skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're right on both counts. I have a friend who is trying to find a way to make the Tarsnap website look nicer without losing its essential geeky/minimalist character; if/when he comes up with something I'll definitely be doing some testing to see how it compares. That said, I don't think Tarsnap's conversion rate is particularly bad -- I'd say that most important issue is simply getting people to the Tarsnap website in the first place.

Promoting Tarsnap as a solution for OS X runs into the GUI problem: Most OS X users don't have a clue what to do with a command-line interface. Tarsnap will gain a GUI at some point in the future, but of course this is a rather non-trivial amount of code to write...
An awesome start up allowing you to do exactly this and more is http://flowtown.com. Their main feature is allowing you to convert email address into social profiles, you can really learn a lot about a person by what they post online - a great way to learn your customer base online.
Why couldn't you be fucked to spare a couple words to tell us what "Balsamiq" was? I have no idea what it is and, I suspect, neither do 99.99% of those who read this headline.
That's like someone linking a 37signals blog post and complaining that they don't tell you what 37signals does in every blog post. It's called going to the homepage. And I'd be surprised if the majority of Hacker News didn't know what 37signals is, and likewise with Balsamiq. Peldi's like one of the most active and well-known entrepreneurs here.
Always been totally refreshing to read Peldi's blog , amazing amazing what he has achieved and how humble he is about it!

EDIT: I do have one question though, how is your typical work day? With a release every week, thousands of customers to support and a full fledged family - how do you manage to even stay sane ? :-)
This assertion is relevant to my interests. Do you have references to these studies?
Wait, here in Germany they have built a Thorium based reactor for commercial use.

You can read of its fate here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Good luck with other variants of Thorium reactors. I'm pretty sure if there is ever one built, it will not be in Germany...
What's cool is that it looked like he improved it by creating a manually-operated geared system instead!

http://woodgears.ca/box_joint/jig.html
There's this weird thing though, we don't seem to have much in terms of 'intermediately intelligent' creatures. It seems to be an all-or-nothing thing, you can't be for instance smart enough to develop a 50,000 word vocabulary and write a thesis if you can not also speak, or at least have a speech center (no insult intended to deaf people).
There are many different styles of martial arts, with a wide variance in philosophy. Some martial arts discourage hurting the body, in stark contrast to those that seem to promote it. Personally, the philosophy of Chayon-Ryu matches me really well. If you do a bit of research and try out some styles that look promising to you, you may find one that you like. I recommend checking out aikido, which encourages safety and does not require much physical strength.
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Balsamiq has twice as many twitter followers as Facebook 'Fans'. I'm strongly of the opinion that the word 'Fan' and the way it shows up in your Facebook profile makes Facebook pages a lot less useful for businesses. I want to get info about balasamiq, but I am not ready to describe myself as a fan to everyone on my facebook friendslist, considering that I've not used it.

Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business without having to be a 'fan' of it. I think if they allowed this, facebook interaction between business and normal users would be much higher, considering the much larger facebook userbase.
in the scatter plot this information is more clear to me, also - in the scater plot if I draw minimal squares line, I can immediately see the countries that are "better thhan average" and "worse than average" with their efficiency of healthcare.
I agree with the idea of openness. But, if that much money started coming in for something I made, I'd feel awkward reporting on the numbers.
Also, what if the data could be stored encrypted with only the owner knowing the password? This would be all right with me then.

Of course, this would raise the storage cost because the service provider can't use deduplication on all the user's data. The storage provider also would be unable to use data mining on the data. Thus, it probably could only be offered as a payed service.
3)

I believe that Facebook in its current form will not exist. People will become more concerned about privacy. Facebook will be replaced unless they manage to change in time. Perhaps personal websites that can be more easily connected to others will replace the need of a central hub?

I think that it's just a matter of time before a major incident forces people to think about privacy. We will see an advanced search engine that can find out more about you than you want to, and/or some sort of 3rd party service that sells information to advertisers. That will certainly cause a lot of panic. I am almost sure that this will happen soon (within 2-5 years)
Agree, and failure is such a strong word:

Did Guttemberg failed because he spend all his life trying to make a mobile types print and he died poor?

Did facebook founders failed because their original idea didn't catch? Or the flickr people? or the Photoshop creator? or Googleearth inventor?.

Did Edison failed with every new light bulb he tried and burn?. The rocket engineers when some of their rockets exploded?

Stop calling it "failures", they are opportunities.
Judging from the votes I would say 99.99% is probably a bit high.
I would say - the craziness of bug is proportional to the number of the levels of abstraction that it takes from the source of bug to its effects.

