skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sony Alpha DSLR A700s Biggest Selling Point The Anti Shake Feature.
Please don't attack the messenger, even for a bad story.

Yes. The source may prompt more fact-checking about the reported facts than some other source, but as I have said before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

Consider the radical possibility that any person you disagree with in general might accidentally make a correct factual statement in a particular case.
The fight against RMT (real money trading) in EVE Online
Thanks!

Good suggestion about the geolocation, I really like it. I'll be sure to look into it.
I've heard a lot about software agents over the last decade or so (they were hot when I was studying AI in grad school), but I have never seen a particularly compelling application.

I'm curious to see how well these shopping agents (probably the preeminent practical example of the technology) actually function in the wild, and how they're adopted.

If the use of shopping agents actually became a market force, I suspect many online retailers would need to change various business practices to adapt, much like websites have adapted by optimizing for search engines.
We don't have a FROM check at the moment. I'm not sure how helpful this would be, since it can be arbitrarily spoofed by an attacker.

The email addresses for alarms are editable; if you get spam to one of these addresses, you can change the address. We were also thinking of adding an option to obscure the email address by adding a uid to the end. An example would be trigger-my-alarm-5j3rt@acme.pagerduty.com.

We also offer regex-based filters on both the subject and the body, so you can configure an alarm to only trigger if a certain keyword appears in the message.
Before Web 2.0 was Web 2.0, SemWeb was to be Web 2.0. Post Web 2.0, SemWeb became Web 3.0 in some circles.

As the UK govt recently brought TBL in, I suspect very strongly that this is what's going on here.
Oh, By the way: The Palm Pre phones home with your location
Very cool!

To increase the signal/noise ratio, I'd love to specify that I'm looking for a product, and not accessories for a product. For example, I just searched for a camera I'm looking to buy. The first large set of results were accessories for that camera, and since they're cheaper than the camera itself, they showed up first.

Great start!
Under United States law, it's difficult indeed to prove defamation of a public official by a news media organization. My current view of today's news is that Dvorak was sloppy, but that his conduct doesn't constitute the "actual malice" that the Supreme Court requires for a successful defamation claim in such circumstances.
I've been facinated with people's spacial associations with time since I first realized they can vary from person to person. I like to ask people how they visualize the arrangement of months in a year, because there doesn't appear to be any single standard way to do so.

When I was in kindergarten, the teacher would lead the class to name off the months by pointing to a year calendar arranged on the wall in a horseshoe shape, starting with January in the bottom left, arcing through the summer months at the top and returing to December in the bottom right. Having been exposed to this particular arrangement so often at such an impressionable age, December and January are in my mind forever separated by gap, and it never fails to generate the feeling that those two months are more distant than any other adjacent months, and I'm sure it has an effect on my planning during that time.

It makes me wonder how it might feel to have learned the months arranged in a circle, on a line, or in a grid. Or to have learned European-style Monday-Sunday weeks, lunar months, or something exotic like months of 7 or 8 4-day weeks, or 10 144-minute hours per day. And of course the hacker in me wants to figure out what the optimal arrangement.
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js:...

---

Why are the results loaded through javascript? can't they just be rendered server side?

I like the name.
Nearly fell off my chair laughing. Thank you :-)
>what is the standard deviation in that example...You need sample sizes to even attempt to do the math.

First, you're asking the wrong person to supply the missing data. The onus is on the OP to justify their stats, not on the person calling BS on the misuse of statistics.

Given that the original article is missing the critical numbers and presenting the rest in the most self-serving manner possible, the only data anyone has to go by is their own experience with conversion rates. We don't even know what "conversion" means for this website because they don't define it, but that justifies making reasonable assumptions (e.g. users who land on page A end up on page B, for a website in some industry, involving some side-effects to get from A to B that are left undefined by the OP). In my experience, the behavior of users on a web site is quite fickle and dependent on the surrounding advertising campaigns, as well as the weather, the time of day, and the timing of holidays. And maybe a billion other confounding factors. So, is the 5% improvement seen here significant? We don't know, there's no evidence to assume it is, and that's precisely my point.
Dvorak said he telephoned the White House for comment on his story. That is what caught my eye in that story, the lack of White House immediate response.
Sam Walton started Walmart when he was 44.

Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 61.

Sakichi Toyoda started Toyota when he was 59.

It's not really rare at all to start successful companies when you're older. Just go look at the history of big companies and you'll find plenty of examples.
Awesome!

2nd on the 'All' selection in the categories (and have it default to it as well) and text boxes for price ranges. But maybe you can have the ranges auto-populate and just give us the ability to define the range if need be. Also starting it off at zero kinda throws my reaction to the search results since at zero the results would most likely not show the product I was searching for and instead return accessories, etc. You might want to have the prices default at midrange.

