skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I've put together Startup Wiki
Evening HN,

A while ago someone here reminded me about HNStartups.com - which is sadly full of spam.

As I had some spare time, was casting for a new project and have always wanted to turn my hand to building a wiki type site it seemed like a prime opportunity.

So here it is: http://www.startupwiki.co.uk

== Some Details ==

I took a slightly different approach to HNStartups. The first difference is it is not Ycombinator centric. I designed it so you could enter any name (be it a fund or individual), indeed a number of different names to detail where the funding has come from. That information is collated so you can click a link and see who else X is financing :)

The second difference is it is a wiki: this is so we don't lose any content to spam etc. If your logged in (please do create an account!) you can mark revisions or whole articles as "spam". If enough people mark it then options for deletion appear to certain people.

I also implemented a karma system; this was just a side effect of the fact I wanted to attempt to build something with a community moderation system. You get or lose Karma for site actions - and at certain levels some mod tools open up for you. Right now those limits are set extremely high. I'll tweak them down once the site gets active (if it proves popular).

It might only need some TLC to keep spam out; which I will happily give. But at least the fallback is reasonably well in place :)

The main aim is to do the same as HNStartups. Track startups and try to build up a reasonable amount of information about them that may be useful for future entrepreneurs.

== Now for the CAVEAT ==

Im launching it now because it has been semi-complete for a few months. There are lots of other bits I want to add but Im not sure I will get chance till around Xmas time :( as it's mostly bug free (for the main site) I thought I should launch it :)

The code is 100% open source. It is built on the Kohana PHP framework and you can laugh at it here:

http://hg.errant.me.uk/startupwiki

(seriously; it is a serious mess. That is a product of working on it in fits and spurts)

If anyone wants to contribute fixes, ideas and other code please do so!

So... enjoy :) go add your Startups! You dont need to be registered to edit / add to the site - but if you want to sign up then you get a teeny bit more value (like no captcha's once you have 5 Karma!)

(oh, btw I love the name startupwiki but all the domains except .co.uk were taken. if anyone can suggest a better idea I will happily consider it).
I like Matt so I'm not dissing him - I'm just saying that paid search was a new trend in 99-02 and if regulation was in place then I think that that offering would not have scaled to the success that it has provided to marketers today. Now like then we are stuck with a poor monetization solution AdSense and CPM display ads. They flat out don't work.

A new solution is need and that innovation will come from startups and tech developers. IMHO
Clickable links: http://www.startupwiki.co.uk

http://hg.errant.me.uk/startupwiki
Google will scan your documents for URLs like "/something.php#!some_ajax_action, and will rewrite those URLs without the fragments (a method they describe in the article, if you read it).
Interesting feedback. Did you try the "search map" mode?

We've struggled with a good middle ground between having all the different sub-neighborhoods vs. simply allowing people to go to where they want to live by browsing on a map.
I'm not certain why I'm being knocked down other than calling out a Y-Combinator guy for being wrong.

He equates desktops to VHS and the web as DVD, the only problem is there is a clear superiority of DVD over VHS (greater resolution, more features, compact form factor) where there is no clear superiority of the web over desktop in terms of usability and features.

If someone can name me one app that is better than the desktop equivalent, please do so.

Flickr is no where near as useful for image cataloging and management than many desktop equivalents. It wins in sharing for sure, but not actual functionality.

Outlook (and I'm sure the xobni guys would agree) trumps it's online version by a mile. Gmail still lags here as well.

Video editing ... Jumpcut? Yeah right.

Audio editing ... show me one that supports high end audio effects or plug-ins.

Image editing ... Aviary < Photoshop. Aviary < most freeware image editing tools.

Google docs - ever press the tab key when editing a doc? Dragged and dropped an image into the document?

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

If you are going to bring a metaphor and present it as the truth, there had better be some truth to it.

Atlas is cool, but derivative of all that came before it: Delphi, Interface Builder, Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, Visual Basic, RealBasic, etc. Sure it runs in the browser, sure you can target the desktop. I dunno, color me unimpressed.

But, listen, if you're going to downvote me at least come correct.
Because in general you get the same thing: a ticket that allows you to go sit in a theater and watch a big screen for ~100 minutes. You could argue that long movies are worth a bit more (I personally prefer a long movie, but theater owners don't because they can't do as many shows per day, so if it's long it better be a crowd-pleaser).

The price of a movie doesn't have much to do with its overall quality, unless your primary interest is special FX or special stars. But I think a cheaply-made movie (like Pi, say - no stars, shot on 16mm, black and white) is worth the same price as an expensively-made one, for the simple reason that I'm willing to invest the same amount of time in watching it.

