skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Got a crazy idea you want to share for Startup Weekend?
I'm at Atlanta Startup Weekend (3) and I was wondering if there was anyone who had a crazy idea they had and wanted to share.
I'd add a way to upload pdf's or docs so people could send things like invoices/contracts etc.

But well done.
those fonts don't look too well on mac os/firefox:

http://imgur.com/R75yG.png
You could easily just have the server send an additional HTTP header for all it's responses. Old clients would ignore it, and new ones could detect it and start the SPDY session.
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/documents/CogScipub.pdf
You might look into the uses, history, and eventual demise of anon.penet.fi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anon.penet.fi
Most likely, considering the fact that no one outside google actually saw it yet, let alone used it or have any fair judgement on how it actually performs.

Am I excited? Yes.

Am I going to use it as my primary OS?

Why would anyone even ask this question, at this point?
Daring Fireball: The Airfoil Speakers Touch Situation
Definitely worth looking into... for now, I've just asked them to send me a PDF with the letter content so that the letter looks exactly like they expect it to.

The letter input screen you see on the site today is pretty new and intended for new users that just want to send a one-off letter or something.
how exactly do you do this?

"If you want to email someone, have them send an email to your maskur.com address, so their maskur.com address will appear in the "From" field, or ask them to mask their email on this page."

at that point, haven't you already communicated with them? either by phone / in person, or via email?
What if that related or unrelated business that wants to approach you based on your ad for patio furniture, have to pay for that privilege. That might definitely make those auto warranty guys have second thoughts.
There is an automated reason why this guy's having trouble. Google could easily look up a text string they've stored, based on that reason, and tack it on to the guy's account. Something more specific than the unhelpful low quality message he's getting.

Anyone who uses spamassassin, look at the X-Spam-Status header in a message, it could be that terse:

X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-100.7 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_20,HTML_MESSAGE,USER_IN_WHITELIST autolearn=ham version=3.002005

Which is much better than "too many points".
Fools and their Money Metaphors
I particularly object to Apple rejecting apps for "pre-existing conditions."

I have had two apps get randomly rejected for things that had existed for several versions. I blogged about this a bit: http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Update%20on%20Gaia%20GPS...

This is just bad for everyone involved. Apple could just say "fix it next time or we will reject you" rather than throwing a wrench into my operations.

Oh well... I'm going to keep developing iPhone apps and hope things improve.
Definitely, I'm working on that as we speak. I'm planning to offer the PDF upload capability on the letter input form that you see on the site.

Additionally, I'm thinking about creating the ability for people to just email something like "letters [at] snailpad.com" with the recipient's address in the subject line and either (1) the letter's content in the email body or (2) a PDF attachment of the letter content.

If they're a recognized user and have available credits in their balance, I'd shoot off a confirmation and queue it for physical mailing on the next day. Otherwise, I'd reply with an email containing a PDF preview of the letter and some text encouraging them to signup or reload their account.
Ask HN: How useful and developed are languages called Lustre and Scade?
I hear these languages are used extensively in Realtime systems. Can someone put light on my doubts?

Telling a few things about the learning curve would be helpful.
the link is broken
Thanks for the complement, I appreciate it! This is my second semi-serious app with RoR.
To be honest, I think the approach she took is a lot more reasonable. The whole point of building a product business is that your revenue scales differently from your expenses. Your example has an implicit assumption that Google is somehow artificially regulating demand so they can keep their profit margin at 20%. The profit margin on Gmail could be 5% or 99%. Who knows?
I think rigor is imposing to people when you try and combine it with high-level theory. The concepts in that article are built on top of so much theory, that to explain it all would require the equivalent of a course on analysis.

But if you supply rigor in an appropriate dose, it can really be eye-opening. For me, calculus was a nightmare because none of the terms used were well defined. I was just presented with all this highly developed theory and had to take much of it on faith. And I couldn't enjoy nor care about something I felt was just forced memorization of computational techniques for solving contrived problems. But if they'd done it rigorously, the classes would have begun with questions like "what is distance?", then answering that question would lead into "what is a space?", etc. This is rigor and I feel like exploring these types of questions is a lot more intuitive than forcing kids to memorize how to compute the volume of some cone.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to nail these down soon.

As for the sheets of paper, for now I'm betting that the average letter won't be more than 4 pages (since that's when the postage costs rise).
I find it interesting that Apple's problems with the review process seems to be hurting them the most by leaving developers hanging and having nothing better to do than port their apps to another platform.
"www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction"

I never, ever expected to come across this phrase spoken seriously.
If something like this was actually used, I predict we would just see a shift from "I'm in ur base, killin ur doods" to "I am in your base, and I am in the process of killing your dudes."
Good replies guys, thanks for the points.

