skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rate my startup: AppMentor.com
If you have considered pursuing an MBA, you no doubt have seen how competitive entry to the top schools is. High GMAT/GPA and great work experience are pre-requisites rather than differentiators. Setting oneself apart comes through application essays.

There are many consulting services out there to help with this. Most cost thousands of dollars and either do more than many applicants feel comfortable with (ethical dilemmas) or offer services that applicants simply don't need (brainstorming, line-by-line editing). To make matters worse, it's rarely clear who is actually offering the advice (expert?)

AppMentor is different -- real experts (students who have been accepted to top programs) offer ONLY high level feedback on applicant essays, for one very low price.

We have been fortunate enough to sign up a large number of mentors (currently 38 accepted students), but we are having trouble raising consumer awareness. I am very curious to hear what everyone thinks about the service, the execution, and any marketing insights! Thanks in advance for your help!

http://www.appmentor.com
Direct link: http://www.appmentor.com
Please add a pause button. Otherwise, awesome!
I don't know if it has any real business potential, but it's certainly an interesting little project. I'd love to see a blog post about how you put it together.
LOL - it's a cute commercial - probably meant to become viral.
What's up with the setup fee's? Exactly what will you be setting up?
Like another commenter in the blog itself, I think you're confusing "filtering out 100 resumes from Craig's List" with "How you should hire everyone."

I'm not confusing them: I'm suggesting they should be the same.

On the other hand, I did say in the post that if the cover letter shows this is a real person, additional questions are not necessary.

If the proposed additional questions are anything like what it takes in a cover letter to show one is a real person, my point stands.

If not, then what's the point of the double standard? If anyone worthwhile would have send a good enough cover letter or would otherwise be turned off by such essay questions, isn't it easier to send out a rejection letter?
You Must Know Before You Scan Any Image
I believe the only mobile version of Flash for ARM available today is Flash Lite which is based on Flash 7. Is that really useful at all? Seems like Flash 9 is a requirement for almost every thing these days. IIRC Flash Lite isn't even a full implementation of Flash 7. I've never used it myself so I could be wrong. I don't see how useful that would actually be. When Adobe actually ships a modern mobile ARM version of Flash the issue becomes more relevant. I'm not really too keen on Flash in general so I don't mind Apple playing some politics with the iPhone to promote open web standards over proprietary Flash that has historically been an incompatible slow moving mess on just about every non-Windows platform.
Typography: Theory And Practice
So, Loopt realized that a) a location-based social network doesn't have much value-add over a normal social network and b) Facebook and Twitter are both going location-based (or are already there) and have way more momentum ...

and therefore are switching gears. I applaud them for this but they still have a long ways to go if they want to be more than a "mobile meetup".
According to Amazon, EC2 can remove a server from an Elastic Load Balancer rotation at a polling interval of 5 seconds. You can pool servers in different availability zones into the same ELB. I'm not sure the question even makes sense in that context, which I sort of view as the logical extreme of what davidu wrote.
Ask HN: Review my site: BHeardUSA.com
The three static pages (Welcome, Realtime & Trends) are meant to be self-explanatory. We want our mothers to be able to use the site. Please comment on content and proposed service.
I have lived in places where pianos were present, and my quality of live went up considerably when someone who knew what they were doing took a moment to play during the day.

Even a little bit provides a huge lift to the spirits.
Does anyone know who the competitor he is talking about is?
I knew why, but I've actually had much better luck with dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/) * . The automatically-tiled / multiple desktops interface style works verrry well with a keyboard-centric usage style, but also more gracefully accommodates programs that expect a more conventional UI - ratpoison just seems to give up. (I used ratpoison exclusively for probably three or four years.)

* Other people have also had good experience with XMonad (http://xmonad.org/) or awesome (http://awesome.naquadah.org/), though the former requires Haskell (I got burned by GHC's portability issues, and requiring GHC for a window manager strikes me as a bit silly), and awesome strikes me as a bit dodgy.
An iPhone app would be great. Especially if it could read tweets from your followers between songs, though I'm not sure if Apple gives you enough control over the iPod to do that.
its a very neat project. As said before I'd also love to see how you put it together. Also, maybe you can put a little toggle button next to tweets that people can click when they think a word is not said correctly.
Oracle braced for EU objection on Sun deal
Nice pointless rant indeed.
So what you're saying is that one of the most demanded features has been in the CVS version since June of 2008, but hasn't made it into a stable release?
Could be Perforce or Atlassian Jira...
I never downvoted your comments, and do not I think that my points are fanboyism.

> And Apple's walled garden does nothing to promote either diversity or interoperability.