It also costs the movie theater the same amount to run the projector, clean up the theater, and rent the print of the film from the distributor, except in those very rare cases where someone self-distributes (called 'four walling') and makes a private deal with the theater owner to rent one theater, in which case they may agree on a special price for that show.
I started http://www.ourluckydime.com for financial related questions. I've actually enjoyed getting into the marketing and community building side of things and although it hasn't really paid off so far it has been a good experience.
Removing the manual is low.
Not really... the security is on the strong password I choose, not on the recipe. That's the benefit of using a one way hash.

Now, I can choose one long, crazy pass (or pass phrase) and remember only that instead of dozens of passwords for different sites.
This is what convinces me the system is utterly broken for you guys.

I mean you can understand fuss and screw ups with expensive, complex or unique treatments. But when you have a faff just to go for a dental check up.....

Here I book my appointment, turn up, get 10 minutes or so check up and polish and then pay £16. No fuss or drama.

If you need to go back within the month it is free (on the £16 payment) too. Bargain.
Should I invest more time or not on this 2 week project?
Hello HN community,

I think this question is particularly relevant in a hacker community since we are always working on side-projects and frequently have to decide whether or not to try and turn them into something more.

I spent 2 weeks developing a (yet another) task list application for our company. I know there are a million and one task list applications out there but none of them pleased me.

Why? I was looking for something that was in between a text editor and a task list manager.

I like text editors. I HATE one-liner text-fields most task list apps use (Remember the Milk, for example).

So 2 weeks later I had this working: http://tasklistapp.com/ (for the curious: Zend Framework + jQuery)

We use it daily at our company. We love it.

I'm looking to find out whether anybody else likes it (you guys!).

For developers with similar stories, please share your 2-week side-project stories. Did you invest more time? Did it work? Didn't? Why?
>is that business people tend to want to say "yes" to everything, while software people tend to want to say "no"

That is so true, and i see that every single day. I guess NO is a bad word in marketing/sales, whereas it's actually a pretty good one in the dev world. It usually means, less feature bloat, lesser maintenance.
So here's the thing;

For the average computer user the question is:
'can i get my email and browse the web on it (maybe some word-processing), without it crashing'. With XP, the answer to that is 'yup' (same with Linux/BSD/OSX). Therefore operating systems are a solved problem for the majority of users.

I honestly don't know why Microsoft is wasting money on Windows 7. They could potentially stall the industry for decades (and make bank) by re-releasing XP under a variety of names (maybe with some superficial graphics improvements). Most of their users wouldn't notice or care.
Just a note: for your code examples, you posted the publisher twice (I think the second one is supposed to be the code for the consumer).
As someone who works for a company that did a transition like this (at least a few of our departments) part of the problem is this: While people love the web they still see web apps as inferior to desktop apps.

So it seems like a deal that has a bunch of advantages for IT and none for users.

In our case my boss had the idea of making it a trade off. Users switched to Zoho Apps (which is what we use) and as a result they were given 1 telecommute day. It was framed as "Use this because it will give you the ability to work from home". Once they had an incentive they all took to it pretty quickly.
I thought of books as a way to grow my web presence over the long term. Then I would use that web traffic that been building up over the years to make lot more with dead-tree formats.

I used new chapters or pages as pieces to promote on suitable social news site to create a boost in traffic, and hopefully linking side effects. It works most of the time.
It does not seem to be working.
Is your page down ?

www.startupwiki.org (and www.startupwiki.net) works though -> and that seems to be in German
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what happens if the sales don't cover the advance?
Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles: Usenet
Thanks jacquesm!

The more I look into the problem, the more challenges I'm finding. A friend of mine did this for his master's thesis back in 2002, so I know it's not impossible, but he had a strong background in EE (whereas I'm a relative n00b).

Also, thanks for the search query. I'm checking on it now.
this is the day I am having..

I meant .co.uk ;) just had .com on the mind.

Sorry (& thanks)
I like the fact that seats are the same price and it's first-come first served - if you're really anxious to see a film you can arrive a bit early and get the seat you particularly like. I go to the opera occasionally and although I enjoy it very much it really aggravates me how expensive it is and how the seats are segregated by price, so if your spend is limited there is no way you are ever going to be allowed to get a better seat even if the show is poorly attended and there are empty seats in the box or near the front.

It doesn't help that the San Francisco Opera frequently does 3 different shows on successive nights, incurring tremendous expense in breaking down the huge stage sets and erecting new ones, when they could run the same opera for a week (substituting singers who need a break for their voice to recover) and save a ton of money on set builders. Every time they switch out the set it costs > $10,000, probably a lot more.
I think the genesis of that new model will emerge from sponsorship.