Click farms for the sake of click farms are one thing... but it shouldn't matter if you provide decent content.
Circulation has been steeply dropping

Yes and no. 10 years ago, at best I'd buy and read one newspaper per day.

Now I probably visit 10 newspapers' websites per day to read various news.

While physical circulation is down, overall exposure may not be.
Adsense provides an additional revenue stream for me.

Hotel bookings, ads for resorts and adsense.

It's actually a decent amount of money from a network of sites.
App Store rejections may benefit indie iPhone developers
Great point. I think one of the issues with calculus is that it can be studied at so many levels. Most high school classes give lip service to limits (somehow they're important), and then get into symbol manipulation (move the exponent down, subtract 1, etc.).

I think the most important thing in the beginning is to learn to think conceptually about calculus, about how to break a shape into a simpler model and solve it (not just manipulate models that are given to you). Later on (in analysis, which I've never formally taken :) ) the details about the transfer principle, epsilon-delta proofs, etc. can emerge, but realistically only a very, very small fraction of students need that. That fraction can be increased if they are able to use calculus regularly (with infinitesimals, say) and then wonder the details of how it all works.

I like to ask: Would it be such a bad thing if everyone understood calculus as Newton did, at a baseline level? Many people taking calculus leave with no understanding whatsoever, but the same isn't said for geometry or even algebra (you can make references to parallel lines, equations and feel that people will 'get it', but mention a derivative or limit to someone 10 years after calc class and you'll get a blank stare). I advocate having rough mental models that are successively refined over time (vs. presenting the most rigorous version first).
From a pure business perspective, who is losing out here?

I mean, a web developer may hate IE, but what would be the outcome if he designs the site as firefox/safari alone. or a software developer for that matter with windows.

If the project is a hobby, sure. anything and everything goes. But what about the business perspective?
I'm actually a little fearful that worse will happen to me (from Google) after posting this on my blog and on HN.
Public bulletin boards, forums, and ads are a few ways to do it.
My take from that chart is that if git was actually easy to use, it would be as good as svn. whoopee!
In addition to what Aaron said, I'm obviously not talking about providing technical support for people who don't know how to search for things in Google. But services where an exchange of money happens definitely require adequate customer care.
Thanks for the comment. I did contemplate mentioning the definition of sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + ...

but thought it would be too leading & tangential -- I wanted to show visually that most curves can in fact be modeled by a straight line over a small distance, without the sledgehammer of showing sine's expansion.
Start Startup News where only submissions are software development proposals. Members comment and vote on proposals. Each quarter, the top three proposals are recommended to venture capitalists. The proposer and the top five members are invited to participate in the development.
The ISx50 is actually not anything like the Corolla -- it's rear wheel drive (or rear biased AWD) and has a different chassis.

Interestingly, there is a luxury version of the Civic in Canada, it's called the Acura 1.6EL. Other than the fact that it shares sheet metal with the Civic, I'm not sure why it's not sold here.
Solid point. I'll look it up.
Wow. The iPhone platform is losing a lot of talented (go Rogue Amoeba! I love those guys) developers here lately. I wish Apple would fix this.
Everyone Should Get an A
>If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely high number...

It's dangerous to generalize from yourself like that.
they do have to pay for that privilege usually, and I still get terrible spam.
It would take alot of people but it would also increase revenues.

Adwords is not an intuitive service.
this is exactly what Match.com started as...
> you can certainly tell Flash to ask you if you'd like to store data.

Sure you can, if you know where to find the setting, but how many people do?

If the answer to that question is not "almost all of them" or more, then any argument based on implied consent is defeated before it even starts.
Google intentionally doesn't do this because it would help spammers game the system better.
Rhino is a mature project, so at least for my purposes, this was actually a bit more important than performance.

The other thing is that it allowed my team to rewrite pieces into Java as needed without it looking dramatically different.
It is certainly something different hearing them say it rather than reading it in Wikipedia. I find their optimism very reassuring and enjoyed the Q&A format.
More specifically it is the review process. You dump your app into a black hole and get very little feedback. They need to have a dialog with the developer and a tighter feedback loop.

Submit app, assign reviewer (who will also get priority for reviewing any updates), and then you have a dialog with the reviewer.

I've got a couple small apps that I'm preparing to submit, but I don't think I'll spend the time to write anything serious until they fix this.
clickable:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/one-thing-you-dont-need-to-b...
Also, its incredibly difficult to deal with large (>100mb) datasets in XML format. Loading that thing into RAM for an XML parser is ridiculous. Tab delimited data is really the best format possible as you can easily build MapReduce scripts if needed to manipulate it.
That's in a perfect world. The first step is to get the data out there. They we can start wondering about structure and presentation. It takes a long time to build a data infrastructure, but you should stop people who have the skills and interest from getting their hands on it. Hopefully data.gov will work with data producers to become a quality data resource, but at least there is a resource in the first place, a place to go and find material.