I want diversity of full device stacks. Many competing operating systems. Microsoft's business plan and the previously high cost of computers has convinced people that hardware and software are separate things. Apple's take is that they are not - they come together to form one device. Apple produces devices that while internally sealed, interoperate with well understood file formats like HTML, Doc, PDF, and MP3/AAC. This is better for the consumer, who honestly shouldn't care how these complicated systems work.

> What if it were Sun wanting to deploy a JVM for the iPhone?

Well thats great, they can, just like Adobe can release Flash for the iPhone [ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ ]. The issue at hand is whether MobileSafari has a Flash plugin. I personally do not care for one, and Adobe hasn't gone the extra mile to make it compelling.

> The bottom line is, Apple's business model with respect to the App Store relies on being the only game in town.

Silly, unsubstantiated remarks aren't as interesting as they sound in your dorm room. Apple doesn't need to make any money at all from the AppStore, they're sitting on a $40b pile of gold. From what I can see, they're trying to make a great product, and everyone else who failed to do so on their own wants a piece.
Probably these guys: http://www.atlassian.com/
Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.
Subsistence farming is a totally different lifestyle than dumpster diving and couch surfing, and I doubt he's much more prepared for it than your average "wage slave".

Raiding deserted department stores is fine for a few years, but that's not a long-term strategy. When the department store building collapses because nobody's maintaining it, and when the clothes run out and the factories aren't making any more, what then? Same with bicycles and any other technology he likes to use.
Apple won't let Adobe make a decent Flash plugin for OS X. Apple restricts APIs that the plugin needs to run well--things like access to hardware video acceleration.

A lot of people at Adobe use Macs. A lot of people at Adobe work on Flash player. They don't just sit around screwing off all day; Flash on OS X is lousy but there isn't much they can do about it.

I don't know why Apple does it. Stability? Stubbornness? You're right though. If Apple won't let Flash player work well on OS X, they sure as hell aren't going to let it run on iPhone.
As a finance professor I've thought about how to incorporate some of this thinking into my teaching. I do some, having my students implement trading strategies in a simulator that we learned in class, but at the university level it seems that everyone is better off if I cut the crap and just teach them what they want to know, "chalk and talk" style.

I realize this doesn't scale well, but on some level I'm paid to teach small groups not online masses so I don't think my students are paying for me to be an "adviser" or "facilitator".

I like classroom games for teaching economic concepts like comparative advantage, equilibrium interest rates, and the like, but it's not clear those concepts are what I should be devoting time to in introductory corporate. For International finance games seemed to be a better fit.
- Your design is a great start -- The guy holding the megaphone gets the point across very well.

- Trends are a great idea, and showing them by area makes it a lot more powerful (for example, i'd love to see what people are saying about the election right now, here in south jersey).

- My first question when visiting the site is -- How will the public people see my postcard?

- My next question is -- why should I use this instead of twitter, where I can do things like @reply the public person.

- The top message "send positive/negative postcards"...
conflicts with the bullet list of the things I can use the service for...

- I'm not sure navigating between realtime and trends to set the geographic area of search is very clear to a user. Not quite obvious enough

- I think you can lean things out a bit -- do you really need a log in box taking up that much space on every screen?

- Real time: the map is a neat attention grabber, and gets me interested a bit the first time visiting, but I'm not sure it would be as enticing on later views. As mentioned above, I'd work on a more direct way to see trends in an area.

Great start, hope this was helpful!
Keep consumers safe by bringing back Glass-Steagall Act
The Unix idea has never been that text files are the best primitive, it's that they're the best approach until you have a solid reason to do otherwise, and you should start simple. (Unix is more pragmatic than that - "worse is better", etc.) As long as you use plain text, you can use grep, diff, various version-control systems, etc., without having to rewrite any tools for your custom format. Still, sometimes you need more elaborate formats.

SQLite is one good example of a portable, open, simple format that is complementary to flat files. JSON and Lua also seem very Unix-y to me. Unix typically also uses ELF, various compiled key-value databases, etc.

Unix's choice of data types was also influenced by being written for computer that had 32k of RAM. That's, what, as much as a bar of soap nowadays?
Well since the iPhone platform is similar to Apple's desktop platform, if I were Apple, before I went ahead and made concessions to Adobe I'd want to see some proof that they wouldn't mess up the user experience. So far Adobe has shown they aren't either willing or able to write quality Unix flash players.
Quick Summary: They screwed up the camera (probably a software issue) but the reviewer seems to be pleased otherwise.