Otherwise, loving the layout and simplicity. Ya'll rocked it!
Mint.com raises $14 million
But where's his birth certificate?!
Since you will be interfacing with bluetooth, gps, etc, do you for see needing to write stuff in C at a later point for greater control or performance? Is it worth considering how well Python or Ruby can work with bits written in C? I know Python handles this well, but I don't know Ruby enough to answer that.

Also, I don't even know if this is a worthwhile thing to consider with your project.
I've looked at this space a bunch and even played around with building an ubuntu launcher:
http://drop.io/piedesktop

The deb file is up there.

I think that the alternatives to windows work much better on these machines. The ubuntu Netbook Remix is very friendly for those inexperienced with Linux, and Jolicloud, which is really just an app installer platform for Ubuntu, takes a lot of the hassle out of using repositories for app identification and install.

This is all a lot of lead up to my belief that OS is mattering less and less. In fact 26% of survey respondents said they didn't care about Netbook OS as long as it "got them on the web." I think the hardware manufacturers are risk averse but really not watching the market and demand. Big startup opportunity I think...

I compiled a research survey here:
http://drop.io/piedesktop/asset/netbook-market-research-over...
It forces engineering to internalize the cost of their errors, rather than externalizing those costs by pushing them to our customers and human support/operations staff.

This encourages the following:

- Closer correlation between business robustness requirements and software implementation.

- Adoption of more robust design or methodologies when required by the business. If all that is required is an automated restart, then automatically restart the software. If the same class of bugs causes regular failure, adopt a strategy for avoiding that class of bugs.

- A realistic platform for negotiating external support. If engineering staff is unable to produce software sufficiently robust as to support the business requirements, then we must make a business decision as to decide whether maintaining additional operations staff is cheaper -- in the short and long-term -- than correcting the engineering issues.

In my experience, software that fails regularly enough to cost significant engineering resources in responding to those failures is generally broken software. The goal is to not let software get to that point, and to correct it quickly if it does.

It's very easy for your Operations budget to unnecessarily balloon under the load of supporting failure-prone software; engineering has every incentive to externalize the costs of their implementation decisions, while operations has every incentive to increase their headcount and budget by supporting those failure-prone systems.
Yea I noticed that, but that's because the price range set by the slider starts at '0' so it shows the cheapest products first which would most usually be accessories or other related items but NOT the product itself.
I wonder if they eat their own dogfood and use Mint to manage the company's finances.
IIRC, Sanders used to drive a beat-up old car around to all of his franchisees, checking to make sure the gravy was just perfect and the chicken was being made correctly.

When it wasn't, they said that he would curse enough to make a sailor blush, kicking pots and pans all around the kitchen, having a terrible fit. In really bad cases, he would take his "special equipment" back with him.

The reason he ended up going big was because he couldn't keep track of all the payments and legal paperwork by himself. The lawyer that ended up being a partner was told to go help clean out a desk -- and found it stuffed with checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Not sure of the veracity of that story, but it makes for a colorful anecdote! And it reinforces the #1 quality of good startups: focus on delivering value to the customer and the rest will work itself out.
Ask HN: Business movie suggestions?
Hi guys. I've recently watched The Boiler room, which is a awesome movie that can really teach you about selling stuff.

Have you watched any movies that taught you about business? Please share.
The big problem with working in a library is theft. You always have to carry your valuables around. If you want to take a wiz you have to pack your laptop, coat (in winter), cell phone, etc. each time.

But if you're in a group or rent a lockable study room, it's less complicated.
Yeah, this is one of the problems that we've been dealing with for a while, and we're still not sure how to really go about eliminating product accessories when the user is simply looking for that product.

Unfortunately, this comes up whenever you search websites like Craigslist or eBay, so without getting really creative, there's not a whole lot we can do to completely get rid of this problem.

I'm glad we were able to do it a little bit with cars and car parts.

Thanks for your feedback!
You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right?

Edit: I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on launching.
Web1.0 - you don't have a physical building, just a website

Web2.0 - you don't have any content the visitors supply it all.

Web3.0 - you don't have an actual web site, just a vague feeling about how cool you are
Are we on the brink of creating a computer with a human brain?
What did you expect to do after graduation with your major in psychology? What are some of the most interesting things you learned in your psychology courses? (I ask, because I am writing a working paper in psychology--about IQ testing--just now.)
Perhaps automatically filters to sane prices? If you search for iphone 3gs, first few pages are all really cheap (either accessories or have some catch associated with them), not particularly useful unless specifically requested.
Because then the page response would take a few seconds. We figured this was undesirable.
As someone who did the MBA, I think it's an incredibly valuable asset but one that is mispriced and too long in duration. I've gotten more experience building apps on elance and trying to build business cases. The valuable insights can be gained from the books of the best lecturers (in my case Bruce Greenwald http://bit.ly/Vz5SL) and direct correspondence.

