skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not getting paid per call. It's just for metric purposes.
one is lying and the other is pretty powerful marketing

I heard some companies have made it big off "dont be evil"
I think it's enough of a reason to build community networks. You are just connected to friends over wifi and they are connected to some other friends. As long as it stays distributed enough that would be ok.
He was waiting to be out of MS to publish it :)
What left me puzzled was why HelpHive didn't simply de-list Conklin with an apology and a statement that it wasn't their intent to harm his business. It seems that this would have been the ethical thing to do, and would have resulted in some good publicity for them.
http://twitter.com/sjstrutt/hn-pittsburgh
It's been through six rounds of negotiation (a few days each round) across two years. Not really twisting in bureaucratic hell, the way your emphasis on 'years' paints it.

And the fact that all these insane provisions have survived five previous rounds of negotiation certainly shouldn't provide any comfort.
Never mind, my text zoom was stuck so that the 69em width of .site increased while .pagehead's width is set in px.
Strange, works fine at 1024px here: http://grab.by/eLC
Well, a vote buyer can do this under current systems as well.

However, it's a little more tricky than that, because a voter could snap the photo, and then spoil the ballot, and the buyer would never know. That's why ballots are filled out in private.
Just like how SATs are a poor standard for acceptance in Universities. Numbers cannot consistently predict success, work ethic, perseverance, etc. 'nuff said.
Yeah we just found out about that bug. I just pushed a fix for it about 30 minutes ago.
I still stand by my argument; measurement is very important - unless a significant percent of your customers complain, then I wouldn't change it.
Good point. I hadn't thought about getting a second ballot.
I'll try to be there.
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/09/clever-sillies...
Bloodhound diary: On a roll
edw519's post doesn't look like "backlash" to me. Just a standard reaction.

Also, daring people to downvote you is obnoxious. Please don't do it.
I never said it was the one true way; in fact I was being pretty pragmatic about it. As programmer, I'm constantly thinking about numbers base 2 and Hexadecimal (I never understood the point of Octal). Therefore base 2 numbers for bytes just makes sense to me. Clearly, other programmers have felt the same way.

Sure 10^9 is a nice number when not working with computers, but when you're working with a computers you know that base 10 numbers don't fit right. I'm not being combative against my own human nature, I just think differently based on the context. Obviously the vast majority of people don't have that other context.
I thought the same thing. Think how epic it would be to be born on the same day as Sesame Street.
There is a lot to dissect from this interview for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The goal is not to get big fast (although that is so sweet), but to engage with your "brand" advocates to help make your living and expand your reach.
http://shop.lego.com/pab/?warning=false

You can also generate a parts list and building guide for your own design:

http://designbyme.lego.com/en-US/default.aspx
Intel in threats and bribery suit
How does their want for data make this ethical?
It is certainly good news for zoho - I would be quite happy if I were them. But as another poster said, ms are being clever in attempting to dilute googles online office mindshare by introducing people to new competitors.
Ask HN: Marketing/Advertising information?
What are your best books, online resources, articles, blogs, etc for information on marketing and advertising? I want to know the essentials that would be useful to a web startup.
15 years ago. It has been the industry leader for a long time.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22...
"It seems that this would have been the ethical thing to do, and would have resulted in some good publicity for them."

HelpHive doesn't seem so big on on the whole "ethical thing".
Google introduces mobile analytics
I worked for a major online car company (like edmunds, autotrader) and wanted to do the same thing with our dealership directory.

It seems to me the same as someone saying "Where can I find a Toyota dealership in Mountain View, CA?" and replying "Here you go, call this number if you want me to introduce you two!". The routed call might say to the dealer when he picked up "Lead provided by SuperHappyCars.com!" before letting the two parties talk to each other. This would help dealerships see the impact ROI based advertising had, in the lowest tech way possible.