Perhaps a model might be people starting from data.gov and then creating different views into the data for different purposes. They don't have to reside on data.gov, and personally that's what I hope the site evolves to. Making data available in reasonable formats that can then be converted into information by other people.
Danvers HS now referring meeps to the police
Alternately, I wonder if this move will hasten the newspaper's decline. If traditional newspapers/media remove themselves from the Google Index it creates a huge opportunity for new media outlets (huffingtonpost and other online verticals), smaller tier players, other intermediaries (bloggers and the like).

It's not like consumers are going to stop using Google for these types of searches overnight. And it's not like they won't continue to find great content (albeit not from "blue chip" outlets like WSJ, NYTimes, etc.). Combine that with the decline in relevance of traditional outlets wrt the younger generation (I imagine the same dynamic that makes Jon Stewart the most highly regarded news broadcaster in the U.S. also pertains to the < 30something regard for traditional media brands) and you have a pretty dismal outlook for old media made even more dismal by the outright ceding of their Google traffic (if it comes to pass).

But I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. If you're a smaller, up-and-coming online media player though, you've got to be licking your chops.
Microsoft tool found to contain GPL code - now to become open source
Ok, I've decided to put some action to my feeling, I'm going to run an experiment to make advertising on my sites optional, since I feel that I have become a part of the problem. We'll see how it works out.
Women's Sober Living - Sober Living Homes | Sober House in California
It’s one that’s been told before, but until things change, it needs to keep being told.

no, iphone developers need to take more drastic action to boycott apple's actions than just "telling" the story.

apple needs developers to keep the app store and platform popular and, so far, all of the big developers are singing their tune and continuing to publish new apps and updates, even if they are complaining on their weblogs.

i think if the top iphone developers got together and had the petitioned support of dozens or hundreds of smaller developers, and took some serious action like going to apple headquarters and sitting down with those in charge, they could work to change things.
This post has been up over two hours and nobody has come up with any alternatives?

Wow
wikihow did this a while ago (a year or two), you could ask them about their experiences: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Why-Hide-Ads
You should add a 'skypeout' like option to this where it works internationally.

People in the country of destination would print out the items and mail them for the cost of a local stamp and get some compensation for their efforts.

That way you can offer international 'real' snailmail for a tiny bit over the price of a local stamp.
You also ripped off github's desgin ;-)
I think those kinds of quizzes doesn't extract how good or bad the person is for the job.

I wouldn't work for a company that rate a person by quizzes or tricky questions.
I wouldn't say "pay with your PayPal account" because that makes it seem like you need a PayPal account -- they also accept credit cards for those without accounts.
I moved my reply to my top comment and screwed up the reply tree here. So this is for the comment that follows this one:

data.gov is fundamentally flawed, and won't be anything but annoying until it is reworked into something along the lines of what I suggest. Or so I think...
1. Do you do international? I see a lot of need for letters to Mexico, China and India.

2. You could charge a lot of money for handwritten notes. In fact, I would pay $20 for someone to hand write a letter to my grandma, once a year, or so.

3. CC from email. It would be great if I could simply cc xxxx@snailpad.com which you would print and physically mail out.

4. It would also be useful if you could print and snail mail some documents I email you (receipts, hotel reservations, maps, etc).

Edit ... oops I see you have a lot of these features already. Maybe you can work on #2. Cheers!
This strikes me as a strange question. What aspects of the Mythical Man Month do you feel no longer apply?

(That is, it has been a while since I last read it, but I can't think of anything specific about TMMM that seems out of date as long as you take into account the historical context. Maybe the "surgical team" stuff is a little bit bloated relative to the scope of many projects and the strength of many tools now-a-days, but I think you need to mentally account for improvements in infrastructure and ecosystem as you read it--standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. If memory serves, most of the underlying themes seem still valid and relevant.)
You know, I came up with this idea ages ago, and did exactly nothing about it. I think it came about because I needed to mail a single letter and had no printer, no envelopes and no stamps ... surely there must be many more like me!

Would I pay £1 ($1.60) to send a letter - probably - beats needing to buy a printer (ok, I can use the printer in work) find a stamp, take it to the post box etc.

What about recorded delivery letters? I would need to queue up in the post office for those - maybe there is some why that could be handled in batches.

Also, I think companies who send lots of letters get a discount on the standard stamp price.

You could also have 'printing centers' in various countries around the world for cheaper and faster 'air mail'.