The biggest growth area in my personal income from my online activities (aside from the day job) has been the amount of money I've been getting from sponsored tweets.

It's not a perfect model, but I've already doubled the amount of money I've got this month from last month, with no significant jumps in my personal influence.

Activity stream advertising that benefits the publisher, not solely the owner of the social network, could be where we focus next.

Of course, the FTC isn't exactly making that easy with these guidelines (i.e. what qualifies as "conspicuous disclosure" in a tweet?).
I think they are trying to make people do work that they should be doing. The headless browser is something that Google needs to apply to their crawling process.

The work of webmasters should be making the URLs available -- Google has to come up with ways to interpret the content. This is similar to asking web servers to provide an HTML version of PDF documents that they are serving.
I'd be really interested to know a bit more about some of these. Anybody know what "non-stop" or "multi-inferior" debugging are? And what sort of benefit is gained from using multi-process debugging rather than having a separate gdb attached to each process?

Anyway, sounds like an awesomely good release.
My Top 7 Ways to Market a Business For Free
Duke Nukem: Forever Game of the Year 2009?
I saw this:

(Gelfand's prophecy:) Sporadic simple groups are not groups, they are objects from a still unknown infinite family, some number of which happened to be groups, just by chance.

...first here: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/09/mathematical_kin...

It's stayed with me ever since.
I agree, "alternative" does seem to have a negative connotation at this time, maybe because so many things now fall under that term. Thanks for letting us know the doctor was IFM-affiliated; it's good to know that option is available.
Mossberg on Win7: After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft (MSFT) has produced.

Mossberg on Vista: After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.

Mossberg on Win7: Like the new Snow Leopard operating system released in August by Microsoft’s archrival, Apple (AAPL), Windows 7 is much more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary product.

Mossberg on Vista: Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

I do not care what this person has to say about operating systems, and by extension, about anything anyone writes about what he cares about operating systems.
2 Reasons Why Twitter May Not Be Worth So Much to Google and Microsoft
Exactly, how can they leave out the LES and SoHo? It's not like those are marginal or border-neighborhoods. That struck me as a very odd decision.
The 10 years line is kind of BS anyway. Yes XP has been around for 2 years but there have been 2 massive overhauls of security (2 services packs). Tons of Microsoft enhancements (Desktop Search for example) and even more tons of 3rd party apps that add functionality.

It's not necessarily an OSs job to innovate. The OS is supposed to make it easy to connect hardware to software and get the annoying hardware interaction stuff off the 3rd party programmers plate. So XP is fine because it's solid and allowed 3rd parties to innovate around it
> I know exactly what he's proposing. What I am saying is that it won't work, because aging has to do with developmentally fixed processes.

No you don't know "exactly" what he's proposing, and you don't understand what senescence is, as you've made clear many times here. I'm starting to feel this isn't very productive so we should probably stop this conversation.

> Sure, you can replace blood cells, but do you really think we can replace all your cells, including your neurons? If you want to go in for a complete brain transplant, be my guest.

Here you show again that you have no idea what SENS is proposing and you are making up strawmen. If you want to criticize something, please learn about it first.
Fixed, ty!
With most publishing contracts I'm aware of, nothing. From what I understand, this is in stark contrast to the music industry where artists can need to pay back certain expenses.

In terms of Apress (and, I believe most non-fiction publishers), the money you get in advance is, I believe, non returnable. That's why the advances aren't that generous.
A British newspaper produces a ranking where 4 of the top 6 universities are British. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Link for the above Vista quotes...

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070118/vista-worthy-unexciting...
Heh... I like the article introduction:

Most breakthrough innovations make their greatest contributions when they become products people can buy. Here, Popular Mechanics awards the top 10 most brilliant gadgets, tools and toys that you can buy in 2009.

I guess it would have killed them to include purchase links. :)
I noticed that as well; I assume people basically all tended to check page length at the same point through the page--presumably at some boundary between content sections.
Also, HN seems to have excellent PageRank.
> I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.

Okay, you've just crossed the pompous ahole threshold. Good day to you, sir.
Some interesting tips here. The comments are interesting also (people share experiences of how they did it).

http://www.keithferrazzi.com/blog/how-to-gain-vip-access-in-...
Checked it. It works for me.

The other link you suggest, is not working for me!!
There isn't always a 'why' that makes sense. A lot of ways in which things are done are determined by their history, not by what one would expect to work best. Moreover, business/selling is not an exact science, so you should not expect the salesman to provide reasons that make rational sense.

