skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does social shopping work?
In real life, shopping is sometimes social, but sometimes its not. There are times when you want to ask friends' advice before you buy, or want to show off things that you buy, or just see what they are buying. But sometimes you don't want to do these things - and it's very personal.

But for the times when it's social, a lot of can be done in online world. Many companies have tried it, but somehow something is still missing. I still believe that current online social shopping is not done correctly.

So I'm currently trying to bring a fresh new approach of social shopping experience on the web. I've some plans and vision. But before going in that direction, the first thing I want to do is validate the potential customers. I'm trying to understand if people really want this thing? So I'm asking fellow HNers..

Do you believe social shopping work online? If yes, how you want to use it?

IMO, the important aspects of social shopping are - i) Discovery and ii) Sharing.

What is important to you?

I think people are already sharing lots of shopping information already on different services on the web - like Twitter, Facebook, etc. But what about Discovery?

I believe social shopping works, but when it comes to you, rather than you going towards it.

What are your expectations? What do you think is still missing or needs to be done correctly? Please discuss. Your inputs will be very valuable to brainstorm on how I try to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.
"is it really THAT big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings?"

IMHO it is, especially considering how trivially easy it is to correct these misspellings. What is more bothersome is not the presence of misspellings, but his acknowledgment that he has a problem, but steadfast (and even arrogant) refusal to fix it.

To me this suggests a "good enough" work ethic, which honestly doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

That being said, I'd probably only apply this sort of judgment if I was thinking of hiring him or buying from him - it does imply a lack of attention to detail, a rejection of things that others consider basic competency, and an arrogant attitude.
I've been aiming to write a Rayleigh random number generator-driven alarm app for my iTouch (to do random-phasic sleep, e.g., countdown 20+X minutes, X drawn from a Rayleigh(20) distribution). If something like that could integrate with your app, that could be really cool. Crowdsourced sleep research :)
Aardvark applied to shopping would be pure brilliance. Few companies have the potential to be 10 figures big, but that could be one of them.
A better example might be book publishers; do we really need any C books beyond K&R, or at most, K&R plus van der Linden? Maybe not, but there's dozens of them anyway. Different books on the same topic might be selected based on anything from number of pages to familiarity with the publisher and/or author to typesetting to cover graphics to thoroughness of the index to reviews on Amazon.com to addressing niche needs (or perceived needs) of a particular target audience to ...

Even today, with lots of programmers wishing C would just die forever, I suspect a publisher could put out a new book on C and make it profitable if they found the right criteria.
Uh,

Actually, this is an argument that one should encourage something like a community within multiplayer games. If there is a responsible guild/team/etc that players can join for basic protection and where there's some effort to make sure the leaders aren't, say, psychotic, extorting real money, etc. then the virtual world would work much more smoothly.

Mafia and similar entities are certainly real world phenomena but they are a product of the breakdown of community, the rule of law and similar things rather than being a normal phenomena one ought to simply knuckle under to.

It certainly seems like some people would like a game where everything was truly wildwest and you immediately got "powned" as soon as you logged-on till you figured out the angles. But I suspect most people would prefer a game where connected with functioning social system - especially if they were paying for the experience.

The question of how to educate people to understand the choices involved is worth looking into. People do have choice about what game they are going to play. Most don't understand where that choice lead, however.
They do allow comments, you just have to install Disqus, which is pretty easy (just paste some HTML into your template).
How do you deal with rain/inclement weather? I walk about a mile one way to the train station and if it really rains I change into dry clothes once I (eventually) get to work.
Hypothermia is a risk with cotton..
Abduction - Screenshot Utility
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3408

Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

ColorZilla - Color picker
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271

Coral IE Tab - View IEs rendering engine in FF
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10909

Delicious Bookmarks
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10909

Firebug
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

Firefox Throttle - Bandwidth Throttling
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5917

Firequery - Jquery addon for Firebug
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12632

HTML Validator - Validate without having to go to the w3c website
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249

Live HTTP Headers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829

Long URL Please - Replaces Short URLs with the original
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549

MeasureIt - Screen rulers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/539

Web Developer Toolbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

YSlow - Yahoo page performance analyser
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
Ask HN: Accepting applications with digital signatures
I'm helping out with a leasing company that needs to accept applications in order to run credit checks, etc.

They started out using Google Docs forms, which kind of worked, until the company running credit checks realized that they'd like more "legitimate" signatures than a webform.

So far, I've looked into using Adobe Acrobat to create fillable PDFs. This solution works great—easy to distribute, easy to fill out, pretty—until you get to the signature part. It just doesn't seem like something that the average user will be comfortable doing: creating a digital signature with a new certificate and using that to sign the document.

