skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there needs to be a way to leverage a person's social graph. I'm in a three-year relationship that came about because a mutual friend played matchmaker.

By having the two parties connected to each other via mutual friends you also address some of the safety concerns - perhaps you require someone in the chain from person A to person B to vouch for each of them.

This may or may not tie into an existing social network - the problem with making it tied to Facebook is that not everyone wants to announce to the world that they're looking for a date, for fear of appearing desperate, or because they use Facebook for other purposes (such as business connections). Another potential downside is that a lot of people go online specifically to date OUTSIDE their current circle of friends.

(As an aside, I typed this and was reminded of what my little brother and his friends called the "Friendster game" in college - going through acquaintances' friends to score who had the hottest friends.)
The point is not that this is a super robust awesome framework, it's that testing is so simple that everyone should do it.
Matrox reveals M9188. 8 monitors, WDDM 1.1 support coming
Matrox's new hydra of a video card will support 8 simultaneous displays, supports Aero in Vista and Win7, and will support WDDM 1.1 in the first half of 2010.
One Idea I've thought in this area solves the question you were asking about, what activity/excuse the users have to come meet?

Well instead of that being a question for you, make it for the users... Users can enter in activities they want to do? (may it be grab some coffee, see a new show, bird watching, even slightly non dating things like jogging or carpooling, etc). It'd be something like Craiglist, but more focus and non chaotic on this aspect of person-person activities... Now the site would do is match up these based on relatedness of activities the person would like to do.
What a ridiculously concise way to handle "omg the end of the world" nonsense "argument" by argument.

It's amazing how silly some theories become when they are compared visually.
Delicious-Library guy said: half of traffic to his site comes from his blog. (I would give URL If I could, this is just me remembering.)
It's social commentary of Carbon Offsets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset
In one of my early companies, we contracted out the design and it was a nightmare. Design is one of those things that you really want the person to be producing every day. Our designer was actually in Ireland which was even worse. He was also working with other clients, so we weren't the main priority. Ugh. It's terribly even thinking back to those days.
Many of those are "arbitrage" schemes. For example, buying a Google ad for "steering wheel desk" and with an Amazon affiliate link. If the Google ad is cheap enough and Amazon converts and pays enough, you can make money. The difficulty is that there are tons of people doing this for every search term they can think of.

I always recommend that instead of buying some scam package, people look at the free 30 Day Challenge ( http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com ) program, where Ed Dale and team show beginners how to start niche marketing online.
The tone is so sensationalist!
Merchant psychology has to be a big part of it. If Visa is charging you 2%, and Amex is charging 4%, Amex looks pretty expensive. If Visa is charging you 2% and Revolution is charging 0.5%, Amex at 4% looks outrageous, and you're going to start thinking more about dropping it. Once enough merchants drop Amex, people get frustrated that merchants won't take their Amex, and start reaching for their Visa first because everyone takes it.
The Benefits of Testable Code
C# got them in version 2.0 and most people think that's a pretty spiffy implementation. Even more-so with the sugar added in 3.0
This is a very hard problem to solve, as the very act of marking something signals "Hey, there's something important here!" The natural curiosity of whoever finds it is likely to override any respect they might have for the warnings of a long dead civilization.
Absolutely. With 3 founders, you don't stop when you're making enough for 2 people to be comfortable with. You have to earn enough for at least 3 people, and when you are at that level, it's much easier to grow.
Seriously, it ain't that bad! But I wouldn't complain about an update if you feel so inclined :)
"If you and your single co-founder don't agree on something, there's no third party to mediate. You're left in a deadlock with nowhere to turn."

One of my previous bosses made me promise to never start a company with only two founders for exactly this reason. This was after a very painful startup experience that ended with lawyers talking to lawyers, one founder buying out the other, and a fair bit of acrimony. I don't know how common this is, but I think I'll stick to the promise.
Ask YC: Ideas for FluidDB?
FluidDB is a centralized but scalable datastore. In it, the meaning of a given object is derived from the tags placed upon it-- and any user can place namespaced tags on any object. The idea is that ad-hoc standards for object IDs and tag names will emerge through use. I think this is a pretty novel shared-data concept and have had a couple ideas for it, but I'm sure news.yc will have additional novel applications. (I am a fan of FluidDB and its creator, but am otherwise unaffiliated.)

What interesting apps can you imagine with this shared-data system?

You can get a high-level idea of it here: http://abouttag.blogspot.com/2009/08/guardian-1000-novels-everyone-must-read.html

You can get into the details here: http://doc.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/
Surely Nokia understands the concept of a sunk cost.
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
Or you complain and embarrass them by adding your voice to the chorus of bad customer service stories extent, and they gradually develop a negative image that tarnishes their "do no evil" mantra a bit and weakens their credibility for when a larger PR blunder occurs.

