the individual level is often related to standing out. The way you stand out in the government is to start a new project which either increases effecency or does something new. Unfortunatly starting a new program is far less risky at the professional level becuase it's harder to fail. Saving money requres an existing process with a well known goal and cost.

EX: Saving money on toner cartigaes by changing the default faunt on a government document.

PS: I was part of the EISP program which reduces the cost to create ISP documentation by half. The contractors where not happy about this, but the government loved it.
Absolutely good points. Especially the points 2 and 7.
US Man Stole 130m Card Numbers Using SQL Injection Attack
Management, management, management! Do they a have a proven history of success? If it's the founder, does he/she look like they can get shit done? I don't mean are they smart, do they have Ph.Ds, but are they focused and do they finish things?
Building a Ticket Responder for Android, Part 2
Rails vs. Grails vs. Helma: The JVM Web Framework Smackdown, Part 1
Not only does the author have no understanding of educational theory, I don't think they have any actual understanding of Bill Gates either. As if he would stop trying to cure malaria to start some some U.S. college.
I really like that. Why don't you do that, but have it parse somebody's status updates for the keywords?
Paper:

http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/adam_storeygard/HSWLights...
Kinda like http://google.in/news then or http://google.in/news/section?topic=n ?
Thanks for the feedback. I really need to relocate the blog link somewhere else.

I have been playing with the tagline quite a bit and you're right, I don't think I've found one that works quite right yet.
99,999% of MTA bounces can be automatically classified, there's not so many different MTA implementations in the wild. The same applies to 99,9% of vacation responders because most people use the standard templates from their Outlook or Webmailer.

The rest is intern-food. A single person can easily classify 20+ mails per minute. And that's what happens in companies with real customer service.
Good catch. I was going to say that's because there's stuff to do after 9:30pm in European towns, but that's unfair to the bigger US cities.
Or recommending the use of semicolons in situations where a whole colon is overkill?

The real problem, I suspect, isn't so much the waste caused by all those failproof projects. It's that, five or ten years down the line, the obvious solution to a real problem will have a side effect that diminishes the importance of some bureaucrat's carefully guarded little empire.
"I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted."

How? Please elaborate.
A bit disconcerting how this supposed fraud investigator is waffling about firewalls?

EDIT: just chatting to my boss about it; the fraud guy (Edward Wilding) came up and he rolled his eyes :) so Im guessing not the sharpest cookie in the investigative draw (my boss used to be a fraud guy)

SQL injection is so vague: anyone got better specifics on what was done? (I hunted around but no joy)
Unfortunately, declaring "EM freedom" is pretty much incompatible with the idea of using the EM spectrum for anything useful. If my freedom to actually use a cellphone or a wifi network conflicts with your freedom to make a 10 kW roving-frequency 24-hour bagpipe music transmission, how do we resolve that one?

This isn't really a hypothetical problem either -- if anyone could broadcast anything at any frequency at any time I'm pretty sure everything would fill up with ads of some kind.
I agree that the article sensationalizes the point somewhat. But at the same time, your dismissal of the concern because of the need retain knowledge, and hence the people having that knowledge, misses an important aspect as well.

The table shown in the article is tuned not only to weigh against losing people. It also -- and this is the really telling part -- is tuned to give preference to anything that increases the workforce.

Surely preserving the existing set of experts is not fostered by hiring on additional ones. That sounds to me like nothing more than empire-building. And I think that in the big picture, accounting for the possibility of future lean times, making NASA more dependent on personnel expenses must increase the possibility of having to let go some of the pile of experts that these preferences are amassing.
Isn't that the point of most Fb apps, they're designed as an excuse to harvest credentials. Or am I too cynical?
I generally decide on a framework project-by-project. I started off with Django because I was experienced with Python. The project went ok but I found, as most people seem to, that when the code started growing more organically (often called 'maintenance mode' :)) it got real ugly real fast. I went looking for an even more dynamic language than Python, stayed with Perl for a while (Catalyst) and eventually went with Ruby (Rails, specifically).

I'm sufficiently experienced in Rails now and don't regret it at all. It is quite heavy for your average website, though... For this reason I tend to use Sinatra for lighter stuff (my personal website, etc) since it doesn't give you anything except it's base DSL for handling requests. I end up re-implementing tiny parts of Rails, but which part depends on the project and I tend to re-use those parts I've re-written often.

If I could start my big, main project again, I would still use Rails -- no question. Tool support is a huge part of a big project, and Rails is ready.

I have been missing Perl a little, though, and Mojo feels really awesome (and quite Sinatra-like, a good thing :)), so I might convince myself to go that direction sometime as an experiment.

Links:

- Sinatra - http://www.sinatrarb.com/

- Rails - http://rubyonrails.org/

- Django - http://www.djangoproject.com/

- Catalyst - http://www.catalystframework.org/

- Mojo - http://mojolicious.org/
More truth about Twitter
this came out out a while ago but has since been expanded on. it's great for two reasons:

1. information is important (though the correct information is most important)

2. displaying information in unique ways can really help tell the story, make information relevant and more memorable.
I think it's strange that every time a scientific discovery occurs one of the first reactions to it is, "Well, that about wraps it up for religion, eh?" Followed by dismissive comments about how religion is completely different from science because it's "faith-based" (read: irrational, unconcerned with the facts).

Certainly, it's possible to come to different conclusions based upon the objective evidence. That doesn't mean that one of the conclusions is irrational and the other is rational.

In fact, I don't think there's any less faith involved in concluding that the only way life could have originated on earth is via panspermia (and that therefore, there is no God that matters) - all because we found an amino acid in space.