Does anyone have any advice for either an alternate solution, or making the PDF solution work smoothly with less savvy users? There's got to be a better way...
I think we have a difference in threat models. It sounds like you are dealing with a non-adversarial model in which neither party has much of an incentive to cheat. If this is the case then your system works fine. If either party gains much by cheating then your system is insufficient to solve the problem.
Also if you upmod one, the others arrow disappears. Fun!

(They have the same ID)
Perhaps it will correct itself in 24.5 days?
Proven non-impartiality? Do you have a source for that claim? Particularly given that geocraft.com is an obviously partial site itself.

Also, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see that that page hasn't been updated in a very long time:

"This site last updated October 5, 2007"

I guess that's pretty recent for geologists, though :)
There's one additional flaw in his reasoning - there's certain psychological thresholds with regards to pricing - especially at the 'free' mark.

I can be convinced to buy a TV that is twice as expensive if I think it provides the same value. But once you drop down to the 0 mark, it's a different matter entirely (certainly, naive calculations of value break down). Even if you charge for your far superior product, you will have
difficulty competing with an inferior free product.

The only real strategy here is to target a niche audience who's needs can't be satisfied with the free product. Many web services take this approach by offering both a free version (for the masses) and a premium one (for the hardcore users), while some solely target the niche (e.g. Smugmug).

But targeting a niche really means that you really aren't competing for the same users as the free product.
Your Guide to No-SQL (Brian Aker, 7m Stand-up video)
I just launched a site that kinda covers this for the style niche(clothes/shoes/accessories), one of the things I focus on is the discovery/recommendations angle.(http://styleguidance.com)

A problem I'm seeing with recommendations, is the lack of answers after the first couple get posted. I think people just don't want to waste the time searching for an answer, when they are seeing a perfectly good suggestion already posted. It takes a lot of time to find a good suggestion, so the users just don't want to bother, unless they know they can make a difference.

Pretty much the only times I've seen a 4th answer, is when a person starts out their reply with "all of those other choices suck, here is my recommendation"

Or it could be because the site is just starting out, and a year down the line, you'll be able to get 20 different suggestions...time will tell
I'm a big fan of dejavu sans mono. I often use it for demos in Terminal.app at huge sizes and it looks great.

http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download
also: A common bug in published code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960886

This smells like the work of the LHC!
Oh good it's not just me then. For a moment, I thought I'd spent way too long staring at my computer and needed a break.
very cool

ive always had trouble with sleep, and especially functioning in the mornings
Ikea is a part of people's lives.

"It has even been estimated that one in 10 Europeans are conceived in an Ikea bed."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4254181.stm
One of the big challenges facing the JRuby community today is the prevalence of gems with C extensions. For gems where the C source is available, this might be a viable route to compatibility.

For anyone trying to crack that problem, this is definitely worth deeper investigation.
This seems great, but what about couples that sleep together. Each person might have a different "optimal stage" of waking up. Did you guys offer any solutions for that?
Thanks! Good idea. I have heard both of those things before and it put me off pretty badly.

WRT partnerships...

They often take forever to sign up, even longer to integrate, and frequently don't produce any results because one partner backs out.

For every successful partnership (erm...) I can quote you three partnership development projects from my own experience that bombed without seeing the light of day.

Maybe I'm just scarred by some bad experiences :-)
I was speaking to a guy today who has a really interesting idea for a project management tool (yes, another one!). Even though I've tried every tool under the sun I still thought that his concept sounded awesome. The way he intends to combine some of the best concepts out there with his own experience in the project-management space will definitely give him a unique product. Just one solid USP is all he really needs to differentiate. He won't beat all his competitors with lots of ticks in a classic competition matrix. What he will do is scratch an itch that he's had for 6 years and hopefully be able to get all the people he's met during that time (who have the same itch) to use his app to scratch it.

The phrase: "it's been done" Makes me shudder. The fact that there are lots of companies in a given market should invite, rather deter newcomers. The important point is to be different, unique, or superior in some way and that's what gives you an advantage.
So what's the response in temperature when CO2 increases like this?

http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c...

Is that geometric? Or worse?
My sources? My sources are the emails that this thread is about.

Regarding the page I referenced, it's not a religious document, and I make no claims that it's special. In fact, if it were special, it would be more suspect, not less. That said, who cares when it was updated? Have there been ground-breaking changes in CO2 measurement, greenhouse coefficients or anything else pertinent in the last two years?
does scribd support some kind of robots.txt exclusion? if not, they really should.
Fixed. Sorry, Robert was experimenting with gcing items.
Really good point. I usually find it difficult because I don't even drink coffee and don't know how to make it.