I think this idea has a lot of potential, but it would probably require TV commercials to get it to the masses!
Feels a lot like urban legends.
Hmm. how about making the conversation between the vendor and the ad poster public?
This would be vastly improved if Git's documentation and help system wasn't so incomplete, out of date, convoluted, and messy. Git has an incredibly rich featureset, but the documentation often falls down in highlighting the 99% use cases so it ends up with a steeper learning curve than many other SCMs. I think this is one reason why Mercurial is so popular, at the scale of most development projects the advantages of Git over Mercurial are not terribly significant, but Mercurial has much, much better help and tutorials.
just thinking out loud, how about making the identity of the vendors that respond to you and the conversation you have with them public?
How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search
Microsoft Confirms  GPL Issue with USB/DVD Tool
You're a far more tolerant man than I. The fact that Apple is preventing you from supporting your customers is inexcusable.

These kinds of issues can be extremely hurtful to an ISV. I wonder if upper management at Apple knows how much damage they're doing to their reputation in the developer community.
Nice, thank you for that link.

Their stats would definitely be interesting to know.

This experiment was prompted by this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940141
You realize that you're basically running a scam, right?
Is the Android store any better? Do they just let anything in that people submit?
Better would simply be to say that sin is opposite over hypotenuse, and when the angle is really, really small, the opposite is effectively the same as the arc length. Since the acr length is the angle in degrees, that means that sin(x) ~ x when x is very small. Then you can be more rigorous with the epsilon/delta, and say "you pick how close, and I'll get it closer by making x small enough."

Similar arguments can show, for example, that acceleration in a circle is v^2/R. "Calculus" was, or course, done for decades, if not centuries, before "calculus proper" was (somewhat) formalised by Leibniz and Newton.

This whole discussion should probably be taken to email if it's to be taken further. The question is, how can we have this sort of discussion, and produce something worth publishing back onto HN?
Yeah--they used to have little graphs of how close they were to their pledge-drive goal, and things like "Please read this letter from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales", and then one day I looked at Wikipedia and instead of all that, just the Wikipedia logo centered in a banner with "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" in big blue letters around it. I can't explain exactly why I found that funny, but I did.
I too had to buy a comparatively giant house to get a parcel of land the size I was looking for within sane commuting-time of my job. We were living in a house almost half the size, but have figured out ways to take advantage of the extra space, but clearly could live without it.

I think a big driver of this phenomenon is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
I like this idea. It serves some sort of need, I'm sure.

I don't see how to monetize it, but if your goal is just to provide a needed service, I think it's pretty cool. It's arguably more convenient than setting up another yahoo or google account.

As to who would use it, one would first assume it would be mostly folks engaged in illegal sorts of activities. Since we've decided to control our population by getting them to live in fear, by making them all guilty of breaking some law, I'd say your userbase is potentially very large.

However, some of those folks (child porn, drug dealers, terrorists) probably shouldn't be helped. There's also the paranoia aspect. How do I know you're not a cop, trying to trap me? How do I know you're really destroying your database? I think anybody that's doing something wrong won't risk using you.

So, taking out the justifiably paranoid law breakers, that need you, but dare not use you, that leaves us with dating and craigslist ads.
This is horrible news!
I do wish it were a little shorter, or at least that the "why lawyers need this" section came sooner---I think (fear) much of the target audience will glaze over well before the end.
It would't be the first time that microsoft used its cash to prolong the death of something in order to set it against a foe.

SCO definitely comes to mind here.

You can look forward to reporting on google and ms becoming serioudly skewed by this.
He sounds like a jerk, but imagine how much it boosts his morale to feel so superior (even if unfairly so).
Cars are far easier to drive, and maintain, than a horse cart.
You'll have hard data on your own products, but you can still only make guesses about your competitors' products, your complements, and other variables in the marketplace. Joining a company doesn't eliminate uncertainty, it just shifts the uncertainty from that company's numbers to everyone else's numbers.
Why is there a review process at all? There's no review process for OS X, and that seems like a decent consumer experience. For that matter, there's never been a review process for UNIX, Windows, or the Web. Those platforms all seem to do okay.

Seriously, what advantage does the review process offer? Can it be seriously argued that "review" benefits anybody?
"I feel like I'm just making other people rich."

Then why are you working for other people? If you can create the kind of value you claim ($700k daily revenue), then your next choice seems obvious.

start your own company.

don't "do a startup" because those are mostly filled with people afraid of corporate jobs, clutching at lottery tickets ... no, start a real business. make money from day one.

you won't feel exploited anymore, but expect to be exhausted. not the "why did I just do that" kind of exhaustion you've been dealing with, but the "i just gave birth to something amazing" kind that you'll feel good about.

good luck and don't listen to the people who tell you it's too hard.