And that's why I don't like systems with > 2 layers (J2EE, I'm talking to you).
What about us poor people in Europe :(
Data for missing countries (from a comment written by the author of the original graph):

HEALTH CARE SPENDING (per person in U.S. dollars)
Norway: $4,763
Netherlands: 3,837
Belgium: 3,595
Germany: 3,588
Ireland: 3,424
Iceland: 3,319
-------------(OECD average: $2,986)
Greece: 2,727
Italy: 2,686
Turkey: 618

LIFE EXPECTANCY
Italy: 81.2
Iceland: 81.2
Norway: 80.6
Netherlands: 80.2
Germany: 79.8
Ireland: 79.7
Belgium: 79.5
Greece: 79.5
-------------(OECD average: 79.2)
Turkey: 72.1

DOCTOR VISITS A YEAR
Belgium: 7.6
Germany: 7.5
Iceland: 6.5
Netherlands: 5.7
Turkey: 5.6
Italy: no data
Norway: no data
Ireland: no data
Greece: no data

It's a shame the graph misses data form countries like Italy or German, both countries provides free universal health care.
You are quite right, but that isn't going to save anyone since there are people out there who really don't care about the law. And in any case I doubt the UK police is going to be able to track down those who does things like that.
wow. i appreciate that post you made.
I find it predictable and dull that someone here would half-read what I wrote and display what would, anywhere else, be staggering social incompetence.
I had that moment when I saw that video.

But I am guessing that a real lock would employ certain tricks to make it harder to pick it.
I second "Economics in One Lesson" recommendation. Economics explained in an understandable way for non-economists.
"So you have somehow begged, borrowed or stolen an email list of 1000 users who you believe are interested in your new service."

If you had to scrounge around to find my name and other details, or otherwise do something besides ask me, I'm not interested, just so you know.

If I ever get an email with my name from a company I've never given information to, I look to see any indication of how they got it - and then delete that email.

I'm sure the people whose eyes are lighting up at this idea don't care that some of their targets won't like this bit of cyber-stalking. I can only hope those who use it get more resistance out of it than responses.
"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell is the easiest to read, accurate introduction I have read.

"Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life" by David Friedman requires a little more work.

Several previous commentors have recommended Hayek's "Road to Freedom", but I think his last book, "The Fatal Conceit" covers more or less the same ground and is easier to read.

"Software As Capital" by Howard Baetjer, Jr is interesting, but I wish he had discussed open source in it, since his analysis contradicts most open source theories and practice.

A good Engineering Economics text may be useful.

And I second the other commentors who suggested Jane Jacobs's "Economics of Cities" and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" and O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich", his "On the Wealth of Nations", an analysis of Adam Smith's classic is also worth reading.
While it isn't exactly the same thing, OCaml requires you to use different operators (e.g. + vs. +.) for ints and floating point numbers, and it's a very common complaint about the language. (It has conventional precedence.)

When conventional arithmetic doesn't "just work", languages will often give a first impression of being awkward, even though the rules of operator precedence are actually more complicated than just consistently using prefix or infix left-to-right.
It's not about real good/harm, it's about perceived harm. When confession lies at the core of your religion, you end up obsessing over your "sins" and then praying for forgiveness. When this becomes a norm in your life you'll have "more to answer for" than the guy who doesn't spare a second thought for his actions. Charity then becomes a way to pay for your sins.
If the question is "Am you being unethical?" and your response is, "But isn't the real wrong being done by someone else?", then the answer is "Yes, you are".
You can also easily fuck up your newcomer popularity with ADD.
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The "evil" in this method is that you will never know the company has your email, because they will get your info off your facebook profile without having to contact you. Facebook will give the info to anyone who has your email and they won't notify you.
I am not quite buying it, especially the part about popular activities being barred for ugly people. So you can't get elected for school government? Fine, you can start zillions of other clubs or activities. Write for the newspaper, show or make movies, start a band (if you are ugly, start a death metal hate band maybe), whatever.

Perhaps the main aspect of being unpopular is being too self-conscious to actually go out there and start things, talk to people and so on. So you find yourself at the "unpopular table" - have you even tried sitting down at the popular table, or did you just assume you did not belong from the start?

That said, of course it isn't possible to make everybody like you. But it isn't necessary either.
Good advice, including using clang instead of gcc.

To amplify on my advice WRT to K&R, if you bounce when you hit the arrays and pointers chapter, try another resource (maybe ask someone for help), that chapter just didn't work for me.