I think the MBA should be 3-6 months long and priced accordingly. And have a larger entrepreneurship component for those that are so inclined.
the jerk store called, and they ran out of you
This is gonna get ugly quick.

By even responding to the report, instead of relying on its network of bloggers, the White House has just unleashed every mainstream political journalist in the country on this guy's history. Now everything will be examined, Creostar, the DC web sites, how a guy with no budget management experience is chosen to over see billions in government contracts. I hope, now that they have gone on record calling the report a lie, that none of it turns out to be true.

I'm reminded of the young lady, Mary Carol Turano, who was in charge of security at Boston's airport before 9-11. Although she was reassigned right away and the administration was able to hush a lot of that up by waving the flag and screaming patriotism. Or that 24 year old kid that was given the job of re-establishing Iraq's financial markets after the invasion. And cooly handed control of a US$13 billion budget. (Article by Matt Taibbi at http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/War_Profiteers_Iraq.html).

What is this guys budget?

You can bet that guys like Taibbi are going to be all over this.
We're playing with the notion of letting people filter out based on a percentage away from the average price. That or doing it before we even put the results in the page.
A couple of my companies were based on solving problems that I personally had and that I wanted to see solved. That's supposed to be the gold standard of idea generation in entrepreneurship - solving a problem you've experienced PERSONALLY. Interestingly, the two companies that were my "solve your own itch" startups are also by far the smallest (in revenue and impact) of the companies I have founded. All of my other ideas - including the most successful ones - were not solving my own problems, but were trying to make an existing business or industry into the way I would want it to be in an ideal world, even though I have no personal interest or stake in them. So, basically trying to solve problems for others while wearing rose-colored glasses. This tends to happen one of three ways:

1. I see an existing company and say, "Those guys are idiots...I can do that better." (So, naivete and overconfidence FTW.)

2. I see an opportunity to combine elements of multiple industries into a new offering (or bring an approach from one industry to another) in an attempt to make something closer to "the way I think things SHOULD be."

3. MOST commonly, I apply a specific set of rules and methods to try to make a business or industry into the mold of "the way I think things SHOULD be" because I think it could be profitable for me to do so. ALL industries are screwed up in some way...and I have arrived at a set of 'tools' that I use over and over in an attempt to build a better company within individual industries. Some of the 'tools' are tangible things, but many are just applying a new perspective or philosophy. I've found a set of these that I can apply to any business, and I've internalized them to a degree that I can scan for new opportunities and apply them without thinking. I wrote some of them down for a few of my employees, and one guy said they reminded him of Roger Von Oech's Creative Whack Pack but with a more practical business focus. I don't know if that is the case, I just think of them as universal lenses and I try looking at things with them in various combinations until everything seems to fit. There's the famous A. Kay quote about a new perspective being worth 80 IQ points...well, I need all the help I can get, so I built a toolbox of "new perspectives" that I can use as needed. Systemizing it has led to my most successful ideas.

Once I've come up with a basic business model, I have to take the rose-colored glasses (and other lenses) off and be brutal to determine whether or not the project would actually work and whether or not it is worth the time/money/energy to do it. Less fun, but very necessary.
it looks good, but instead of "picture available", I want to see the actual picture in the search results.
This is typically because of eBay links, where the current bid is still $1.

As far as the outrageously high prices go (iPhones costing $4 million dollars and the like), I'm writing a formula to help get rid of those.
Thanks for the feedback scott_s. I thought the left middle side of the page was a pretty standard position for the feedback link; I've seen a lot of other sites that do this.

I do like the idea of making the design more minimal. I guess we are somewhat worried about the possibility of not explaining well enough what our product does.
how is that any different than in a busy coffee shop?
True,Boston may be a bad example for those reasons, but I wanted an example mainly to get a handle on the numbers. Minneapolis might be a better fit, but will the tubing mileage needed and the problems change?
Interesting suggestion.

Oompa, what do you think?

My initial concern would be the page getting overly cluttered with photos, or the load time taking too long.
What happens if somebody shorts two inverse levereged ETFs at the same time?

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=DIG&t=2y&l=off&z...

[Warning: Doing the above features similar dangers as a Martingale system.]
Just make your bot mimic the activity of a real human, and it won't take any more resources than a real human. And if you're crafty enough about it, no one will ever know (much less the advertisers, who are probably both clueless and don't bother to even try to check if real humans are using the site).