Here are some videos of the device:
http://pinoytutorial.com/techtorial/motorola-droid-official-...
If increasing your growth rate is your objective, this looks like a very nice first step, Joel. You disguise a PR piece as an objective "how to" in a national business publication, coming across as an authority, the underdog, and an all around nice guy who really cares about his customers.

You're an engineer who claims to be "weak" in the sales department, but all evidence to the contrary: nice "sales hack". Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool if he bought from your competitor. Not bad for a couple hours work. Kudos.
Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities
Atlassian Confluence (the corporate wiki product from Fog Creek's probable competitor) has pitiful search functionality, among other things, for all the revenue that product probably generates from site licensing.

That being said, Atlassian Confluence's "Wiki" is updated nearly every minute (according to the homepage dashboard) at my company. It's not just a Wiki; it's a Wiki that normal business users can use. Fog Creek seems to think they can take on their competitor by mainly focusing on features while IMHO Atlassian's strength is producing an adequate product that works and more importantly makes the person at a company who leads and drives its adoption a likely corporate hero. Corporate sales is tough but lucrative.

> "What set Oracle apart from Ingres," Moore writes, "was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres 'accepted' 50 percent growth."

To achieve 100% growth: Oracle salespeople were fired if they did not achieve a doubling of their sales quota on a yearly basis.
This is the best argument for considering venture capital that I've read in a while, and it barely mentions venture capital.
Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down votes like on HN and reddit?
aka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
interesting site good luck with it, would you like to rate my startup it's called

"R8 Your Politician"

http://nitechblog.com/blog/p.php?id=543

http://www.R8YourPolitician.co.uk
http://www.R8YourPolitician.com
http://www.R8YourPolitician.TV

R8YourPolitician.US & .CA are their but not much done on them
the authors suggest that it's time for a massive federally supported effort, equivalent in intensity to the Manhattan Project, to determine the source of academic achievement gaps and to develop plans to shrink them.

I don't even know how to comment on that. I'll just point this out as a choice sentence from the article.
Very interesting project and I had fun listening through the recent tweets from HackerNews and ShitMyDadSays. A minor annoyance is the robot voice, but I realize you may be at the mercy of the text to speech engine on that one. My only criticism would be when reading @replies. It says the name of the person you're replying to twice in quick succession and it's hard to understand. I'd either say it once or just put a pause in there. ;)
This is quite a dilemma to someone who greatly values education, but is very apprehensive about democracy.
http://bheardusa.com/
Innovative new, free open-source license: Goatse Prostate License (GPL)
I found this story some time ago before I knew Hacker News.

The sites where I found it at the time were:

an excerpt from The Ages of Gaia, James Lovelock (story like):
http://www.alamut.com/proj/98/nuclearGarden/bookTexts/Lovelo...

and department of energy (fact like):
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml
How so? How often do you see cars pulled over at the side of the road, hood flipped up and driver screaming into a cell phone? Sure, it doesn't happen to everyone everyday, but it happens.

Now imagine that happening 8,000 feet in the air.
Jeez, everything is a conspiracy on Hacker News. How about I wrote it because I'm a columnist at Inc and I have to turn in one article a month? And how about, they hired me because they like columnists who are actively running businesses to write about the issues they face? (c.f. Norm Brodsky, the other columnist, who has some kind of a box storage business).

None of the plumbers and dog shampoo-vendors who read Inc. do software project management. The number of leads I get from Inc readers is laughable.

Also, you're confusing sales and marketing. They're different things. We're pretty good at marketing for a company our size. We're absolutely bad at sales.
Disneyland as an example of Minimum Viable Product
This is an unfair comparison. No single version of Firefox has greater marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. If you take all version of Firefox together, yes they do beat the oldest version of Internet Explorer still in wide usage, IE6, but that's comparing apples and oranges.

Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox 2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.

Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or significant.
Not so fast. First, Spolsky probably doesn't need VC based on their revenue; they can staff up a sales team without going out for more money. Second, Spolsky got to spend ~10 years turning the dials to figure out what works for his product. He's in a good position. He has the option of increasing growth, and that option is more attractive right now than maintaining current growth.

No VC funded company has a 10 year runway to figure out how to get their product right. Very few VC funded companies get 10 years, period: the investment needs to liquidate at some point.

Finally, Fog Creek all but stumbled into their current product. They had a "VC-ready" product when they started (CityDesk). If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now.
AT&T not happy with Verizon ads: 'There's a lawsuit for that'
I don't think edw519's being sarcastic. I got the same vibe he did off that article, and I admired the article all the more for it.
For a moment I got excited that they are proposing a HTML tag to deal with this. It would be cool though to have something which can generate slideshows, animated galleries, and banners.
For the things Firefox supports between versions, it supports them infinitely more consistently than IE. That matters.
My source was http://kottke.org/09/11/natural-nuclear-reactors which also has some more links
If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now.

