skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting idea.

I think the feedback thus far is a little harsh. There's room for improvement but I don't think your average user will be put off by the design. I'd reconsider the "Register Now" post it though--the font feels a bit angry and the post-it image is a bit pixelated.

Here's a few more general thoughts

1) I'd look for a way to make the concept of the site a more clear. I know a thing or two about affiliate programs and it took me a minute to understand how this site works/what it does.

I'm confused by your introductory paragraph and what it implies. In four paragraphs of text you never really explain what's going on here. What do you mean by "use"? Where do you get your "income"? That's what makes it feel shady to me. I'd be more direct about what your business model is.

If I understand you correctly, you're just giving kickbacks of 50% of the money you make from affiliate deals. If so, I'd focus on making that clear. Find a way in layman's terms to say "We register for affiliate programs. You buy products using our affiliate links. We pay you back 50% of what we earn." For example, you could say something like "The website that pays you back: Simply by starting your shopping experience here at Half2You, you'll earn up to 7.5% of your purchase price back in affiliate rewards" maybe followed by more details on how affiliate programs work (something like question 2 on your current FAQ).

In particular, I'd reinforce the concept that (1) you aren't buying the products from Half2You and (2) you continue to shop at your regular online stores, you just start the process at Half2You in order to get the affiliate credit.

2) I'm confused by what I should expect to find under the categories, I half expected to find a list of products. If you want people to use this as a browser homepage, I'd focus on making it work more like a gateway. Maybe your homepage should look like the Opera speed dial--just quick graphical links to the stores I'm most likely to shop at.

3) While you're at it, in the store detail pages I'd be more explicit about the terms of your affiliate program. E.g., go ahead and tell people what percent they'll make with a purchase from that store. Among other things, this will help both you and them maximize the reward by selecting the store that gives them the most cash back.

4) I'd focus on affiliate programs and drop the revenue share on display and text ads. That seems to be moving you into a gray area.

5) It seems as if you are toying with notions of user generated content on this site--ratings, reviews, coupon codes, etc.--maybe even having folks create content pages to drive organic (non-registered) traffic. If I were you I'd focus my energy on the affiliate links in the short term, mainly from an MVP perspective but also because I think the kinds of user generated content you are likely to get will bring down the perceived quality of the site. To the average user this feels too good to be true. You need to give visitors confidence that you're not somehow scamming them.

TL;DR: I'd try to be more transparent about what this site is and what it does.
You're not accounting for the fact that this is a book on the NYT bestseller list. She could write dozen of books over her lifetime and have only one make that list. So I'd quibble with "which probably gross a fairly similar amount."

Criticizing the quality of the book doesn't seem entirely valid, because quality literature may sell far fewer copies. How many copies of his books did Pynchon (for example) sell?
Clever title.
The info is sketchy at this point but it seems that Stephen Colebourne's First Class Method proposal is the one in the running.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddhp95vd_0f7mcns
http://www.obsessable.com/news/2009/01/26/android-applicatio...

> The application has reportedly deleted all the contacts from the device's internal memory, as well as all data on SD cards on the device.

I'm not justifying Apple's review process, I'm just saying bad stuff has happened on Android before.
ORNL computer is the fastest in the world
Senate Panel: 80 Percent of Cyber Attacks Preventable
10 Largest VC-Backed M&A Exits of 2009
Have you tried craigslist in the freelance section? I'd interview them on the phone before hiring, but if you have some technical competency you should be able to listen through a bad contractor's BS.
This is a lesson in branding. If it was, for example, a Motorola phone, the article would say just "a cell phone".
Bloomberg + Vanity Fair Financial Crisis Live Webcast
What companies "will do", and what products "will be", is never news. Microsoft in particular has been saying (and lying) about such things for years.

Believe it when you see it. Not before.
Possibly some kind of backwards compatibility.
It seems to me that you can't cover all the cases, you just have to figure out how often throughout history they have occured and cover the major fraction of them. In any case, here are some of the ideas I liked:

Some of the ideas in the original comment thread from 2006 were nice. Make the area inconspicuous, make it extremely expensive to dig up. Why not make it look like a giant concrete dumping ground?

To thwart geological surveys, maybe you could figure out a way to stealth the tunnels or arrange the tunnels in the shape of a warning message.

Perhaps you should make the area extremely inconspicuous and just trecherous to get to for the technologically unenabled (build rivers, hills etc). That way you ensure that mostly only hikers get there and hopefully don't notice the concealed enterance. Of course, that plan could be thwarted if a group of people seek shelter there because of wartime persecution.
Worms don't require a user-installed daemon when the Apple-provided ones are also vulnerable (example: the SMS vulnerability in 3.0)

I agree though, disallowing third-party daemons reduces the damage exploited apps can do.
If you want good security theater, just install some fancy looking machine that makes cool noises and every once in a while directs someone for a personal screening (regardless of whether they should be pulled out of line or not).