So, from the other side of the fence, you need to make sure your engineers understand that.
In the circumstances I'm familiar with, the advance is yours.

Who cares, though? Everyone who has ever written a technical book --- with the possible exception of Graham, who is a different kind of writer --- will tell you that finishing a book is far more difficult than they thought it would be at first, and most people allocate multiple months to their original estimate.

Against your lowest conceivable contracting rate, you will never come within radio telescope detectability of breaking even by writing a book for a major publisher. Publishers know you know that, so their entire pitch will be, "authoring a book will be excellent for your reputation and career". This is true in the same sense as getting a Microsoft MVP merit badge is good for your career; look at some of the people who write books, present company excepted.
Hey, they forgot my flux capacitor!
Code To Joy: Open-Source group announces jJava
I don't think you can say the companies themselves are evil. Evil implies a deliberate choice to hurt people instead of helping them. I don't think insurance companies have that choice. They're in the business of collecting modest premiums in return for being on the hook to pay out large amounts of money for the few most sick patients. Of course they're going to drag their feet on paying and try to get the sick ones off the books. If they paid all the claims, they'd be out of business. They don't have a choice, so you can't call them evil.

The unfortunate second-order effect is that it attracts the wrong kinds of people. They need software to find people most likely to cost them money, and jack up their premiums until they switch. Would you want to write that software? Like, the line of code that says,

if policy.expected_payout > policy.current_premium*0.6:
policy.schedule_increase()
Case Study: OfficeMedium - A Drupal Advancement
> it's in fact easier to make that same argument about the French Revolution than it is about Tiananmen Square

No, it isn't, because your argument depends on the "end" being an escape from "absolute monarchism" into democracy. Even if you believe the ends justify the means in general, the argument doesn't work when the end result is not very good.
This probably works out okay as part of an overall strategy for Mr. Cooper, who is building a publishing empire. :)

A little, perhaps, but it's not been a big part of it. I was working on a RSS related startup (which I later sold) when I wrote Beginning Ruby and Ruby Inside was created solely to promote the book. It turns out, though, Ruby Inside has now become my main gig after selling all my other sites.. :) So, a serendipity, rather than a plan.

As a result I got to contribute a chapter to a Web-related title and officially became a published author (yay!). After that I somehow connected with an agent who started bringing opportunities to my attention.

Wow. That sort of thing hasn't happened to me. I've written a chapter for another book and done some technical reviewing on a couple of others, but I haven't had any book related leads come my way. A shame really!

The next opportunity seemed golden: the chance to write a brand new title as part of a very well-known series (something like "Selling Online for the Technically-Challenged Among Us").

If it's the "For Dummies" series - which it sounds like - I've heard a lot of negative things from other authors about the line but.. just because of how famous it is, I'd consider it "golden" fame-wise and probably do it too ;-) There's only so much "noble" work I can do.

Anyway, awesome post - thanks for sharing your story, I enjoyed it.
Living where the sun don't shine
I used to participate in Usenet a lot, back in the mid 90s. Rather stupidly, I set the no archive header (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive) on all my posts. Now I can only find myself quoted in replies.

Shame, really.
No, haven't you heard? Health insurance in America is the best in the world! Obama only wants to change it because he's a Commie!

</sarcasm>
When the only measure available is hopelessly flawed, the correct approach isn't to use it; it's to say, "I don't know."
I was a non-programmer, and I wanted a program written. Nobody was going to write it, and I didn't have the money to pay someone to write it.

So what did I do?

I learned to program, in order to write that program. It took a while, but it was worth it. And it turned out great. And years later I'm still learning. The learning never stops. That is a good thing, not bad.

I would advise anyone to not think of themselves as a "type" but instead to figure out what you want to do, and do it. It might take some hard work. But again, it is worth it.

So how do I perceive non-programmers? They are just people who either have not discovered the concept of what programming can do for you, or they have discovered it but have given up on their own ability to learn (fallen into the "type" misconception). Kind of sad either way.
Minus the ITIN part, that's what I'm going to be doing for 2008-09 (and what I outlined in option 2 above). It's not necessary to have an ITIN and to declare anything to fill out the "Foreign" portion of the tax return and use the treaty's benefits to deduct the withheld US tax locally. Though if you know any more, I'd love to learn more :)
Inaugural Kiwi PyCon, November 7 - 8, Christchurch, New Zealand
In my case, I like the UI changes in XP and Vista (yay for transparency :) and setting it back to Win98-style seems silly to me. But I think I agree with this optimization for a single window, because I usually have many windows open at a time. Hopefully I'll get to try Win7 early and see for myself.