They are free to do business this way if they like and their customers are also free to pass it on by word of mouth. That's how the market works.

Also, you're being blithe. Google (as most businesses) tries to make it as easy as possible for customers to convert onto their products. They don't put "Oh, by the way, we are able to offer these great services partly because we don't offer support" on their call-to-action pages, and people don't typically expect that it's virtually impossible to obtain customer support, so that's not something they're likely to research up front. By the time they realize their data is tied up in Google, and Google doesn't provide reasonable support, it's too late. It's not like you need support all the time, but when you need it, you REALLY need it.
An Elementary Introduction to the Hopf Fibration
I'm not sure he removed it, I think he just didn't want macros from the start as I recall.
> Think they know and do know are different beast all together.

Not really. I wrote "think" to account for the fact that they can't predict the effect of their knowledge even if it is accurate. (As money people say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. For example, a lot of people lost money in the housing bubble despite accurately predicting it - they just didn't make good moves at the right time.)

> Which part of insider information laws do you not understand.

I understand a lot more about them than you do. For example, it's not illegal for Google to trade on its knowledge of a pending Google order with Rackspace. It's illegal for Google employees to do so only because that interferes with Google's biz relationships and misappropriates Google's knowledge.

If I legally come across confidential information, I'm perfectly free to trade on it. There's only a problem if I steal the information.
Ask HN:  Rate this Start Up - Venmo.com
This reminds me of http://www.cheatneutral.com/

I'd say both of these parodies show why carbon offsetting doesn't really work.

---

When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

Can I offset all my cheating? Well, first you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.
Extrapolating computing
So you're saying you disagree that they should be upfront with their own limitations as a customer service provider, even though they are soliciting you to buy customer service from them?
The problem is that there are some really fundamental differences between rats and humans in terms of metabolism. (E.g. things as different as that they have a type of muscle fibre, type IIb, that we do not have at all.)

You just can't take studies on rats like this and assume that they have any relevance to humans. There are many many known metabolic effects that work on rats but not on people.
PHP's closures are abhorrent. The syntax is partly the problem but also the fact that functions aren't first class objects in PHP.
I've never liked having to type my test twice, once for the actual test and once for the 'message'. So I do something more like this instead:

#include <stdio.h>
#define test(expr) do { \
if (!(expr)) printf("FAILED: %s\n", #expr); \
else printf(" ok: %s\n", #expr); \
} while (0)

int main(void) {
int a = 1;
test(a == 1);
test(a == 0);
return 0;
}

I don't actually use the direct printf() approach, but this shows the idea. Is there a reason more people don't 'stringify' macro arguments? I'm pretty tied to GCC, and am not always aware of what works on other compilers.
One possibility is that Google is thinking really outside the box.

They have Google Voice and have recently purchased Gizmo5. In addition they have been really working towards providing free Wifi access in various hotspots and have been fighting for wireless spectrum.

It may be wishful thinking, especially since I'm not a wireless phone technology expert, but can Google be setting the stage for a pure VOIP Wifi phone which completely bypasses Telcos and can this Google phone be just that?
Interestingly however, much of the Linux kernel is based on the idea of pulling something off and then substituting it completely. For what it is worth, it seems to work for them.
He has said he took lisp and removed macros. But it could have just been conceptually, I don't know. Does anyone?
HN Suggestion: Comments automatically upvote
Since we expect people to comment in order to add to discussion, it seems that any comment should be counted as an upvote of the parent comment/article/both.

This has two benefits:

1. Saves users a click when commenting
2. Discourages people from commenting that they don't like something

Downside is you can no longer give a comment and a downvote, and so cannot explain downvotes, unless you downvote first, then comment (not too hard to remember.)

This also raises the question to me: What's downvoting for? Since something sitting at 1 is unlikely to be seen anyway, and flag exists for pointless posts, it basically exists so the community can fight about what it is interested in, with faction A voting up and faction B voting down. Is that worthwhile?

Perhaps PG can tell us: how many downvotes are there in proportion to upvotes? Of the articles/comments that get downvoted, what proportion receive a significant number of upvotes and downvotes, and what proportion are just downvoted?

(I regret I did not have the time to write this shorter)
You can usually get away with storing the log-factorials, and then just taking the exponent at the end. (If you don't have an arbitrary precision library handy, or computational speed is an issue.)
Just do a quick calculation, and see how much you'll actually make. Then realize that your local McDonalds pays more.