Also have a trained pro sitting on the sidelines pulling out people he finds suspect.

At a later point, maybe you can replace the fancy looking stuff with equipment that actually does something.
well, I hope the ebooks will change this. With the costing of printing going away, you don't need a publisher anymore. The only thing you really still need to do is marketing.
The Most Amazing Bubbles In History
Programs back then probably weren't designed with modularity in mind, which is why its hard to remove even the slightest detail of code without extensive testing..

I really hope Microsoft gradually improves this situation with the MinWin project.
Whoever makes mobile payments ubiquitous will make billions.
Agreed. One of the most important skills I picked up in college was not the ability to code in whatever the hot language du jour was, but the ability to learn a new language quickly, and to pick out its important characteristics: Garbage collection? Dynamic typing? Closures?

After that, yes, it's nice to be fluent in a fast, productive language like Python, and to understand a lower-level one like C.
Please checkout our service, Feedity - http://feedity.com for creating RSS feeds from virtually any webpage.
How about a skull? Pictures of people dying of radiation?

I can't see giant monuments doing anything other than enticing people to dig. However, reliefs and images of people dying of radiation poisoning might be less ambiguous.
If, like me, you were left hoping for some explanation of the actual magic behind this code, try this: http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2003/InvSqrt.pdf
Personally, I think the origin of Quake3's fast InvSqrt is from a bubble in the space-time continuum resulting from posting articles about Quake3's fast InvSqrt routine to social news sites every week. Yeah, it's kind of self-referential, but that's exactly how these bubbles are formed...
I've done that last thing in the UK, however I had to do it via the fraud dept. I had to report unwanted chargers from an e-tailer I'd "cancelled" my account online with as fraud.

However Barclays did make it a reasonably painless and speedy task (comparatively).
there is an american startup in Cambridge that are considering moving here permanently for their startup. They moved here because of the Red Gate Springboard programme.

Let me know if you wanna pick their brains about USA vs UK, and I'll intro you.
I am a big fan of libcloud.

One thing I didn't quite get after reading the blog post was what the ASF Incubator gives to its members, or what libcloud is now more likely to accomplish.

I know what a business incubator does. What does an oss incubator do?
Thank you for writing it in plain english -- I really wish I could upvote you more than once because it's one of the best replies in this discussion (for that, and for bringing up "blithe", that I didn't know of).
hilarious. but maybe a few people will participate (fall for it) and thus indirectly donate to jquery, postgres, or apache.
I don't think people trust any of the none popular gateways. Just add the cost of Paypal's fee to your product's cost and use different payment methods. credit card, Paypal, Google checkout, money orders and checks.
are you familiar with the new paypal developer platform? you can now have people create an authorization of amount X, but not charge them until some date in the future(I believe the max window is 1 year).

Would that help your situation at all?

Would be curious to know about your experience with bizbuysell.
TC50 Success Story: CitySourced
Scroll Clock
How The World's Fastest Supercomputer Was Paid For: Stimulus Funds
Amazing. Source: http://toki-woki.net/p/scroll-clock/script.js
Can you explain your last sentence? I don't understand it.
How to Use Ning for Business
Of course, the flip-side is that anyone will be able to publish a book and most people will know how to steal them. Neither of which make for great prices. Still, interesting times.
The design principle behind Java is "don't add features that could confuse programmers". (This confuses me, a programmer, but that is a bit too meta for this post.)

Despite this principle, Java's users asked for generics, and so the language designers added them. But with a twist; they intentionally made the simple concept very confusing. This is so that the next time someone asks for a feature, they can point at generics and say "look at how badly we broke that! do you really want us adding more features?" A few episodes like this (closures will be next), and people won't ask for features anymore. With no more feature requests, it will become clear that Java Is Perfect, and the designers can retire with a very smug feeling of self-superiority.

I think.
Joining the ASF adds structure to the project that will help it grow the community and product. This includes formalities such as contributor agreements, so that all IP is released to the ASF, or votes so that consensus is reached by a group instead of individuals. It does add a little overhead, but the overhead is there to help grow the community in general.
Nokia has designs on India
Only because a lot of HTML email is tested to make sure it’ll appear at least somewhat as expected in Outlook.
Why is a link to a blog post any better than the same content in a non-link?
The Future of Linux is Google
Google App Engine and the myth of the open cloud
4 Scenarios for Android, Minus the Phones
How to Make a Million Dollars
75 points without a single comment? WTF
So, in this brave new world, people that are afraid to use guns have lost the right to live because they didn't take up the responsibility to defend themselves?