Nothing wrong with that, although I can see how it could be abused too, routing calls to the highest bidder instead of the advertised party.
The account settings pages have also been updated. Much nicer graphs about your current plan. I like it!
You don't say. They do appear to be at least as predictive as High School GPA though. These things are useful when dealing with populations, less so with individuals. To a college administration bureaucrat you are not some unique snowflake sothey want all the information they can get to tell them if you're worth admitting and the SAT is clearly worth considering.

Predictor	R	Predictors	R

HSGPA	0.54 (0.36)	SAT-M, SAT-CR	0.51 (0.32)

SAT-CR	0.48 (0.29)	HSGPA, SAT-M, SAT-CR	0.61 (0.44)

SAT-M	0.47 (0.26)	SAT-CR, SAT-M, SAT-W	0.53 (0.35)

SAT-W	0.51 (0.33)	HSGPA, SAT-CR, SAT-M, SAT-W	0.62 (0.46)

http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/216
4 of my favs...

I loved this one, the first "computer you can put in your pocket" - http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/83351/priceless-the-25-funnie...

And this was a great example of how sex sold way back when. I will tell you, if someone did an add that looked like this today, feminists would be up in arms, lol: http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/83351/priceless-the-25-funnie...

The original portable computer? "Compact, mobile, low in cost..." http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/83351/priceless-the-25-funnie...

And last, GEEWIZBANG! http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/83351/priceless-the-25-funnie...
They can truly measure the value of the service by charging for it and seeing what service providers are willing to pay.

All the fake phone number does is measure how many phone leads the site generates, but it does nothing to measure the value of those leads. What if it generates 30 leads a month from consumers that are a bad fit for the service provider? On the other hand, what if it's 3 leads a month that turn into valuable business?

I'm with the plumber on this one. If you're trying to gain favor with a business you don't do it by hijacking their name and representing them as something they are not.

HelpHive got this one wrong.
make sure you don't bend your wrist when typing and you have proper keyboard form
I wanted to keep the title as neutral as possible. More hacker news, less hacker opinion right? ;)
I never claimed otherwise, but that's not even relevant.

No doubt this guy is looking back at what he accomplished at Microsoft. Whether it's his fault or not, I doubt that he wants to hear that his work was a waste of time.
Although not quite the same situation, this reminds me of the fiasco around GetSatisfaction at the beginning of the year.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540
(Brian, is that you? ;-)

Yes, you're probably right. Nothing wrong with breweries or beer from a Catholic perspective--in fact, much right with them--but the way they converted it is creepy, putting the big tanks right on the old altar.
I personally don't like it when everything that is extended to entrepreneurs.

I posted it for independant musicians (and there seems to be a lot among us) that want to make a living from music. I don't think it really applies for entrepreneurs in general.
By "consistently predict" you mean "perfectly predict"? That's a little straw, don't you think? Perhaps you meant to say, "The correlation is a mere..." followed by some low number.
I went and looked at the site. They list the companies' address, and below it a phone number. The layout implies that the phone number belongs to the business. If they wanted to do it the right way, they could have added something like, "contact this business via helphive".

I would call this highly unethical, at this point; it is a willful and material misrepresentation of the facts.
Just start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconsumption.

I didn't understand kirstendirksen was actually blaming consumption as is. Overconsumption, owning "stuff", more is better, bigger is better, double is better, etc., is a relatively new social push. Difficult to be really concise and short here. We all are here in a conversation that needs "information", "facts", "decisions", etc.

My advice is don't be opinionated before the fact, avoid being defensive when possible, don't stay with asumptions. Asumptions are not facts. "Consumption" is not good or bad. Then, if you relate owning or buying or collecting stuff with things such as happiness, well.
Nice! A bit sluggish here (linux/firefox) but usable.

If you had some iPhone UI templates, I'd use it.
> ... and 22 year old CEOs use buzz terms like scalable, robust and enterprise but there is no meat to anything ....