Yet culturally, I need to learn this in order to close some deals.
Little-known fact: due to the onerous UK taxes they were paying at the time, the Beatles (including John's estate) collected more from their "1" album than they did over the entirety of their previous careers as Beatles.
It's unplayable on my 3G iPhone - too slow. Probably fine on a 3GS, though.
I find that this means there is an ambiguity between "I have not read this email" and "I am working on this"

Also, certain things that need to be done can be done by multiple people, so a "I am working on it" email is a good locking mechanism.

(I usually say "I'll look at it", delay, "Done" to remove some ambiguity.)
I found that it took me a while to get twitter. None of my non-tech friends are interested because there is no instant gratification for them. They aren't interested in following celebrities or finding out about the latest news-links (two examples of ways you can benefit pretty quickly from Twitter, I guess). They're not motivated to build up a following because they've spent a lot of time friending on Facebook and don't want to do that again because "facebook statuses are the same". They're not interested in keeping up to date with people they don't know because they already spend enough time keeping up with the people they do.

For me the addiction to Twitter has come from the number of times serendipity has occured. I followed a developer who tweeted about a conference where I met a bunch of cool developers who I followed. They all tweeted about cool stuff they're working on and through them I've met lots of other great guys and have been able to build some great apps with some of them. One tweet started all that. That's why I love it.
Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
Product design debt versus technical debt
Let me see what we have on this post so far as ideas:

- adwords

- Advertising experiments

- a/b teting ($7m in split testing. Wow!)

- Engineering. Go past just file syncing (uuilly)

- corporate sales

Each one of these is interesting in a way. I honestly don't think that the first three are likely. The last 2 are a strategic change of direction.
Consalas.
Sounds like bubble gambling talk to me. I'd rather make something a bit more lasting.
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions! You've helped me find some great fonts. I really appreciate it.

For those asking, I use TextMate on the macbook and I've been using Sublime in Windows.
I'll throw in some more advice: if you're going to start a company w/o a technical person, pick an idea that allows you to pre-sell. Enterprise applications are a good, because it's not uncommon to get commitments from buyers before the product exists. If you can do this, it demonstrates two things to prospective developers:

1) The idea/market has legs

2) You can pull your own weight
I don't think random SEO sites count as substantiation, but:

http://www.lowprofilelinks.com/blog/?p=35
http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/backlin...

Those only talk about inbound links from edu pages increasing one's PageRank, so maybe I was remembering incorrectly.
Does Facebook recognize objects in photos?

I remember reading a paper about this a year ago (where they concluded it would take to much processing), but the site seems to be down. Here's Google Cache of the PDF if anyone's interested: http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:A9_-uStMjeIJ:www.enriqu...
You might be right, but I don't understand how either party could cheat.

Let's assume that the hash is computationally secure, so that it's effectively impossible to compute a file to match a given hash. SHA-256 seems to me to meet that assumption.

I decide whether I want heads or tails, and create a file that starts with my choice, then has random padding. I compute the hash and send it to you.

You now tell me openly your call. I believe you have no way to compute from my hash what I've chosen, so to you, my choice is hidden. Whether you guess right is effectively random.

Now I reveal the file from which the hash was computed. Again, I can't compute a different file with the same hash, so I'm forced to reveal the choice I made. If you were right we both know it. If you were wrong we both know it.

Can you explain how it's possible for either of us to cheat?

I appreciate your time - thanks.
Better than email on a mobile device?
I'm actually working on exactly this for fashism.com
You need the humility to look at the facts, however daunting; and the arrogance to ignore them when they aren't relevant.
The 37signals guys like it when they're angry. It causes them to write blog posts that get them lots of attention.
First cancer vaccine to eliminate tumors in mice
23andMe's pitch did seem perfectly reasonable at the time and it's a pretty good area to keep a money-losing startup going. It fits in with Google's overall mission, etc.
Ask HN: Can you suggest any good tech blogs for my new site?
Over the past few days I've been working on a side project (mostly as a way to get familiar with Django) that I've just launched: Bloggregator.net

The site is a tech blog aggregation site, similar in many ways to popurls.com and alltop.com, but focusing on tech blogs.

I've started off by adding some of the tech blogs that I read, but it would be great to get some suggestions from the HN community on some more that I could include.

Feedback on the site itself would be great too!
Totally with you, though I might not find intentional misspellings as endearing as you. I'll add to your list that I can cut a lot of slack to non-native speakers.