Lifting the ban on guns/knives on an airplane is not going to make it safer to fly in a plane because "everyone will just pull out their guns and shoot the terrorist." What if the terrorist has a bomb strapped to him? What if he takes someone hostage? Just shoot through the hostage? What happens when a civilian decides they they are an expert marksman and tries to shoot the terrorist, but hits the hostage instead? Supposing that the terrorist was 'defeated' and everyone was safe, how would the legalities of that situation resolve? Is the person excused from killing an innocent because they were 'defending' their self?
This is a good point, but having just designed an HTML formatted email don't discount the fact that Outlook is popular enough to gain bend-over-backwards-to-make-it-work status. Having said that, it wasn't too difficult to get it looking good.
It looks to me like she has written a number of books in this same "Darkyn" series over the past few years, several of which have peaked on the NYT bestseller list. Check her Amazon or B&N page.

Anyway, I agree that quality literature may, in reality, sell far fewer copies (although I'm sure that Pynchon has sold hundreds of thousands or millions) -- the reason I mentioned that was because one reasonable argument is this idea of fairness, where you could say, "it's not fair that someone producing something of this quality should be paid so little, so the system should be different." I would agree with that if Joyce Carol Oates was making $50,000 a year, but I think that in this case the market's valuation of this work matches or exceeds my personal sense of fairness.
I heartily agree with your skepticism.

In my opinion, rather than attempting to simulate progressively larger brains, we should instead focus on really nailing the details of smaller ones, perhaps starting with insects.

As an example, Portia jumping spiders display very complex hunting behaviors, including trial-and-error learning in novel circumstances. Even with tiny eyes, they have the visual acuity of a cat. However, unlike a cat, they are only able to see a small portion of the visual field at a time, and must therefore scan the environment, keeping the rest of what has been scanned in memory. Portia spiders are known to spend up to an hour "analyzing" their environment before deciding on a course of action! Their sharp eyesight allows them to recognize the species of the spider they are currently stalking. One common tactic is to pluck deceptively at the web of their victim in order to manipulate it into reacting and moving into a more favorable position before the attack. Different species of spiders will respond in different ways, and so the Portia learn to intelligently apply different patterns of plucking to fit the circumstances. When encountering an unknown type of spider, Portia will try various experimental plucking motions, the successful results of which will be remembered and reused correctly in future attacks.

This amazingly rich and adaptive behavior it somehow manages to produce with a mere 500k neurons; about 2000 times less than the number used by Blue Gene in the experiment.
It's a shame that that is not linked from the original article.
Playgrub: New and Improved
The potential results are almost unbelievable:

"The bottom line is that cash for caulkers would be trickier than cash for clunkers — yet would have the potential to do far more good. McKinsey, the consulting firm, estimates that households could reduce their energy use by 28 percent over the next decade. In terms of greenhouse gases, that would be the equivalent of taking half of all vehicles in this country off the road."
Very true. As happy as I am to see all the great feature support in IE9, it's going to be a long time before we can write CSS like this for any kind of mass audience.
The Black Hole Theory of Design:

http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/the_black_hole_theory_of

Another way to put it is that Lisp might be a local maximum: It may not be the globally optimum language for a particular problem, but once you approach Lisp you find that improving your language requires either becoming more Lisp-like or making a huge leap away from Lisp (C, ML, Haskell, Smalltalk, Erlang, &c.)
It really depends if there is something like "Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act" in your country (that one particular is from Ireland). So, in a nutshell, contract doesn't trump law, ever.
Yes, that was exactly the point.
Indulgences? "_"

I guess these are for yourself rather than others though.
Anyone have recommendations? The only thing I've ever bought from PragProg is Agile Web Development with Rails, which I can recommend.
Hi David, can you please say more about why you don't recommend Europe? How's your own company's experience been?

No doubt Silicon valley is ahead as far as startup hubs go, but I don't think we are helping the business community in Europe by just accepting that as an unchangeable situation.
> Way to stand up for yourself!

I hope you're not being sarcastic. It's a tragedy that these airport screeners feel themselves to be the representatives of the police. It's just like the security guards and retail managers that think they have a right to detain you if they think you've stolen something [They don't have any such right, unless they are holding you for the cops to get there and sort the situation out].

The reason that most people just put up with this stuff is because it's easier to just 'go with the flow' than to resist and have to go through this whole process. Personally, I have respect for the people that are willing to stand up against this crap and push back instead of just bending over.
Vevo To Officially Launch December 8, 2009
Just got the following email because I am on some mailing list.

