skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1.

Trick 1: Forget about the $5.

2.

Trick 2: Forget about providing the actual service within those 2 hours. Use the 2 hours just for doing the actual trade.

3.

Then sell something before you buy it. If I was given just 2 hours, I would do quick brokerage.

Hour 1: Find a group of people who wants to buy laptops* at a decent price. Get their configs down and get a commitment.

Hour 2: Find a seller who will give the best price on bulk laptop purchases.

*Laptops because I think it has high profit margins. But if finding a group or a business that is willing to buy laptops is hard - I would switch to some easy product - like movie tickets.
cool. bring the people to the ice cream and sell them something else.
When I first heard about this, I about broke down and started crying. This is the worst idea I've ever heard in this on-going climate change saga.

I'd rather we just went back to coal power and forgot about "clean energy" than implement this.
G & G Industries Inc
The Sunshine Clothes Dryer, the umbrella style clothesline. Our Flag Poles beautify homes, cemeteries and buildings. The Saw-Jaw Tool makes circular saw blade changes more hassle-free than ever.
I had a great conversation with another small business owner the other day. She runs a small design firm that he wants to stay small and nimble. She encourages turnover because more senior employees demand higher salaries and better benefits, and upsets the overall balance of power for such a small firm. So 3-4 years is the longest they let anyone stay, unless they're on a partnership track (which one staffer currently is).

Obviously the dynamic with is different for hackers, and especially those working on a single product over time, but it was a refreshing perspective.
Fail Manifesto
Where the Wild Things Are II: Max Goes Into IT
Look at the D5000 ... cheap, good, and more silent that a Leica M7, according to Ken Rockwell.
Well, OK, but that's an awfully narrow example. What happens when you are asked, or want, to write of something about which you know only a little? Or something you sort of know well but which requires a modest degree of fact-checking and verification?

Put another way, how much do you expect to earn per hour for this sort of work? How long does it take you to write an informative 300 words?
I haven't seen the implementation plan, but it shouldn't require unicode. Current IDNs (currently available below the ccTLD and gTLD level) are implemented with Punycode, and the rollout was mostly a non-issue.

We've got fraud working just fine with ASCII--non-latin character sets don't really change that. For the latin-keyboard crowd, imagine having to type in an umlaut every time you wanted to go to Google.
Or the other thing I would do is - organize an auction.

1. Source products from an auction company on consignment basis.

2. Find an event happening in town and pickyback to it - hold your auction at that event (with permission) or outside but very near the event (with no permission).

3. Auction the stuff. Anything over the reserve price = profit. Anything under the reserve price = sale canceled.

Sourcing products within 2 hours from an auction house is hard though - unless you already have a relationship with them before. But given a bit more time - and this is a good idea.
Demonstrating that your sense of environmentalism is based more on what you find pleasing and less on costs and benefits
First team: regular work.
Second team: speculation.
Third team: ads.

Where is direct marketing team?

My solutions:

Receipt one:
* by bunch of cheap sport items;
* walk to the park;
* lease them;
* hire and teach other people to do that instead of you for half of income.
(Tested).

Receipt two:
* by a sport item (e.g. ball);
* walk to the street;
* encourage people to play a casual game with you, alone, or with other people;
* hire and teach other people to do that instead of you for half of income.
(Tested).
At home I have a 15" MacBook Pro.

At work I have a Dell Precision workstation. Core2Quad, 8GB ram, 2x500GB RAID 1, Windows 7. I spend the majority of my time in Eclipse, but I also have VMWare Workstation running 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu.
What if the alternative is famine, dislocation, and instability?
Yes, it's a part of Freetype, Ubuntu just doesn't enable it at compile-time.

In include/freetype/config/ftoption.h:
enable FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING
enable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
disable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING

Even under the most anal-retentive freetard fealty to Intellectual Property Law, distribution of C source code cannot infringe upon patents, only distribution of compiled binaries. It's the difference between promulgating plans for the machine (the original point of patents) and capitalizing on said plans.

Gentoo is the only distro I know of that has it turned on by default.
That's quite a comprehensive list. Cool to see Screenr on there in addition to Screenflow.

Have you tried Google Quick Search Box? (http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/) It does all the same things as Quicksilver, but has always seemed snappier to me.
I agree. I also listen to Planet Money and This American Life regularly. Both great shows, but Radiolab is awesome.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
In theory, but they could be pretty confident about the risk of this being low since it was only a 3-minute presentation.
Apps that rely on network effects to be successful need a free model, or an existing base with critical mass. The latter is nice if you have it.

Freemium is a great way to get some users to pay for value created out of the total network effect created by mostly free users.

