instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
|---|---|
What's up with performance? | jacquesm: HN is probably up for another upgrade.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468595 |
Review my Startup | jeffmould: I tried to do the demo, but was asked for an email address. While I trust that you won't spam me, I don't understand why I have to provide an email address for demo purposes. If you are going to provide a demo, I would recommend either doing a video, some screenshots, or have a demo that doesn't require any ... |
Review my Startup | petercooper: Anyone else notice how the Hacker News domain extractor messed up on this post? It shows up as (syncfu.com#dosyncfu) on the front page and direct on the item. |
iPhone App Developers? | cgherb911: there's alot of places to outsource your iphone app development. Honestly, I would just get the app sourced, its alot cheaper.After you get started, you can hire a programmer for <1% equity + salary. I'd be happy to send you to a few iphone developers.-Chris |
Climate Denialism on HN? | JacobAldridge: 1) I think the HN community has a natural skeptical streak - are we bordering on denialism or respect for the debate?2) http://xkcd.com/386/ |
Climate Denialism on HN? | nfnaaron: You label it denialism. I think it's closer to robust skepticism. |
Climate Denialism on HN? | camccann: Any suggestions?Flag content-free political junk. Ignore the rest. Don't take it personally. Submit interesting technology articles instead. And please don't contribute to the noise by complaining about it. |
Climate Denialism on HN? | colah: I can't say I've read all (or even most!) of the articles posted on HN about this topic, the ones that I have haven't been climate `denialism' but rather scepticism and more specifically scepticism towards individual claims... There were some people outright rejecting AGW in the comments, but even that wasn't th... |
Is legal language copyrighted? | rksprst: Not sure about the legal implications but there are a couple sites that have their terms of use / privacy policy under creative commons. Wordpress has their ToS under CC share alike: http://en.wordpress.com/tos/ |
Is legal language copyrighted? | grellas: 17 USC section 102(a): "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression . . ."This section includes a list of eight "works of authorship" (literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works, ... |
Is legal language copyrighted? | munishdayal: I agree with grellas that while Digg or Reddit (really their legal counsel) could technically claim a copyright in the legal written work that you are adapting for your own use, realistically suing you for copyright infringement on their terms of use and privacy policies wouldn't be worth their time, and y... |
Climate Denialism on HN? | endtime: What I find far worse is the term "climate denialism". It's simply Orwellian. That sort of attitude just makes me mistrust people's intentions and motivations. |
Climate Denialism on HN? | cletus: The issue has come up a lot in the last couple of months due to the CRU hacking, which is where I guess the HN link is.The mistake you're making is that you're presuming an equal burden on the so-called "denialists" like they have to prove there isn't global warming. They don't. AGW is an hypothesis. The burden... |
Is legal language copyrighted? | redsymbol: I'm not a lawyer. You should talk with one before doing anything.That said: I asked this question directly to my attorney a couple months ago, as she was reviewing a contract I had cobbled together from similar specimens I found on the web. She said that no, legal language found in contracts is not at all c... |
Climate Denialism on HN? | jcnnghm: Having read through some of that leaked code, I can safely say that if they are as bad at climate science as they are at programming, we have nothing to fear. In particular, the assertions that some have made that the "artificial correction for decline" code is commented out, and was only used for testing, is... |
Climate Denialism on HN? | benl: /Any suggestions?/My suggestion would be to step back, realize that climate change is not a religion, and that you do not have to convert others to your cause.If at that point, you still find it engaging and rewarding to debate the science and policy, go right ahead. But if not, you can ignore it all with no wor... |
Climate Denialism on HN? | dnsworks: I blame the sensational state of scientific reporting. Content providers have been in a rush to scare people for as long as I can remember.It feels that anything reported on in the scientific community I read today which gets enough coverage to become "common knowledge" will have that popular stance make sev... |
Is legal language copyrighted? | bmr: As mentioned, legal language is (supposed to be) clear and concise. You'd have a strong argument that the merger doctrine should apply.The merger doctrine holds that when there is only one way to say something (or a limited number of ways), then it cannot be copyrighted. One common example from the case law is gam... |
Climate Denialism on HN? | akamaka: The article about the 2035 glacier melting mistake was valuable to me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057991I was quite happy to learn that there was a mistake when the IPCC predicted that the glaciers which feed China's and India's biggest rivers will be gone in 25 years.Correcting mistakes isn't denial... |