A peeve: More than once recently I've seen articles indicating that words like these are meaningless. I beg to differ. For the record:

"Scalable" describes things that work well when dealing with increasingly large problems.

"Robust" means it can take anything you throw at it, without breaking.

"Enterprise" means for a business, particularly a sizable one.

These are all meaningful, useful words, and the fact that some people misuse them, does not change that.

(OTOH, I must admit that, when I hear the phrase "enterprise computing", my brain automatically translates it to "I'm trying to rip you off", but maybe my brain just needs rewiring.)
HelpHive (the directory) is absolutely in the wrong here. Their business model is unethical at best; it's on par with spamming and link-farming.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that the founder of HelpHive is a former RealNetworks employee.
Iran seems to be demonstrating the limit of what's achievable by winning 'hearts and minds' alone.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917428

Although there are only two comments there, and already more comments here.
It is not opinion...It is the News..he was laid off..not that he wanted to quit MS
the name really doesn't matter. if it's useful and people like it it could be named almost anything. good luck breaking into the search engine space guys.
Independent musicians trying to make a living from their music are entrepreneurs, and most of what I saw in the article definitely applies to someone bootstrapping a startup.
In this case though it seems applicable to at least some sub-set of startups.

Our company, admittedly B2B focused, would not be where it is today if we hadn't engaged strongly with a large customer right off and made them impressed and happy with our service. Not only did that secure a solid revenue stream, but it gave us a great referencable client, and people who were bring our name up in conversations just because they liked what we did for them.
Ideas are nothing

Execution is everything
The Feldspar Language: functional dsp
October 2009 browser stats: Firefox finally passes IE6
Obligatory response to this (and most) web startups: why won't Wave kill this?
Unfortunately requires subscription but looks like an interesting tale.
The real problem with Zoho and Google Docs and all the in-browser editors is that their actual "word processing" features are quite weak, and nothing like a replacement for a desktop suite (which MS Live Office is at least close to being.)

Another comment in this discussion admitted of that in passing, pointing out their real strengths are in sharing, etc., but MS's Live Office is also very strong in sharing. In fact, in simultaneous editing, it surpasses even Google Docs.

(You can try out the Live Office at http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp... or at least you could a couple of weeks ago; don't know if they're accepting new previewers.)

I don't mean to bash Google or Zoho and praise MS, but this is a serious issue.

Will anyone step up to the plate with a serious browser-based document editor? Perhaps none of the solutions that rely on the in-browser editing will ever be any good. I've been tempted to write something more serious with Cappucino, but that's a pretty high hill to climb...
Just signed in with my google apps account - a very nice touch. Then I tried Writer, and got the following message at the top of the page in a nice red message box:

Zoho Writer is not supported yet in Chrome
Please switch to IE 6.0+ or Firefox 2.0+ version for better experience.

So integration with Google goes as far as using their sign-on system - but not their browser. For what it's worth though, it seems to work OK in Chrome...
Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself. High IQ potentially makes it easier for you to learn to be smart and execute the skills of smartness. Most high-IQ people never learn those skills.

But people who think this makes the universe fair are living in a dreamworld. Who says that tendencies toward rationality are any more fairly distributed than IQ? And could you really teach the skills to someone with IQ 70? The answer is not necessarily "No", I suppose, but I'm skeptical; I'll believe it when I see it done; and the universe is still unfair, because it will still always be easier to learn and perform the skills if you start with IQ 130 instead.

(Those asking "What are these 'skills' of which you speak?" are directed to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences )

If you want to make the universe fair(er), you are going to have to develop human intelligence enhancement technology at some point or other - teaching rationality classes may make everyone cognitively richer, but it is not going to cure cognitive inequality.