I don't think Markus Frind was swinging for the fences when he created plentyoffish.com with a free model. I think he realized how hard it was going to be to get enough people on a dating site to make it interesting.
Facebook Wins $711M Anti-Spam Lawsuit
The complex plane is the fundamental thing.

It's the only way to get to the complexes without doing anything spooky! Defining i to be "the square root of minus one" is about as sane as defining it to be the square root of the colour blue.

The first people who thought about it followed that approach, and were rightly scared stiff and confused by it. Even Euler made trivial mistakes.

Argand came up with the right way of thinking about it:

Take all the tuples (x,y). (Where x and y are just integers). Define on them addition and multiplication rules.

Oh look! There's a big system of these things, and embedded within it is a sub-system which works exactly the same as the integers and their rules.

Since they're exactly the same for all practical purposes, we may as well forget about the difference and say that we'll write (a,0) as a and (0,b) as ib, and (a,b) as a+ib

And although non of the pairs in that subsystem square to be (-1,0), also known as -1, there are two things that do!
So now we know that both (0,1) and (0, -1), otherwise known as 1i and -1i, or i and -i, are square roots of -1.

No slight of hand or magical thinking necessary.

As it happens, we can do the same thing with the reals, to form something that embeds the reals. But the reals really are dark and mysterious and need to be brought about by a kind of magic.
That really looks like two blue leaves to me, and not much at all like water.
I think you mean AdSense. AdWords are a way for content creators to <i>spend</i> money, not make it.

In any event, AdSense revenue is trivial compared to the cost of creating content that has any widespread impact.
i doubt anyone will pay you to play a ball game with you just off the street
Honestly, 99% of this doesn't matter if you're not concerned about the politics of the development of the language itself. If you code with D1, and pick a library... none of this matters.

Your comment is akin to "After seeing the debacle with the C++0x committee, I will rule out C++ for anything until I hear it's no longer a train-wreck." Which might be legit. Just saying.
How should I monetize this post? 16,000 views a month.
If I was dependent on Google Wave and confronted with this page when planning to use it, it would probably make me angry.
Looks cool, though.
I see that the Human dimension is missing in the article and some of the comments.

Yes, sure you can google whatever you may need to know.
But is useful to search how to deal with your 12 month baby, for example? You can search about her education, her games, comunication, etc... But all you get is a contradictory mess as a response.
Will you get the habit of patience from the web? you'll need it with your daugther.

The same goes with all sort of inherently human issues. You can google about communicating, leading, working with people, but until you incorporate the knowledge you need, you will never be better than a person that has been doing that for 5 years. Google, won't accelerate those 5 years, as it won't sort what material is good for you (wont coach you), won't practice for you either.

So, I'm for giving to the machine (google?), what the machine best does, and for all the other stuff, you need humans. (with experience if possible)

ps: Google, won't launch your startup
It looks great, I agree. I like the range approach for the standard library. I also like the end of the include nightmare.

Is the output binary as good as a C++ one? That would be my first purely technical concern.

Other concerns would be related to the building tool chain and the quality of IDEs.

But the real concern is business oriented.

For pet projects I'd be inclined to give a green light. It's always nice to play with new technologies as it opens your mind and give you new ideas.

For full fledged commercial products you expect to live several years, that's going to be a solid red light. I wouldn't take the risk of using an unsupported language.
Pre-built packages sounds perfect! Though I think you deserve a rest while you bask in adulation. :-) Your idea is worthy of the original unix hackers... and, in keeping with their spirit, made real.

BTW: I actually took a little over 2 weeks (2-3 days extra), and I was working full-time (though that amounts to only about 2-3 hours of 100% concentrated hacking); you also did extra stuff with integrating it with bash, and I'm sure fiddling with it a bit to make it a practically usable tool. So I think the implementation time is within a factor of 2, for Java vs. Haskell.
This post is the top search result for "migrate itunes library," and is very high up for "transfer itunes library." I get 16,000 views a month on it. In the month after Christmas, I'll probably get 30,000 views (everyone getting new computers). I feel like I could sign up direct advertisers for this. I'm using AdSense right now, but you can imagine that isn't much revenue. Any suggestions?
A top quality, supported, opensource compiler would help. The LLVM front-end looks promising but I half expect it to be abandoned. It's kind of odd, it definitely seems like there is a desire for a compiled machine code producing language to compete with C and C++.

I kind of remember this argument with Ada over the years, particularly when the GNAT front-end to GCC was mainlined. Having tools available is a big noticeable percentage of the problem; maybe 30-45%. Tooling is becoming more than just a compiler though, an eclipse IDE for D would be nice too and it's probably required for serious consideration by the masses. Supported and live are important for this stuff.