The only problem is that most real humans probably earn a few grains of rice, get bored, and forget about the site. So a bot effectively mimicking a typical human user wouldn't be of much use (unless it was distributed on many different computers).

Maybe some altruistic hackers could create a virus which installed ricebots on systems it infected. Though, unfortunately, that idea would likely backfire, as the ricebots would be quickly detected and that would generate negative PR.
You should watch the documentary startup.com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
Mint is one of the most awesome services out there and it helped to streamline all my finances. Every single penny i spend on mint will be worth it - in case i had to.
I've had similar realizations. I tend to visualize weeks and months linearly, but with no gaps. December and January are adjacent to each other in my mind, as are Sunday and Monday. (I also don't really consider the week to start on Sunday. If I designed a calendar for myself, weeks would be arranged in rows where Monday is the left-most cell, and Sunday is the right-most cell.)
Really? I have a bachelor in applied mathematics, I like math and algorithm, but when i was interviewed with a software engineer position, i had been asked all kinds of c++ programming questions, and these "do you have experience on this and that". I had to spend extra time on these things, i just felt why i didn't directly get into computer science program and spending more time on these detailed engineering things at school
We are lucky today that New Zealand is less than 24hours away from almost anywhere in the wold by plane...

Oh, how convenient! Only 24 hours by plane? ;)
It's almost certainly situational. Now, the question is which one applies to you more often.
People want it. I believe the first of the netbooks were Linux. Then Microsoft got around to offering Windows on them, and they promptly took over the market.
An equally valid question to ask is: "How many users are bouncing away from that website after landing on the first page?" That raw rate improved by 5.2%. When you quote percentages of percentages, the rates vary widely depending on your point of view -- in the original example, an optimist might report a 20% improvement, looking at the users who reached point B, and a pessimist might report a 10% improvement, looking at the users who left without reaching point B. This is only partly why it's a bad idea to quote percentages of percentages -- they are dependent on the baseline. There are at least two baselines to choose from (successful conversions vs bounces). Also, percents of percents hide the task difficulty, which varies depending on the starting point (going from 1% to 2% is probably not hard, going from 99 to 100% is probably very very hard).

But the other reason why it's a bad idea to quote percentages of percentages is that there is no indication whether the claimed improvements are actually statistically significant. I didn't see any data in the article to indicate they are, and what little I know about conversions from my own observations is that they vary by at least 10% depending on totally random factors.

>Which is a better description: "I doubled my conversion rate" or "I increased my conversion rate by 1%?" I'd go with the former.

I see your point and I'd use it if I needed to flatter myself. But I'm sticking to the latter. And I'd be sure to mention the starting baseline as well.
It looks like the results are being loaded with independent ajax requests to each product database. If this was just all done server side, you'd have to wait until all of these requests finished loading instead of having them appear on the page incrementally. Most people don't want to wait 10 seconds for a page to load.
I would like to see thumbnail images. Ideally, as many as possible in a grid with prices. The hard part browsing craigslist for me is clicking through to see listings/products with images. The UI seems more optimized for non visual browsing (e.g. airplane tickets).
The biggest complaint I have about your site is that with a standard qwerty layout, the entire domain is typed with the right hand except two letters (b and the c in com). Maybe something easier to type? :P
Web 3.1415926535 ...

Because, hey, (a) it's another dot-com bubble, and (b) bubbles are irrational!
Thanks for the tip. I'm moving to Long Island City next month so this should be a great place to go to. I assume they don't allow food, but do you know if they allow beverages at the tables? My local library allows that which has been great for me. I usually need something to drink or munch on while working or I get antsy.

EDIT: Ah man. It closes at 6pm alot of the nights. I usually like working later than that.
Well for people who do not own a Mac, make that $1100 :(
If only Apple made an SDK for Windows ., sigh.
Wonderfully meta. An HN link to a Mashable Article that's little more than a quote from a comment on HN.
Definitely a good product. Google ads grab my attention right away - if there's a way to make them blend in to the page, it would be cool.
You should try for individual sponsors rather than Google ads. Otherwise, the idea is neat, and wish you all the best.
Are Entrepreneurs Made or Born?
Ghostbusters.
The biggest reason I wouldn't work at either is that I can't use a huge display. That matters more for my productivity than the differences between the two options here.
Designing the Facebook username land rush
If Web 2.0 doesn't mean anything where does that leave Web 3.0.

Web 2.0 was coined by a book publisher to sell more books. It's just marketing.
NASA can't keep up with killer asteroids