I mention this because I suspect that people applauding "IQ isn't everything" are actually applauding a seeming implication that the universe isn't quite so unfair. I'm afraid I can't back them on that implication - though, of course, IQ isn't everything.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920568

Much discussion already there.
If you stick with families, you should position towards an individual niche like military families, grand parents, or someone along those lines. Marketing it would be pretty easy - take the military example; there are dozens of magazines that hit that demographic and you could very easily change your layout and focus and brand yourself towards military families. Once this was done I could imagine one of those magazines covering Ramamia for an article or 'site suggestion of the week' etc... just my 2 cents.
He didn’t have a bad word to say about Microsoft. He was more concerned that I not write anything negative about the company than anything else.

This guy's a class act. That level of professionalism is something we don't see often enough in this industry, and it'll reflect well on him while he looks for his next job.
It is a 1000 people company. I believe that a 1000 people company can definitely create that many products.
I can equate this to aggressive inline skating which I did competitively on the ASA Am circuit for a long time (ala http://www.rolldc.com/ - my home crew).

I would try to land a trick a million times, trying different things or variations or mind-games to conceptualize the balance or approach. None of that shit ever helped.

However, getting it SORTA right, or straight up lacing it one time would allow me to land it 2/4 next tries. Then 3/4 next tries... etc.

The success, mainly the FEELING (in this case physical/balance/positioning) had such a great impact that my brain absorbed the muscle memory much quicker. It then became a feel, and much less of "ok, now jump and spin, try to put my foot here...". I'm sure business could be similar. You can feel success, correct moves, etc, once you've done it before because you know you're on the right track.

For anyone curious and with Windows (.wmv) heres an old skating edit from sophomore year in college. Even though I edited it, there are only a couple of clips of me, I'm the second guy that shows up.

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/skottie/TeamCool/summermid.wmv

Edit: I realize its a little off topic because its not about hacking but I've equated this "feeling" to code as well. You know when you are on the right track (design/progress) because you get that effortless "bliss" feeling.
I too developed really bad wrist pain - mine was from too much autocad and solidworks.

My secrets were to:
1. Use a good chair and keyboard tray. always.
2. train my left hand to mouse and switch off
3. use an upright mouse. http://www.evoluent.com/ It's a little expensive, but it's a good product. I now have one for each hand so i can switch off everyone once in a while.
4. Also - wean yourself off the little mouse scroll wheel. Use window zooming for cad and hold down the middle button to scroll on web pages.
I fail to see how it is unethical, provided it is disclosed that the number will be routed.

Maybe I missed something...

Plumber pays helphive $99 a year (see: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/10/21/helphive-tests-pay...) to be listed?

In doing so, Plumber agrees to the terms that state his phone number will be re-routed?

Plumber didn't read his agreement & now he is upset?

Plumber can turn off this feature & he is still upset?
But wopuldn't the higher fatality per flown mile rate of aircraft demonstrate the need to be conservative?
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/18/1387/0641#more
FatELF project is stopping
I tend to disagree with this...why will Wave kill this
More close shots of his books in the photogallery of the visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/faircompanies/sets/721576226806...
It's the message, stupid
The Romance of Vegas
The clever part was reverse engineering the distortion so they could get an undistorted image. Having constructed that in Lego they could then apply the distortion to get the result.

All his Escher constructions are astonishingly accurate, especially given that in real life he's comparatively normal.
Oh god, what a waste. This is basically some old toff having a whinge. He's trying to turn the debate on global warming into a political football — for example he ignored the core issues to start banging on about lefties, atheists and how Al Gore won't talk to him. Boo hoo.

As soon as he takes a break from his rather childish needling, the first thing he talks about is the Medieval Warm Period. Ugh. I agree with him on one point, people should do their own research. In particular people should investigate the MWP and do so in broad context i.e. look at the temperatures over a longer period of time and particularly in comparison to recent years.
The message of the article is the typical "you need other skills, not just high IQ, to be smart".