On what do you base this theory?

I don't know that you're wrong...I just don't see how it naturally follows from anything we know about Fog Creek.
Arguing that the winning students have "broken the rules" assumes the rules dictated they had to spend all of the money; I didn't see or hear mention a requirement that they spend any or all of it anywhere. It seems to me a set of rules along one dimension of a subject in no way implies corollary sets of rules along any others. For example, if someone told you that you could create any password, but that you could only use three letters of the alphabet (e.g. A, B, and/or C), they haven't said you could not use each one once or more, or not use numbers, or characters, symbols, etc., and they certainly haven't said how long or short the password needs to be, or if you even need to use letters at all, or for that matter that you even needed to create a password; maybe you'd rather spend your time gardening!

To me the three examples (even though they were kind of hokey) didn't so much turn the constraints on their heads as they did make them totally irrelevant... They made it less an issue of the constraints of certain explicit rules, and more about the implicit absence of others.
Yes, the US does indeed have some electrified freight service.

But it's not much -- 4 short lines with a total of 159 miles. All are closed loop lines linking coal loadouts and power plants.

FWIW, the November 2009 issue of Trains magazine has an article on US rail electrification.
I like the harmonica feature! LOL!
Or maybe add an option to your settings to allow users to pick their own.

This would satisfy everyone from the people that like your grey to the black and the #333 guy.

90% of your users probably won't touch it, but the ones who would may appreciate it.
This is a better article:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4510/125/
I am all for not being secret. But there are exceptions and in this case, if I am really mapping out a specific strategy to go after a competitor, I wouldn't blog/write about it. I'd be curious to hear where he draws the line in sharing strategic plans.

The startup I am doing right now involves public data. I've been able to learn an incredible deal from my competitor just by googling around and finding the name of my competitor in the minutes of public meetings.

On a separate note, this makes me feel really good about my decision to take Sales Management this semester:)
Allow for the fact that I am probably totally wrong about this.

But, when I started reading JoS, Fog Creek was all about CityDesk. If they had gone for funding, they'd have done it to fund CityDesk.

CityDesk didn't work out for them.

That didn't matter, because there was no VC board to shutter the company or fire the management. And they hadn't run the VC-company playbook of hiring a 20-region direct sales force or running $1.5MM of ads to promote the product. So they weren't screwed.

That's all I'm saying.
I like it too, zen, especially the female voice.
Would be neat to add special effects in the audio stream, e.g. if the tweet is about "happy hour" or "party", or if it's news you could have background clip like CNN.com headlines
What do you think of twillage?
it finds events on twitter (happy hours, conference, wine tasting, etc.) and presents them by location and date.
Yikes, lighten up, Joel. I really meant what I said. I have no idea how many leads you get from inc, but I bet you get a few more with that piece.

What I didn't say in my original post was that this was an excellent example of generating interest in your business while contributing to the community at large, and that quite a few of us here can learn from it. But now, I'm afraid to give you another compliment because you may misinterpret it. (Oops, too late.)

There have been many times when my post was misunderstood because I accidently omitted the <sarcasm> tags. But this is the first time the inverse ever happened. Live and learn.

</nosarcasm>
it's actually http://twillage.com/search?q=concert&city=san+francisco&...
NodeBox - beautiful visuals with Python
This application has the potential to provide an enjoyable, useful ambient experience. Personally, I can imagine myself having this on in the background, while I'm working. Before I would consider doing that, though, the speech quality needs to be improved.
To: The profit mongering companies with lobbyists and idiotic politicians who cause legislation like this to be created.

We'd like our internet back now.

Sincerely,

The Compter Scientists, the group of people who invented the internet.
Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential for adaptive AI teaching lies with the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in "The Diamond Age"

"A book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence."

http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-prime...
Was the first-class or coach? I remember it costing my ~$400 for a round-trip Windsor, ON <-> Toronto, ON in first-class on VIA Rail.
T-Mobile is down (everywhere?)
Recovering From Breast Cancer
The effect of computer games on education is probably also tied to when the person is exposed to the particular games.

As a kid, my best friends and I spent ages playing every manner of strategy game out there, from Red Alert to Alpha Centauri. In retrospect, we've come to the conclusion that those games taught us invaluable lessons about what it takes to analyze new situations for optimum strategies, and how to balance competing demands of time, resources, attention, and effort in the pursuit of several related goals at once.

Of course, this doesn't apply so well for studying quantum mechanics, but for learning project management, it's amazing.