Another aspect of adoption seems to be adoption. It's a snowballing kind of thing. In the GNAT/Ada days there were a lot more advocates of its use than there were users. If you really want D to start getting more attention, then start doing some successful D software, particularly packages that get attention seem to be good (see Mono and Tomboy) Ada has a good complaint compiler that is supported and still doesn't have many users. Some free/open software that shows some of the benefits and advantages of D would help.
I don't like it. The best part of D&D is the ability to ad-lib. Every attempt I've seen to make the interaction through technology reduces this ability (with, perhaps, the exception of simple chat rooms).
My sense of environmentalism is caring about what's good for the planet, not what ways we can offset the damage we've done. We have NO idea the cost of geoengineering. Outside of ruining the sky, how many plants will die due to lack of proper sunlight? How many animal species will go extinct due to the loss of these plants? What about the effect of less sunlight on any living being? Suicide rates are high in the extreme north and south of the planet due to constant darkness. A lesser effect, across the whole globe?

And what of the effect on weather patterns due to us pumping MORE junk into the air?

Oh and of course this geoengineering, once started, must NOT stop. If we stop replenishing the atmosphere, weather patterns will not keep an even layer around. We'll lose coverage, holes will open allowing pure sunlight back to the surface, and we'll end up with a greenhouse effect the likes of which we can't even imagine.

So no, the potential risks of this idea FAR outweigh the benefits in my mind. I would rather just kill the planet off now instead of make it a worse death later on.
We are friends with the Pete and Tapinko and are in talks about both of our businesses - they are focused on newspaper advertising, not outdoor yet.
New music search engine on the way 
More info about Herd It at:
http://herdit.org/music/about.html
Sanford Wallace already owes hundreds of millions of dollars in judgements to other service providers, so this number is largely meaningless.
I think that guy has psoriasis.
Why don't we experiment with geoengineering some other planet before we screw up our own.

Venus is covered in clouds, doesn't seem to help it any...
We've spent our time focusing on the back end which is building our platform and obviously less on the website. Regardless, the website will be a wash once the product goes beta.
That's so cold. And un-inquisitive.

That's like saying to new parents - "Wow, this kid you have for yourself, that's pretty cool; but really - could you not have wasted your time with that and build a business instead?"
Focusing on 'above the fold' is as much about first impressions of your site as it is about where the content is located. It definitely is still an important consideration even with scrolling.

Though my initial impression of the article was that he was saying 'the fold is bunk', which I'd disagree with, I think he wrapped it up clearly with advice on how to pay the right attention to what is above the fold.
Man, I didn't even know it was available to pre-buy it.

I'll pledge them the time value of my $40.
I love to see that they're using jQuery for the animations. I'm anxious to see more people going this route over Flash. Not that there is anything wrong with Flash, and it may very well be better suited for this type of work, I just want to see the uses and plugins for jQuery continue to evolve.
At this stage, if you are dependent on Google Wave, you aren't angry, you're mad.
Hey Bastian - I'd love to talk. My email is john@adstruc.com
... and you've just created an inductive proof for how the US financial system collapsed.

Don't get me wrong: I think step 3 has a good chance of working. BUT if you, like your customers, assume that a commitment is equivalent to the actual asset (i.e. the laptop) then you are vulnerable to defaulting on YOUR commitment if and when you cannot deliver the asset.

How might that happen? Imagine you commit to purchasing laptops through a broker, exactly like yourself, who has no laptops to sell. This happens all the time (e.g. "just in time" ordering) and it results in delays, angry customers, and in the case of the US financial system, systemic fraud, corruption and failure.

Naked short selling is surprisingly similar to your strategy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling
But with several of those options, you take on liabilities that may exceed the money you made. By the same logic, you could use your two hours to get a mortgage on your house. (And the last option sounds like fraud.)
I would have a hard time imagining your chances of success would be even close to equal as having two founders. From what Zack and I have found when working on our site, we have peaks and valleys of output. Both of us have other responsibilities (meaning we are not funded and have other income we have to bring in), and life just happens: when I am in a lull, usually Zack is pushing stuff out and vice-versa. Very occasionally we both lull at the same time and user interaction suffers, traffic drops and we get a swift kick in the ass to get moving again :)

Not to be saying it can't be done, but, be prepared to do nothing but the startup (get some funding, live off savings etc).
I'm getting right sick of the British Library being a Microsoft shill.

I've just been reading, again, about their involment in the embarrassment that is the ISO approved OOXML.
If you know of a product that does a good job and is easier than doing all of these steps manually; you could do an affiliate link for that product. There are tons of people who are intimidated by anything that takes more than 2 steps to do.
I couldn't agree more...there's no way Facebook or Twitter would have gotten as many users as they have now if they charged for their services on day 1. They might be able to get away with it now.