Free shell hosting with compiling? | mahmud: Free? A whole VPS is $5/mo.http://prgmr.com/xen/ |
Free shell hosting with compiling? | wlievens: hosteurope.de is pretty cheap (<$10/mo) |
Is anybody solving really cool problems anymore? | philjr: http://www.lifesize.com/ for teleconferencing. Wicked kit, we've got four of them, connecting offices and they're a nice alternative to shelling out 6 figures for HD Skype. |
Best way to dive into web development. | scorchin: There are two main areas that you'd need to learn: front-end development and back-end development.Front-end development knowledge points: HTML, CSS and JavaScriptBack-end development knowledge points: Server administration, databases and interpreted languages.I'm biased towards open-source technologies, so I'... |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | ThomPete: 1. Sell it |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | ThomPete: 2. Make something on it |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | ThomPete: 3. Give it away it's a cool name someone might need it. |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | ThomPete: 4. Spend the rest of the day asking yourself why you bought such a lame name. |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | jdee: 5. Write a web app that displays the amount of time left until it 'drops' out of your ownership. Only then can you move on with your life and forget this whole sorry episode. |
Just bought Drople.com what should I do with it? | sburgess: I like the site Wordle.com Perhaps you could do something with the word "Drop". IDK, hard one to see ideas for. Best of luck! |
Is there an anti-Flash bias on Hacker News? | ThinkWriteMute: Replace "Flash"/"Adobe" with "Buzz"/"Google" and you've got pretty much the same thing.Geeks love to hate. |
Is there an anti-Flash bias on Hacker News? | bonaldi: We like good technology, open technology, interoperable technology, accessible technology, technology based on standards, efficient technology, technology that pushes the state of the art, technology that expands what we can do.We don't like being corralled into one vendor's world, having technology that only ... |
Open-Source / Free Simulation and Queueing Package | dalke: SimPy - http://simpy.sourceforge.net/ |
Is there an anti-Flash bias on Hacker News? | lionhearted: I like Flash in how it's implemented on Google Chrome - if it crashes, the flash plugin crashes and not your whole browser. I was annoyed when my iPhone couldn't play Youtube videos to show people, but the counterargument is that Flash is bad for battery life, which is obviously quite important on a mobile... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | vyrotek: Please let us know what you think!
There are some questions and alternative ideas at the bottom of the article and we would really like everyone's input.Edit: Here are the questions in case the article was too long for some :)- What are your thoughts on the idea as proposed?- Is this something you would consid... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | SlyShy: You need to sell this idea better. Right now it feels very much like a solution without a problem. You talk about stickiness briefly, but without specific and concrete use cases I'm not convinced. You might want to investigate thesixtyone. They use an achievement system quite like what you describe.Ask them how... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | joshsharp: Great idea! I would like to see this being applied to something that spans a whole lot of discrete sites, like Disqus for blog comments. Then allow badges for number of comments total, high interaction on a particular site, etc. It would be interesting to see your achievements follow you around the web. |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | Vindexus: I've actually been thinking of doing something like this for a while. I think the market is there, but I don't think it's SaaS providers. I think you should start looking at web games and social games. Also take a look at Facebook games. There's a LOT of Facebook game developers out there. Granted, it's movin... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | ambiate: Achievement systems have 2 issues:
a. users attempt to fixate on achievements more than the software they're supposed to be using
b. users cannot achieve certain things, realize that its hopeless, and lose interest in the system all together and possibly the software |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | Tichy: Didn't read all of it, but I think it might be similar to an idea I once submitted to YC. Also reminds me of http://sf0.org/I think it can work. But I also tire of game mechanics by now - I don't want external influences on my choices. |
secure web behavior for your grand-parents | tdoggette: A lot of what goes into a good online-security mindset is good understanding of some basic concepts that a lot of novice computer users lack.One example is the fake alert popup. You and I know that it's just an image in a small web browser window that is designed to look like an OS's alert, but that's a pret... |
