skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From yesterday:

Microsoft/Danger lose Sidekick user data in server failure

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=873882

54 points by bensummers 1 day ago | 63 comments
I would get rid of the horizontal bar.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5
I'm sure he used their design as a template to get something somewhat presentable for the time being and that once he has some more time and traction, he'll give the design a bit more attention. Let's relax a bit and stop making this out to be some corporate scandal.
Done...I think? After submitting step 1 and giving your app permission, I was brought back to step1.
Google Juice - Now With Artificial Flavor
It would be hard for me to believe that my parents generation was better educated than mine.

For one, when they graduated in the early 60s there was a massive gender gap in college attendance - my mom was valedictorian and went to secretarial school because her parents told her "women can be teachers, secretaries, or nurses", by the 70s she knew she should have gone to college. For comparison the female valedictorian from my HS went to Harvard.

Then there is the general quality of the education. Neither of them took Calculus in high school. They had Latin and most schools today teach Spanish, French, and Italian but aside from that they think my education was much harder. College is unquestionably more rigorous today.

On a shorter time frame, say the last 10 years, MAYBE that argument holds true. In my home state the last 3 have had serious state budget problems that affected the schools but until then it was getting better and better every year.
Started using backpack from 37signals and have found myself using it all the time - now a very important part of my workflow. Granted it has many downsides but for now its working great!
We've never taken funding, but we have lots of employees. They're not all founders. =)
I just see a teeeny-bit of inspiration. Remove the top black bar and it will be hard to tell that he was even inspired by basecamp. Sorry but you are way off on your judgement for this one. Of course, IMO.
I really dislike the stackoverflow user experience :/
The premise that 25% of people pay up without questions seems highly questionable. The only source for this is the company itself, correct?

Edit: why the downvote? Take a look at the direct quote from the article:

However, not everyone who receives a letter will pay up, but DRS says that an impressive 25% of all recipients do without asking questions. This figure is much higher than most people assumed previously.

Why would one take such a surprising number on face value, especially from a company with such a shady business model?
Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the following error message:
"""
You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar.
"""

I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing them! :)
"I believe that Running is rubbish, slow and boring, and you never get anywhere exciting". FTFY.

Have you ever run in a natural park or a mountain?
That's a pretty nice concept, pity that they will not take it in to production. That's probably a pretty expensive rig they have there, with active hydraulics to change the angle of the vehicle.

It is really clever how they got rid of one of the most annoying details of this configuration by making the tilt automatic.

A 'rigid' trike has a tendency to roll over in a tight curve.

Most trikes are in 'tadpole ' configuration for that reason, two front wheels, one in the rear. There used to be a little car called the Robin Reliant, famous for roll-overs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8SvdSzs7c

And here is some diesel-electric competition, claiming 125 MPG:

http://www.zoomilife.com/tag/xr3/
I back up my Gmail by forwarding it to other providers (Yahoo, Comcast). If Gmail fails and loses all my data, it's in my comcast and yahoo account. If they both fail then ok Im screwed, but the Internet I hope would have to melt down if all three of these systems failed simultaneously.
Conan interviews real people, an actor wouldn't cut it.
Make Money Taking Surveys Review – Which Sites Pay?
I think character limits would be a pretty big limitation for something like that.

However, their groups/lists is a step in the right direction.

They have already solved the problem of user participation though.

I thought about a third party app for this, but their API limit would make it almost impossible IMHO.
I noticed your company's site has a header too. It's just not colored black. There is not much difference between your site and CustomerFind in that sense.

In fact, your pricing page(http://agilezen.com/pricing) is clearly inspired by basecamp. Absolutely nothing wrong with it(I don't think it is in ripoff category). But for someone to have such stringent standards when evaluating others, it's odd.
Whew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated
I think you need to qualify the title. $0.60 is what you get for every legal download, 150 times that is what you might get if you happen to catch someone, find out her address and if she then also pays.
I wasn't saying it's a corporate scandal or that the creator was a bad person. The problem is that 37signals didn't offer their design as a template for re-use.

Everyone uses other designs as inspiration (myself included), I'm just saying you should put some distance between yourself and the original inspiration before showing it to others.
I did not downvote you. But I suspect its the tone in your feedback. Maybe you could have asked "Why did you choose to have a BC-like design?" then...
since when does grey = no separation?

what a weird comment!
Call me extremely cynical but I am kinda skeptical. Soros' buddies is elected into power. Now he is investing in for-profit anti-GW companies (acting as if he is doing it out of charity).