But then they show some examples of questions for which you supposedly need these "other skills", and sure enough, they're typical little math puzzles that could be taken straight from an IQ test, or SAT/GRE.
His termination shouldn't be all that surprising. Remember, Don Dodge is a big name and costs Microsoft a lot of money. How much value is he producing, exactly? It's difficult to say, since he doesn't work on a directly revenue-generating product. Companies like Microsoft tend to hire well-known guys when they can afford it for the less tangible rewards (brand value, etc.), but have difficulty justifying their employment when times are tough. There's no doubt in my mind he was a valuable asset to Microsoft, so I don't want to undermine that, but anybody who has worked at a large, slow-moving company knows exactly how the attitude towards spending works.
My Agile Experiment - a Flashlight on the iPhone - Up to 74th in utilities now
I wasn't saying that. I debunking the statement, "Our trains are on electricity, so we're 'greener' than you with your diesel trains." Neither fuel efficiency nor the ratio of pollution to energy produced have anything to do with the cost to convert to different energy methods.

On a side note, I doubt that the amount of money it takes to convert a fleet of locomotives to electricity is even in the same ballpark as the cost to build a nuclear power plant. This also doesn't take into account any loss of power due to transmission distance, heat generated in the lines due to resistance, etc.
I think it would have been interesting to see FatELF included. While I can understand that lines have to be drawn somewhere, it didn't sound like this was very thoroughly examined before being rejected. On the other hand, at least they had a chance to talk about it.

One thing he says at the end:

Open source is a lot more gratifying when you are working on your own project. Contributing to other projects? Not so much fun, it turns out.

It definitely sucks to have a bad experience. But it's probably like switching jobs, your experience depends on the co-workers and the management; some environments are just better than others. Hopefully he won't generalize too much and decide against contributing in the future.
The plumber just needs to trademark his business and then it's a simple case of trademark infringement, no?
What is sad about that?
Domain Industry Rocked By Shill Auction Bidding Admission
Best flashlight in the store .... I guess, never tried the others.
When you say you have a fast INTERNET connection do you mean it has high BANDWIDTH or low LATENCY?
and you have a very odd definition of "evil"

It's not that odd. An evil is anything that is damaging or causes harm, (regardless of malicious intent.) Propriety formats are troublesome, so they are an evil.
Huh, interesting idea, thanks! Is there any kind of data on niche vs. general (and bigger) audience?

The press thing has actually happened twice, even though we haven't done any marketing nor have we press-launched yet. http://screenshots.markbao.com/articles-20091104-162137.png
tl;dr: "I'm still mad/insulted I'm not on Twitter's famous suggested users list".
The article says, "Up to now, HelpHive has been free for both consumers and businesses that sign up to be on the site."

But, according to to plumber, "These local business listings are not placed there by the business but have been harvested from other sources."

And, "If it isn’t illegal to place ads or listings to the public using our company’s name without permission and faking our phone numbers, we need a law now."

I see nothing that says the plumber signed up for anything, had any agreement, or paid any money. It appears that HelpHive took upon themselves to "help" this guy.

Unless I'm missing something, Karim Meghji's rebuttal completely skipped over the claim that HelpHive was harvesting company data from other sources and listing businesses without prior approval.
Bountii on Bing Cashback: It's Broken
Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid
It sounds more like a rave toy than a flashlight. I hope the user-driven spec model illuminates something interesting.
I was thinking the same thing. Although when you think about it, fundamentally it's no different than Yelp or Zaggats. It's just another level of service layered on top of a directory.
Tweetie supports ShoutEm
Haha, that's an interesting thought. I wonder if I will find some niche raver market on the iPhone from all of this.
So do we. The interface isn't the greatest, but it is configurable enough (on screen, no coding required) to cover just about anything. And if for some reason it doesn't do what you need, and you can't configure it to do so, it's written in rails so diving in is no trouble at all.
Stealth Search Engine Blekko Raises Another $2.5 Million
There is work in progress on adding some features to Clojure to allow child threads access to dynamically-bound variables:

http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/170