Is legal language copyrighted? | matthewmarkus: This is an interesting question. It looks like one could claim a copyright in contracts in theory, but there are several practical problems to making a contract copyrightable. Personally, I always thought that copyrighting contracts might make them unenforceable since copyrights could limit a public cour... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | inmygarage: Perhaps I am too much of a "normal" but the phrase "SaaS Achievement Engine" sounds like that specific type of tech-marketing-speak that will be unappealing to site owners because they will be too bashful to admit that they have no idea what it actually means. I have no such hangups.Second comment is that ... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | andrewcooke: you could do it with client-side calls as long as the server-side can sign the data (ie use an hmac). that still means a server-side api, but it doesn't have to make the calls.for this to work i think you have to make it really easy to use and with minimal impact on the developer. would you handle the ge... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | bemmu: I'm just beginning the process of adding badges to my app, but it wouldn't have even crossed my mind to use an outside service for it. I think in some form your idea has legs, for example as a WordPress plugin or other situation where people need simple plug-in achievements, but not as something to integrate in ... |
Tips for college graduates | vaksel: Get an internship/job, w/o internship/work experience noone is going to hire you |
Tips for college graduates | pasbesoin: Not regarding finding a full time job, but important: Investigate your health care insurance options, if you are in a governance that does not provide or guarantee coverage (e.g. U.S.). You may be able to continue on your parents' policy for some period of time. If not and you find you have to purchase a ... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | petervandijck: It's not important enough a problem to solve. If I want badges and stuff, I can very easily program that myself, without the headache of integrating with you guys. I don't think this will work. On the other hand, email delivery is hard and important, so I will pay a company to do that. Find a harder prob... |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | idlewords: When I was at Yahoo Brickhouse, we developed something very similar, which half-launched but appears dead:http://bravo.yahoo.com/teaser/I never felt comfortable with the project primarily because I didn't feel I understood the market at all. |
Review Our Idea (Achievements for the web) | lambdom: I would have liked a 2-3 sentences summary.. I don't want to be rude, but I stop reading in the middle of the first paragraph. I know you have worked really hard but try to sum it up in a clean and easy way. (And by the way, "SaaS Achievement Engine" tells me nothing.) |
secure web behavior for your grand-parents | nfnaaron: I thought for a few minutes and didn't come up with much in the way of "if you're not a nerd, at least do these things."One resource is AARP:http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourmoney/scamalert/articles/Not focused exclusively on what you're looking for, but there are some things in there.Unless you do find the type ... |
Books/Articles on Social Networking and Game Theory | ConceptDog: I'll start with one of my own, Croudsourcing by Jeff Howe http://j.mp/anYbsR (Amazon Link)Just picked it up the other day after reading for a bit. I like the authors style as it mirrors that of Malcom Gladwell. |
Interviewing with a startup, what questions should I ask them? | hga: Besides the Joel Test for programming processes, I always try to ascertain:Their finances, business model, etc.Can they fire people who don't work out and how careful are they in hiring.Plus there are many warning signs to watch out for, like unwarranted secrecy. |
Interviewing with a startup, what questions should I ask them? | hga: This "archive of quality Hacker News 'Ask YC' posts grouped by subject" looks worth checking out: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive(Thanks to jmonegro for posting it to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126993.) |
Tips for college graduates | rantfoil: I think the biggest problem most college grads who are applying for jobs face is that they don't really think about what employers need. Getting a job is the first real step into the "real world" where there aren't rote and well-trod paths to success. Many new grads treat applying for jobs as a kind of applic... |
Best way to dive into web development. | radu_floricica: If by any change you've programmed a lot in Java, you have a fair chance to be able to keep the language. Just stay away from anything that remotely sounds like enterprise or uses XML and you'll be fine. I also personally prefer Apache Velocity instead of JSP - easier to learn, too.About client-side pro... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | jacquesm: Make them make quizzes one question at a time instead of multiple ? (lower barrier to entry)Give them an incentive ?Make it seem like the ability to make a quizz is a privilege awarded only to special users ?Attach their username to quiz questions that they've added ?Offer to send them results on how well peo... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | ScottWhigham: Well, I suppose your first step is to market to people who need to make quizzes. Who are you marketing to? |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | JangoSteve: I guess my first question is, how will the site make money? It's only useful to give away gift certificates as an incentive to create quizzes if quiz creation leads to making money.I'm guessing you plan to make money from ads, which is why you're trying to get more quizzes (so that it will attract more user... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | DanielStraight: It can't hurt to make the call to action to make quizzes more prominent. "Make" listed among other plain text menu options hardly screams for action. Perhaps put some sort of call to make a quiz along with the list of quizzes. Or put a big "Make your own" at the end of the list of quizzes. I also really... |