I suspect that those companies will get quite a lot of taxpayer funded dough and will be extremely profitable.
Isn't Aardvark (http://vark.com) tackling this idea, without limiting the sources of the answers/tasks to twitter?
Log in and try again. My app never got a pingback from Twitter (for whatever reason). What browser are you using, BTW?
Some feedback:
1. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on those keywords?

2. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty. Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?
My point is that education/literacy in America is not something that magically emerged on its own but is something that was mandated by the earliest settlers. These particular settlers, regardless of number/geographic footprint, exert great cultural influence up until this very day. As time went on their meme spread out and mutated, and we have what we have now which is universal public education.

Compulsory school attendance seems like a different question, and more like an implementation detail to me. At least today school attendance is not compulsory if the parents arrange for the child to be educated up to the currently mandated educational standards. (i.e. Homeschooling is legal.)
I now get "Error: that twitter account is already in use." I am using Chrome.

(To the dude downvoting this and other random comments of mine, stay classy!)
And just because people is sometimes stupid. This is embarrassing.
On this topic does anyone know of a good article that shows you you can profile your binary size? Say given binary X object Y takes up 60% and in object Y source file Z takes up the most. Or a list of common coding practices in [language] that cause the binary size to significantly increase?
So this company is suggesting that it's better to allow your customers to break the law and then threaten to sue (making money from the settlement), rather than have them use legal channels?

It's a scary world we live in.
Registered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL
Since when does being assertive require that you hurt others?
You are right, even though you have to give him the point that a lot of the existing static type systems around by now are bad. Haskell is approachig a really nice, hassle-free type-system, but take, e.g., Javas typesystem? Bleh.
Hey Zack,
Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you know how that process goes.

Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.

Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.

Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.

That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)

One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)
As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education.

The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones?

The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes.

Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.
"Do you consider the science beyond dispute?"

The way that science plays a role in shaping public policy is by allowing us to ask, "What is our best guess as to the correct decision based on the evidence available."

Whether or not the science is beyond dispute is irrelevant.
Sure, our pricing page is inspired by Basecamp... and practically every other SaaS offering out there. As I said in another comment, everyone (including myself) takes inspiration from other designs, but there's a difference between taking inspiration and taking a stylesheet.
The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not fill up instantaneously.

How can I communicate this clearer?
The illusion of gender
Python requires you to initialize a variable before reading it, so:

foo = object
ofo.__call__()

will cause a (runtime) error. Thus, if you use your declared variables, errors will occur on mistypes (unless, of course, you have the typo declared, which would be a smell in itself (think of variable names being too close))
Can absolutely confirm that. For me it looks like something that is designed by Microsoft (mainly because of the fonts).

There are too wide spaces between text and metadata, too lwo contrasts between light shades of grey and a disrupted context for some elements (see My Profile and Search).

#fail
A few years ago, a friend of mine and I were DJing a lot. Just when CDs were coming in and people were starting to accept that DJs might not use only vinyl forever, we considered starting a website to sell electronic music digitally. At the time the bandwidth costs were so high that we couldn't have made a profit, so we shelved the idea. We totally missed the boat on that one.

In my current company, which I once had a formative role in (I'm one of 3 founders), has made far too many mistakes to list here. The biggest ones IMO have been lack of quality control in hiring due to a desire to grow too big too quickly, and not realising how important it is to decide on the company culture that you want and defend it to the death. Now I feel like I work in a bank.
Lack of freedom in what way? Other than being responsible for providing for yourself any responsibility you assume beyond that is your own choice.
I'm using language without static typing for most of my work and I can hardly remember any bug that was caused by having wrong type of data in unexpected place. I remember very well redundancy of using language with static typing, I know how much boilerplate code is needed in languages such as java, and how complicated can generics become in C# if you want to achieve fairly simple architectural things that can be concisely expressed in dynamically typed languages.
taking a stylesheet

Can you elaborate? That is a pretty huge accusation.
Sounds fascinating - Any chance you can provide some links / Self Post / Reddit IAmA on your progress/challenges?
Is there a stack exchange site for spelling? ("experiance"!?)
I buy the 25%, only because it was based on responses in Germany. This is the country where I get yelled at for jaywalking at 3am and some subways work on the honor system. Germans are ridiculously honest.

In fact, now that I think about it, 25% seems low. What's happening in Germany?! Pretty soon, when I visit, I'll be forced to pay for my subway rides. Clean up your act Germany!

Kind regards,
A dishonest American tourist
In the mass production industry, the first users traditionally pay off R&D at a high price, and then you reduce and sell to everyone else once costs are recovered.
> Thanks, keep me posted.

> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.

> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...

> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light" account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options - c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably Irrational_

> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: zackster@gmail.cøm

> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.
i'd like to try it too. email: twitter@emoticards.com
thanks
Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes, etc.
The 90-minute Scheme to C compiler: code and presentation
Perhaps not, but it is (or was) down as a profit on their books, which is how the whole sub-prime fiasco came about.

Or at least if not "profit", it was certainly a means for them to make profit.
The extreme tail of the graph has not been replicated as far as I can see.
I'm really poor. Can I have 90 days?
Didn't you see the 'doc' directory?
A hundred world-class minds over six decades really is a lot.

Really? Try saying that to a math professor.
don't worry they'll all die off soon. Once they get out of beta, not many people will be willing to pay $129/mo.
No, I meant try signing in, not re-creating the account
Really! Getting lots of other people to take on debt results in many other people making immediate profits to the short term benefit of all.

Consider. We get Sally to take out a large mortgage on her home. The person issuing the mortgage takes the mortgage, sells it to an investment bank, and makes an immediate profit. At the investment bank they take those loans (small investments with considerable risk), bundle them into a deal, and slice and dice off several (rated) safe tranches that they sell for a profit. The purchasers of said debt get to take money that wasn't making interest and put it into something that makes money, resulting in an immediate profit on the books.

All of those companies along the way record profits, and pay generous bonuses to the people who did those things. Those bonuses are a profit to the individual that is kept whether or not the organization runs into future problems. Which creates perverse incentives. There were many individuals who realized that they were doing something unsustainable. But if you don't do it, you'd lose your cushy job, while if you do it you make nice bonuses. From their point of view the possible eventual failure of Lehman etc were externalities and they were motivated by their current bonuses.

Furthermore back in the neighborhood, Sally didn't sit on her money. Instead she spent it. The various businesses she spent money at get to record profits on those sales, which in turn goes to hiring people, paying healthcare premiums, etc.

None of that would happen if Sally didn't take out that mortgage.

In short what has happened is that the taking on the debt results in causing money to circulate. As money circulates, multiple people record profits. This is well understand, and is why standard macro-economic theory says that money is effectively created when debt is taken on. And, on the whole, this is a good thing.

The problem, of course, is that just as money gets created by the taking on of debts, money gets destroyed when debts are abandoned. And when people take on debts they can't afford, they do get abandoned. Which is the current problem we are dealing with right now.
Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name. I started mine in 1998. We just called them "personal websites".

As to Travel Blogging, I actually implemented the grandparent's idea back in 2005, right when the Google Maps API became available. We just passed the 10,000 blog mark last month. Check it out:

http://www.blogabond.com/

It's never made a dime of direct revenue, but the consulting work it generated has kept me traveling these last several years.
I'm not accusing the OP of anything. I was just pointing out that I took one look at the website and immediately recognized it as heavily inspired by Basecamp's design. That's all.

The colors and font of the header are identical, including the use of a single green link. The fonts used in the headers don't match the logo or the buttons, and have altered kerning just like on Basecamp's site.

I honestly couldn't give a shit either way. The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.
The point is that funding isn't very well correlated with achievement outcomes. Schools could easily do a much better job with a fraction of their current budgets.
I don't think that's the case. You praise us for having unmatched aptitude for understanding complex systems. While it's probably true, reading such open praise made me uneasy.

Strengths do not balance weaknesses because understanding thing fast and thoroughly does not help me to finish what I am building before loosing interest.
"We named our inkjet printer Sagmeister. Coincidentally, it stops working periodically." http://twitter.com/andrewcmyk
Elastic lists
No, but I can tell you the only thing that works for me: I have to have a problem that I really, really want to solve. It's not necessarily a problem that I have, it could be -- and often is -- a problem that other people have. The more people have it, the more I want to solve it.

If I've got something like that to focus on, then I'm less likely to lose interest halfway into it.
So you're saying that, until I have the time to invest in my own branding, I can just use the Coke logo instead?
According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_tim... , "May you come to the attention of those in authority" is an escalation of the better known curse "May you live in interesting times". Today it's a depressingly common threat, too.

It looks like RIAA and the other mobsters are going about it wrong, maybe they should be hitting up more people for smaller amounts.
OK, what if it is a flag variable that is either undefined or an integer? That is, do you need to initialize all variables?

Also, how about this?

foo = 10
...
if ...
ofo = 20
...
formula = bah * ( ... foo ... )

Edit: Please tell me the second case isn't as catastrophic as it looks? That would give at least me no ends of problems -- I thought modern languages left that kind of sh-t in the 1990s? Better have a good culture for testing!
jacob.coby at gmail.com