But for other apps that provide a more tangible service and don't rely on the "network effect" (say, Evernote or Freshbooks), there is a compelling case to charge from the beginning.
Pages like this will be so much better when we have MathML in the browser and can stop using fuzzy images for mathematical formulas.
Apparently so.

But this wasn't just about thinking of business ideas. It was about identifying skills and assets you may not have thought were marketable, finding ways to sell them, then determining if there was any market for them. I would say this skill set is not one most people have.
This is a good explanation of why the result is negative and why it has zero imaginary component - ie why it is pointing the opposite way.. But it doesn't explain why the result is unit one in magnitude / length. Can you extend it do that that?
Buy a handful of cheap, blank, brandless t-shirts, write my name all over them in bleach, sell them as designer t-shirts to celebrities.
very true, Femtoo is still very much work in progress, but I am trying to aspire to the point on my list! (thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated)
When I first saw the rationals placed in 1-1 correspondence with the integers I pointed out there were lots of mappings that don't work, e.g., mapping every integer to itself, thereby not having any integers left over for nontrivial fractions. The instructor didn't have the right answer handy, and many of us were confused. Sometimes Z and Q had the same cardinality, sometimes they didn't?

Here's one answer: it's like saying you can get from New York to Boston, then producing a map that demonstrates the route. There are many other routes that don't take you to Boston, but so what? All you need do is demonstrate A map that gets you there -- you don't care about all the wrong ways to do something.

I wish the instructor had hit me over the head with that at the time. Perhaps we were too busy dodging Velociraptors and chasing those cute Neanderthal girls...
FYI: Hawking is British and teaches at University of Cambridge in England. :-)
Notice the "preview" under the logo. I don't think it's Google's goal to make their current iteration of Wave highly available and production ready.
Droid Shatters the Competitive Landscape
very good point about the spam/ghost accounts. we've seen that ring true for our free beta of Floxeee. Usually the people who are using your product for free are your worst customers.
That's eager, not anxious ;)
Its fun to watch a bunch of programmers struggle with design. They're learning/blogging about pretty obvious problems that most designers don't even remember solving and usually fix subconsciously.

I personally find these blog posts a little boring. This was the kind of stuff I used to deal with as a designer daily for a media site 5+ years ago. And frankly, none of it is as hard as they make it out to be. They need to hire a good designer and be done with it.
Agreed with @icey. You could probably locate a decent paying CPA from affiliate sites like http://www.wickedfire.com/ that would provide several bucks for each purchase/view of the advertised software solution. (A DIY tutorial making money from automated services. Ha!)
Benioff's pivotal moment, pre-Salesforce: Taking Oracle customer service job
Very good point. I've been toying with different approaches to the front page - I think you're spot on, and yes Femtoo certainly IS beta! I am trying to follow the points on my list...honest! thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.
Can someone just spoil it please? I hate having to waste my time in order to glean insights. Pareto.
Love how the wave(s) [the real ones] come forward and go back - in the animation.

If using 'Google wave' was as good as the image. serene.

[It is not! its a wave storm]
Things You Learn From Bootstrapping
I sure hope not. Their simple animation spikes one of my cores just to animate some clouds. Not a very efficient way to animate things.
I am always surprised by the power of framing.

It's like a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where language shapes your thinking.

nb: it's "always surprising", because that is the nature of framing and then noticing the frame...
"I like the range approach for the standard library"

This is D2 - I don't use D2 and wouldn't use it. I was talking about D1/Tango combination. I don't think I'll make a switch to D2.

"Is the output binary as good as a C++ one? That would be my first purely technical concern."

That depends on the compiler/linker, of course. In short - dmd good enough, ldc great (llvm as the backend after all).

"Other concerns would be related to the building tool chain and the quality of IDEs."

You can download DMD/Tango package from their Trac page and you're ready to go, however I would strongly advise you to use SVN tango version - which implies you need MSYS(on Windows) to build it. Ask for help on forum there (dsource.org/projects/tango) or on irc d.tango (freenode).
As for IDE, you can use Descent for Eclipse, as some people do. I use Emacs for everything though, same applies for D - there is a module for it.

"But the real concern is business oriented."

There is no concern here, since basics of risk management should tell you not to use it. Same applies for other emerging or obscure technologies as well (I'm looking at you Lisp). Short answer, don't use it for business critical things yet, though some have done that with success.
I see what you are saying. The comment you responded to essentially said "it would be great if PB did X" when in fact PB did do X and they were not listening. That was actually one of my favorite talks of startup school but not really because of the format. The "unprepared" format won't work for most people.
Allocate 1MB of memory upfront. When OOM happens, free that memory and run recovery mechanism.

Similar policy is used in Linux for disk space: 10% of disk space is reserved for root.

PS.
Linux OOMKiller already do something similar: it just kills a process to free some memory.