Also, ask yourself this: how do you know you'll get paid? You are helping someone run a scam. Which means they aren't exactly a model of integrity. So, if they just don't pay you, who are you going to compain to? Google? "Hi, tech support. I was working for this guy trying to scam your customers, and now he won't pay".

Next thing you know, you'll be responding to one of those "work from home opportunities" re-mailing packages. The cops busting your door down follows shortly after :)

Seriously, use your time to learn new skills. It is worth way more than you think.
Thanks for the info. Trial versions for desktop app are currently being developed and we will upload them on the websites you mentioned once they are done.

I was trying to figure out Amazon store for software, but it seems to be not working for everyone at this moment. The list you provided is good. It seems like there is no complete list for these stores. We will make one, once we are done with finding all and post a link on HN for everyone to use.
Computer 'geeks' strip for charity
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?
Any business we consider to be a commodity today and can't live without. It wasn't always so, and somebody worked hard to make it one.
first impression - how flexible is the input syntax? as a user, i'd be mad if i thought i typed in something syntactically correct (e.g., "venmo $5 to bob for lunch") but there was actually a syntax error and my transaction didn't go through
Put Some Shine On It: One PNG Goes A Long Way
Rock Band Group Algorithm
I like it - it's software the encourages you, maybe even forces you, to share the experience with someone else turning every user into evangelist. It also seems like it would make financial transactions very simple.

My only concern would be that phone numbers still haven't become non-transferable identification.

I'm sure you have considered these issues before but I would wonder about:

My parent dies and their cell phone account is turned off - how do I get their money out of this service?

My wife and I share a cell phone but we don't share checking accounts.

Someone has already created an account for my phone number.

I use multiple cell phone numbers.

etc.
Strongly agree with this. And I think the focus on CEO for a small company makes sense, but when you apply the same message to a large company it has the potential to become an even larger message. Why isn't every employee at every company doing some type of customer support every 3 months? Or even just once in initial onboarding or 6 months into a new job. Every company has customers and customers are the core of what makes the company go. What else could be more important?
Good thing too. I'm all for addons and the like, but they should be transparent and under user control.
What you're very close to describing here is the Loopt Mix app. There is a small sign up, but its pretty quick and simple. The number one issue with these platforms is that they are plagued with a large number of males completely throwing off the male to female ratio. The problem to overcome is how to get women to use these applications.
I was just thinking the same thing!

It's cool that they released their data set too (although with conditions), shame that they don't give the wine names so you could compare computed scores to wine spectator or the like.
Adam Smith Video On The Story Of Xobni [video]
That quote along with

"A cognitive computer might also help soldiers analyze and react to chaotic events on a battlefield."

seems to be there for the benefit of people controlling the purse strings of the grant money. DARPA (or IARPA now) and potential backers from the financial world (although, do finance folks actually finance this kind of research?).

It may actually work at predicting financial trends, for a while. Then some trading floor will utilize that information to trade, and then their competitors will, then these machines will totally fail to see some other consequence of the complex trades they are making with each other.
Interesting types of examples so far - not many are focused on "best" defined by investment merits, which was my first inclination. I tend to think of businesses as being great in those terms - requiring little incremental financial capital to support significant growth opportunities at high incremental margins, protected from competitive encroachment, etc. Others have already identified some of these from among the well known large businesses, so here are two less well known (or at least not as often thought of) in this vein: wireless towers and WoW (World of Warcraft - or I would have said so before this issue I just saw via google regarding losing Chinese users). The former are local monopolies protected by very strong NIMBY characteristics, have fixed costs that are not subject to significant inflation, and have attractive growth prospects as cell density continues to go up. The latter is just a phenomenal business, though how long it lasts is certainly open to debate...
The fact that the site is "godaddy secured" fills me with confidence.
Python had them tacked on after the fact (version 2.0 as I recall, or was it 2.2?), they work pretty nicely IMO, as long as you treat functions as first class objects the whole time you're ok.
No idea. It's crazy that Zappos is such a unique example of having everyone do some customer support when they start. And I've got almost zero other examples of this in my head for medium and large companies.
> but you really shouldn't be shopping there in the first place.

What makes you say that? I wanted to rent a small car for a week and not one site quoted under $300. Priceline quote came in at $120 from the exact same car companies. It worked out great for me. Of course, I was very cautious about not signing up for 10 other things.
How about you make a deal with theaters etc... in the area.

Couples go online and pick shows/movies they want to watch.

You match people by show, time, area, etc and when they both agree they PayPal you the money to buy the tickets online.

They meet at the theater or a nearby public place.

So, they have a common interest, feeling of safety, immediate discussion points, etc...