Search engines with regular expressions? | amock: I think this would be really computationally expensive. You can build indexes of words, but building indexes of arbitrary regular expressions is much harder. I think Google did a study and found that even increasing the number of results per page was detrimental to their traffic because the pages took longer t... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | og1: How much did you try with mechanical turk? My experience is that when describing a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) it takes a few tries to get the results you want. I suspect that if you asked for an entire quiz you'd get bad results. If I were setting up a HIT I would give the user three sample quiz topics and only... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | foulmouthboy: It's useful to think about your use case. Why would anybody ever make a quiz?It's much more fun to take the quizzes. The payoff for somebody to take a quiz is to learn something about themselves even if it's meaningless. In comparison, it looks very very difficult to make a quiz with little payoff. Why do... |
How to grow user submitted content based site? | petervandijck: Check out how http://hunch.com gets people involved, there are some good lessons there. |
Search engines with regular expressions? | tokenadult: What is a use case in searching everyday text webpages for which regexes would help, in your experience? |
Interviewing with a startup, what questions should I ask them? | keefe: If your goal is to get equity of any significant amount, you should discuss this up front - that's not to say ask for it right away, but talk about the path for that job and whether if things go well in X months or years you will get 1% or whatever it is you want. You could also ask how much runway they have. |
Where do I report HN bugs? | pg: Send an email to pg@ycombinator.com |
How to manage costs for Twilio apps? | patio11: Charge people money! |
ChatRoulette != FAD? | danielzarick: There is something special there. Over the past week I have shared a handful of hilariously funny experiences with some of my closest friends and coworkers. Stories shared with people close to you end up meaning something. If there is anything that makes ChatRoulette a legitimate product, it is that conce... |
How do you protect your IP in a startup? | noonespecial: You probably can't. If the code is all you've got, someone else is probably going to beat you anyway, especially if you're spending a bunch of time worrying about it instead of building stuff.Instead of paranoid maneuvering to protect something of unproven worth, spend your time creating an awesome place ... |
Getting prototypes from China [Indian firm] | mrphoebs: Hey chirag, do a search on alibaba.com for manufacturing and fabrication providers in the material you are looking for. If you contact the provider maybe he'll fill you in on the rest of the details, although 20 seems like very small order. |
Recommendation engine | mrphoebs: hi clay, Could you be more specific. Solr is intended to be used as a search engine(faceted) and I think it has the ability to recommend similar documents(not exactly sure if you could do this through the API). Is this what you are looking for??? |
Recommendation engine | claydonahue: I am trying to figure out the best recommendation engine available? I am looking at Drupal's Content Recommendation Engine Module and Solr Search for http://drupal.org/project/cre http://drupal.org/project/solr it depends on the choices that are being made on the interface...and i thought would ask Hacker... |
ChatRoulette != FAD? | david927: return false;ChatRoulette == FAD |
How do you protect your IP in a startup? | composed: IP has gone "the way of the dodo", meaning become obsolete, for all digital copyright forms including software. The solution is to develop a robust business model that depends on generatives. See http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_f....Assume your competitors are already doing the same... |
Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | pstinnett: I just "launched" my first Ruby on Rails application last night. It creates a random playlist of songs from Pitchfork.com's best new albums area. Up to now I've primarily worked with PHP.A little backstory: Just a little over a month ago I saw Zach Klein (now working at Boxee) tweet this: http://twitter.com/... |
Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | kungfooey: I think it's pretty neat. Very simple interface that tells you pretty much exactly what it's going to do. |
Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | pclark: great domain.doesn't work so well with chrome and flashblock, can't find the flash element to unblock. |
Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | dogas: I like it a lot, reminds me of muxtape before they got taken down.One suggestion - the onmouseover gray hover color gets a bit annoying for the current song playing. Also, a fast forward link would be great, in case the song is a little "out there". |
Review my first Rails app? Pitchforked | wsbail29: Nice job!