But his situation is even worse than you say: He's aware that he has a problem, and he's also aware of the existence of a virtually effortless, automatic solution to this problem. Even if it only makes his writing 1% clearer, isn't it a free 1%?

If his site were ugly, and he apologized for not being a better designer, then ok, I can understand that. There's a slight barrier to having an aesthetically appealing site. But it's 2009 - what is he composing in that doesn't have automatic spellcheck? The contents of this very text box are being checked for spelling.

(I'll avoid commenting on the phrase "deal with it"; maybe it was funnier in his head.)
Assuming that graph is an exponential increase in CO2, then there will be a linear (not geometric) increase temperature.

So it's considerably better, not worse.

A little calculus goes a long way.
I know it's not what you asked, and I'm sure, given your situation, that you've already investigated your options, but you might take another pass at elevating your monitor.

My eyesight happens to be OK, but I overwork my eyes in a similiar manner - I crank the size down until I have a hard time reading it. I've found that having my monitors up higher encourages me to sit with the best possible posture. YMMV. Good luck.
Just sayin, Jason Sadler is an awesome dude. Anyone who chooses to do business with his company would never been dissapointed. It's well worth the price! :)
I remember trying to figure out RLX when I was considering writing a Roguelike a few months back. I remember I gave up when it looked like it would take a few days to get running. ( already had a few projects going on.) This is pretty neat and I hope they finish to the point of being a usable guide soon.
Here's a link to the site: http://www.bloggregator.net
Plurchase is in the same category. Not sure what kind of traction they have.
Yeah, this was my problem with the claim that "Cash for Clunkers" was a raging success. People like free stuff and money, and it's not exactly rocket science to get the word spread about all the free stuff and money being handed out.
I'm talking about a 22 percentage increase in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere over 50 years.

I assume you don't dispute that CO2 acts as a significant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere?
> Should it be "will probably not view the product..."?

I don't think so; the idea that the author is attempting to convey is that people who haven't spent a lot of time working on the parts of a business that aren't building the product won't realise how important those other things are. Admittedly it could have been explained a lot more clearly—I had to go back and read that sentence over too.
Is this an alternative to JNI?
yes, but that syntax is unnecessary as the proposal allows for final variables (primitives and reference types) to be available in the function literal syntax

final int a = 0;

is all you need in the example you provide.
Ahh, I get it now :) I thought the sentence was about why this specific product is the most important out all products out there. And it's actually comparing the product to other things involved in making it, like markering and customer support.
Hmm. That's cool; the numbers would need to be per-package, not per-sender, and not sequential, but I assume those have been taken care of.

Cool.
the problem is that you don't know if it will last. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to be deadpooled. Whether by getting crushed by a bigger opponent(the company offering a buy out has money to burn, if they don't buy you, they'll buy your competitor) or by a savvy startup which gets lucky.

Where is Lycos? Where is Altavista? Where is Friendster? When you can't take a step without stumbling over a corpse of a rotting startup, gambling it all away in hopes that you are an exception just seems silly.

It's better to sell out early, secure your future, then once you can risk it all without ending up in a poor house, you can go all the way with your second startup.
If you owned a 'hot' company in the bubble & decided to 'make something a bit more lasting,' you probably went bust. Those that got out, won.

If you think that the market is too hot, what you are saying is that startups are overvalued. If you hold an asset you believe is overvalued, you should sell it. Holding overvalued assets because they wil be even more overvalued later is bubble talking.

BTW, I'm not saying there is a bubble. Just reacting to the commentator's POV.
Thanks for picking that up, rewritten to hopefully be easier to parse.
And the problem is that at the university I teach at, being an ethnic minority is worth 20 pts of the 100 pts necessary for admission; the same number of points as a full grade point average. That means that the black students did a full grade point worse in high school, on average, than the white students they're competing with. I fudge this by grading my black students easier than my white students on essays/exams.

(based on the assumption that they score the same in other areas. That assumption is obviously not true, but the other areas where they might differ have such small point values it's close enough.)
Unless google has tweaked their algorithm to give domains with a lot of high page ranked pages and automatic boost (and this may be the case but it has never ever been conclusively demonstrated) google is still indexing pages.

There is a 'ban hammer' that has been applied to domains wholesale in the past, to give all the pages in a domain a PR of 0, but a PR boost across a domain has not been seen 'in the wild' as far as I know.

A good test would be to find out-of-order wikipedia pages that have content that is clearly of lesser value than pages that are ranked lower. That would be fairly conclusive proof that such a boost indeed exists. I haven't seen it though, but I'm open to change my mind if someone has some real proof of that.
On Testosterone: Driving a Porsche vs. Camry