And maybe you can squeeze a percentage of the ticket price from the theater.
Maybe using a travel site to book a combination airfare + hotel package. That's about it though.
The proposed system at http://javac.info/ is a little weird and unconventional but it could be promising. It really all depends on what Sun/Oracle decides to do with the language as JDK7 seems to be in limbo at the moment.
Yes, Matrox has beta Linux drivers for x86 and x64 distros. Here's a set of release notes: ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/linux/2009/readme-1.1.1.txt
they work pretty nicely IMO, as long as you treat functions as first class objects the whole time you're ok

Clarify this? Also, isn't there some inconvenience due to the indentation thing?
Using off the shelf components just says they won't reinvent the wheel. If I remember correctly, Bistro uses a django-esque templating model. Not reinventing the wheel or creating another "instant blog" tutorial is fine by me.
> another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop.

That's not oppression.

Those folks are perfectly free to continue to do as they've done for centuries or to buy something else if they feel that the benefits are not worth the costs.

There's nothing wrong with charging more. Customers are always free to buy something else.
Well, purportedly, it's an astronomical/mathematical prediction of doom from natural causes, made by a society with very advanced math and astronomy.

Whereas their own society was brought down by sociological/biological causes, which we have no reason to expect they would be particularly adept at dealing with.

Not that I believe a word of the 2012 nonsense. But logically your critique doesn't hold much weight for me, despite sounding truthy.
I use it daily and love it. I switched from Gmail to Thunderbird to Outlook 2007 with Exchange and have never been happier.

It has reasonable search, which I don't need much anyway since it has hierarchical folders and great filtering. It has a preview pane, the lack of which makes Gmail unusable to me. Unlike Gmail the layout is intuitive and it doesn't take me forever to remember where the spam folder is. Between Barracuda and Outlook's spam filtering I get very little in my Inbox. And if I look in my Junk folder guess where 99% of the emails came from? They were sent to my Gmail account which auto-forwards to Exchange. Gmail's spam filtering might be good in comparison to Hotmail but Barracuda (and probably many other third party boxes) blows it out of the water.

It works with Exchange 2007 so that my emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar events are constantly and instantly synced across the 3 PCs I use frequently and my phone. I can enter an address in a calendar event on Outlook, then seconds later on my phone tap it and have the location pop up in Google Maps. I can save a phone number from an email on my desktop and call it almost immediately after from my mobile. Any smart phone user can do these things.

I'd probably have a much different outlook on Outlook if I had to run the Exchange server, but I just pay some company $6/mo per mailbox to do that for me. There are dozens of such companies for small businesses. (We use Sherweb, and they rock.)

Oh and Outlook doesn't make me disable Firebug :)

If you know people who email a lot, they'll pretty much all tell you that you really can't beat the Microsoft email stack. I'm small potatoes compared to the volume some of my friends do in a day, and they've all tried every email option available since its what they spend most of their time doing.
The Complete Ruby class - and this from a simple language?
Robert Klemme has written a blog post (http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/rklemme/018-Complete_Class.html) that outlines what should be considered when creating a new ruby class. It's been pointed to by many rilluminati as a great and well-written introduction to just what makes a proper class in Ruby.

Even though I myself have done quite a bit of ruby programming (and one of my co-workers is a ruby fanatic), I couldn't help but read it and marvel at the fact that, in a language trumpeted as a programmer's best friend, it sure is really complicated to create a "proper" class.

Perhaps the problem is that Robert only mentions many problems in passing, without providing any links or descriptions of what he means. For example, one that really confused me was the whole problem with calling super in your initialize method, and what would happen if another module you included also has defined initialize, and holy toledo I'm turned around.

Anyway, is ruby really this complicated, and is python any less so? Or does the article just make it sound overly complex due to lack of context?

Edit: the reason I ask about python is I'm weighing my options between it and ruby currently, which is one of the reasons I landed at the blog post. Thanks.
I think that's a good idea, but man kids in schools these days get hit hard by environmental fundamentalism. I don't mean to sound insensitive to that cause, but I'd be lost in a sea of messages like that.
An iPhone,the 4th amendment & TSA (airport screening) policy "change"
I have also tried using Mendeley but never used it after a day of trying it. Papers for Mac is so much better and they have an iPhone app too. Hopefully, Mendeley will follow suit.
I don't see the point here. I mean, I could pay Jenny back next time I see her. Am I missing something ?
Is this why half or the plugins that I had installed and working in 3.6b2 aren't working with 3.6b3? I have the Add-on compatibility reporter, and extension check turned off....
I would have assumed that Dropbox encryps, too?
Exercise does seem to steady my emotions, but that's not the greatest benefit I get from exercising. Health benefits aside, I can simply focus more. There's nothing like being able to sit down and fully comprehend the problem at hand because you went for a run earlier.