I did something like this awhile ago too. I wrote a scraper that pulled all of the reviews from Pitchfork (scraping was necessary before they updated their site with rss feeds). My app currently just display a random set of reviews on each visit.http://pitchforkd.thirtymontgomery.comI was actually... |
Review our startup: MovieListr | davidjairala: Little background: A friend and I have always been huge movie fans, and our movie libraries have been growing steadily for years now, so we thought it'd be really cool to have a place online where you can catalog your movie library, while also mapping it to actual places where you have stored the movies.... |
What do you look for in a startup job? | hga: For your situation, I'd:Look at you, most of all. Your character, and savy in things technical, business, etc. Experience (which can be traded off for willingness to listen (my first startup was in 1982)). Etc.Pre-funding is probably going to be an individual thing, you'll not be able attract some people withou... |
6 months runway, what to do? | mrphoebs: Hi tichy, let me play the devil's advocate and recommend that you get a job ASAP. I know its soul crushing(most jobs) but it will take your mind off of the money equation, and allow you to do good work on the side. If your cash-flow is tight it puts a lot of stress on your work be it contracting, building app... |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | Tichy: I only check it out sometimes, when I am very desperately in need to procrastinate. At times it will be several times a day, at other times I don't look at it for weeks. |
How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website? | minalecs: you can pay users, or offer incentives give aways or prizes. If they like the site, they will stick around. |
How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website? | gkoberger: You won't make any friends at craigslist (in fact, they'll probably block you), however you could try "importing" craigslist ads (of course, credit and link properly). I don't know if I'd suggest it, but it's a route you could consider. The founder of Lyrics Wiki ( http://lyrics.wikia.com/ ) indexed other ... |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | megamark16: I like to get comments in on good articles early, they seem to get more responses that way, before the thread has grown old. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | chuhnk: I will usually scan newest once I'm done reading through the top 1-60. Everyone has differing tastes and so the stuff that I like to read doesn't always end up on the front page. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | RiderOfGiraffes: Your findings are completely consistent with what people have been saying many, many times over the past few months. If something doesn't get noticed quickly on "newest" then it can sink without trace, regardless of its inherent value. Unless you get some friends to check your submissions and upvote ... |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | georgecmu: It seems a few people use the kick-starting strategy.
I've seen articles get a bunch of points right after being submitted and making their way to the frontpage, while my submissions of the same content that have been made a bit earlier never got any upvotes whatsoever.Personally, I haven't done it and don't... |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | makmanalp: People like me who subscribe to the RSS feed get almost every story, which is equivalent to newest I think. As a sidenote, maybe there should be a "hourly / daily new good stuff" feed rather than a dump of everything. |
How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website? | mrduncan: It might not be helpful advice in your specific case (or that of craigslist type sites), but make it useful even if there aren't any other users. If I remember correctly this is the advice I've always seen from the Reddits on how to solve the problem. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | elblanco: I usually look at it instead of going to page 2. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | proee: Here's an idea...Make the first 5 listings on the HN frontpage be the 'newest' entries, followed by the top rated entries.This would force people to scan past new items and give them their "30-seconds" of fame. Plus it would keep the front page very fresh feeling.It's like singing in front of Simon Cowell for A... |
How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website? | mrphoebs: You need to seed content first. That's how reddit got started with the founders submitting stories under different user-names. Take offline ads(news papers) and list them online (throw in some OCR software like ABBY to scale it). It should get you started. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | jayair: I submitted a Ask HN post about our service (Personal Trending Topics) and didn't get a response - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118331I posted it at a time when there was a lot of other stuff getting posted so it got buried really quickly. And now I feel discouraged to post it again... |
Please review my start-up - planergize.com | megamark16: The plan viewer was a little flaky for me as I scrolled along the timeline. All the bouncing around seemed to detract a little bit (at least for me), but than that's just a first impression, I might get used to it if I used to service a lot. |
Please review my start-up - planergize.com | Maciek416: Interesting idea.I think the copy on your landing page needs some work. In particular, the intro paragraph ("Planergize is an online service that ..") seems a bit muddled. I wasn't sure at first whether your site was about plans, or about wedding planning (given the badge in the top left). I think you should... |
Please review my start-up - planergize.com | imp: I thought the name was a take-off on "plagiarize". I was expecting it to be a system where you enter a student's homework and it would do a search and tell you if it was plagiarized. Sorry, I didn't actually try the service, but I just thought I'd share my confusion with the name. |
How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? | mnemonicsloth: I always read /newest first. I figure there's a pretty good incentive.Early votes have the greatest impact. So at the cost of a little bit more time spent foraging, you can promote more stuff you're interested so it will get talked about by lots of smart people. I think I get a better collection of sa... |
Please review my start-up - planergize.com | guiseppecalzone: It's took me over 30 seconds to figure out what the site does and I'm still not 100 percent. If I were a normal user, I would have bounced by now.Improve the landing page? Pictures and some points on what it does could be helpful.Good luck! |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.