"Dear member of the VEVO VIP pre-launch mailing list,

We are excited to tell you that VEVO will launch the evening of Tuesday, December 8!!

We've been working night and day for months to bring you the best music video and entertainment experience we can dream up, and in just about 3 weeks you can see it online for yourself!

The VEVO service at VEVO.com and at YouTube.com will go live in coordination with our launch event in New York on December 8th. We'll be sure to let you know as soon as it's up and running so you can start having some fun :)

We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on!

In the meantime, please keep in touch and let us know what you think about all things VEVO!
VEVO on Twitter
VEVO on Facebook

All the best,
Team VEVO"
If anything, that's quite an indicator of article quality.
Ooh, I like it. I have a design exercise that involves listening to a song for inspiration. This will be perfect! Thank you for sharing. I agree that this is a fascinating idea.
Thanks -- actually, with PayPal you can only "Authorize and Capture" funds for 29 days, which isn't enough. A year would be quite nice.

However, there are a number of payment gateways that microPledge can use aside from PayPal. At this point we're interested in licensing the software and/or selling the entire business.
I was thinking the same thing. It's a really good article - above the TechCruch norm. I especially liked #2 - "Where's the real money?" It's tempting to try to go from 0 to 100,000,000 in one go, but if you haven't penetrated a familiar market yet, it's often worth waiting on the unfamiliar market.

Reminds me of the recent Pyramid Method post here[1]. Succeed in a small sector that gives you frequent feedback. Once you're mastered that sector, move on to bigger things.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=712300
Most of their language books are pretty good -- Programming Erlang and Programming Clojure are both worth reading, if you're interested in either language.

It's disappointing that they don't discount The Pragmatic Programmer, as that's a book I wholeheartedly recommend to every working developer. I think that's still owned by Addison Wesley.
Haven't tried for this specifically, though we have found contractors for small jobs on craigslist before and it's never been very good. One guy we hired for a media encoding job early on was such a loser he actually tried to blackmail us until our CEO verbally castrated him.

This seems like the kind of thing that you go through your network to find. I figured HN would be the next best thing, but unfortunately no upvotes so none of the thousand members here that could probably help me even saw this. Ah well.
> The TSA detained the man (possibly illegally)

Not 100% sure that it was illegal. If you walk out of a retail store and set off those alarms, they do not have the right to search you. They do have the right to detain you iff they are holding you for the cops to get there (it becomes illegal when they detain you without calling the cops). This can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in general I believe this holds true.

Though I believe that the TSA should be held to a higher standard in their jobs (retail employees/managers are not trained to deal with this sorts of issues, at least not well).
Assertive Code
Now I'm the middle of rewriting a good-sized software system. The reason for this is, we had to a add a completely new security level on top of our data (user accounts, groups, individual column access).

There's just no way we could've refactored our already tucked-together legacy code. This thing was passed along 4 different developers, each constantly adding new features and I'm surprised it hasn't exploded yet.We're getting calls every day cause something broke again.

So yea sometimes rewrite definitively makes sense and I'm sure our customers will love it.
Hmm,

I feel much better about NSA involvement with Linux because of it's open source nature.

The NSA could be working to patch security holes in Windows or it could be installing back doors or both. With Linux, it's clear they're patching security holes/vulnerabilities.
I think it's better to take into account a book's longevity. If it is a classic in print 50 years and sells steadily, it could outsell a book in the NYT bestseller list, which might only sell that big for a year or even less.
So you didn't see this, then ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935053
In-text advertising that doesn't make you vomit
could you shoot me an email off site? my address is in my profile.
I think that kind of stuff just depends on the border guard that you get. I've gone through that border crossing once. It was the middle of the night and the guard saw that we had an orange with us (crossing Canada -> US), so he took the orange and threw it in the trash and let us through.

It's definitely a lot less intimidating of a border crossing than the ones in Detroit or Niagara Falls.

[ Sort of off-topic: I've had at least two times where I was waved through a border crossing (Detroit) by the guard without even asking to see ID or a passport, but this was back in 2005. On the other hand, I once went across the border for ~20 minutes to drop off a present for someone (sending it in the mail across the border would have taken at least a couple of days) and they told me that I was 'randomly' selected for a full vehicle search once I told them my stay in Canada had been 20 minutes. ]
Why it matters that Pierre Omidyar is doing a news Startup
i was going to summarize, but it's thin and we've heard it all before: work hard, solve a problem, etc.
I hope we fund more supercomputer projects. One of the good things about SDI was the supercomputer funding.

but...

I really question using economic stimulus money for this. That money is meant to get people working now, not research. $19.5 million could have started a lot of small businesses.