Then again, pointers and recursion are the two basic hard concepts one needs to learn at this level (see Joel Spolsky on The Perils of Javaschools: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...)

Good luck!
Independent tech consultant here. I did a healthy five figures in part-time indie consulting in 2008. I went fulltime indie in June 2009, and in that last half-ish of the year, did more in Twitter-related work in '09 than all work in '08, and billed something like 200-250% total in '09 over '08.

I've subscribed to various freelance sites for years (since 01 or so) ... guru.com, elance, rentacoder ... I've never once landed work off of any of those sites. You have to spend too much time competing with:

a) cheap offshorers
b) cheap "clients" uneducated in project management/software development and are therefore unwilling to pay appropriately for it
c) noise, noise, noise
d) general wage pressure of the "marketplace"

... to make it worthwhile. Some people who got in and got big early on made their reputations there, but individuals on these sites tend to top out at maybe 40k/year -- and those are rare. The only people making any greater money on them tend to be people who have turned around and co-opted teams of other developers via the site.

You're better off networking, both online and in-person. Make sure you have a solid skillset and a unique value or unique sales proposition. Focus in one area to begin with -- new consultants who try to generalize too soon tend to fail before they have a safety net of money or reputation. Once you're really, really good at something, consider branching out.

Attend and present at local and regional user groups and unconferences. Offer webinars and seminars. Maintain a regularly-updated blog and newsletter that focuses on that initial niche. Write (useful, not overly markety) whitepapers. Join your local Chamber of Commerce. Attend relevant Meetup.com meetups; start relevant meetups. Check out your local SBA office. Always carry a business card, and manage your personal brand and reputation -- it's your finest and most valuable tool.

All of these things are far more worthy uses of your time than piddling it away on noisy, garbage-filled, flake-filled "freelance marketplaces."
Have you tried Reddit advertising?
IMHO, the point is not that the site isn't flashy, but that it doesn't explain why would you want off-site and crypted backups in the first time. The site I would expect for a backup tool is one which scares the visitors to the hell, full of well known horror stories, and showing how tarsnap would have avoided them.

For example, Jeff Attwood, a well known and "smart" guy isn't he? Well, he also thought his hosting provider was doing adequate backups...

Astalavista? They had backups, but the cracker logged into the backup servers using the credentials stored in backup scripts and deleted them. Did you know that tarsnap may use a key for writing, another for reading and another for deleting?

It's true that being an UNIX oriented tool makes it a "niche" product since most companies use a combination of UNIX and Windows servers. But there is still a big chance of success among web owners running small to medium webs for a living on cheap VPS or shared hosting accounts on foreign countries. They should get very nervous every time they hear an horror story detailing how some site dissapeared because of a bad backup strategy...
Next to simply being familiar with the marketplace and being able to tap informed individuals within it to learn about a potential client, LinkedIn is a GREAT way to vet clients. Networking in various forms is the best way not only to promote yourself, but to build a body of knowledge and a network of knowledgeable individuals who can help you to make determinations in these situations.

There are also various signs you become familiar with during the pre-sale/sales process. They shouldn't be completely inflexible. They should be willing and able to pay a reasonable deposit, or open to an early-payment discount mechanism that ensures you are pre-paid.

People skills. Networking.
Is this area too fast moving for a "book"?

Perhaps a newsletter might be a better bet?
This is pretty much a "more of the same" prediction.
With the recent FB changes, I always thought that marketers getting your details through this method was the least of your worries - I figure identify theft is the bigger worry!
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Is it really unethical? Everybody knows that part of their facebook is viewable to the world, and they can change it and make it private if they want.

I don't this tactic makes spamming any more or less ethical.
I think you're probably right about this, and that some peer-to-peer equivalent of facebook will emerge, where users may (optionally) host and have much more control over their own data and who gets access to it.
I don't use any of the three services, but the landing page of FriendBinder made me more curious then FriendFeed's. However, it just looks a tad unprofessional, with faded looking colours, unsubtle shadows & gradients, and heavy use of Arial. I'd really get a professional designer to tweak that a bit, I think you might profit from that.

Or, if you don't want to spend money: Brighter, more friendly colours, replace Arial with Helvetica, drastically cut down on the italic, draw some subtle, but clear seperations of the containers. But keep the basic concept intact, I really like it.
This is where our hacker stupidity/blindness sets in.

'Everybody' in your sentence actually means 'computer programmers/tech savvy people/criminals'.

And this is why Facebook's move is so distressing. My Mum and Dad don't know this. My 'normal' friends don't. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
Awesome! The profitability of your business made my jaw drop to the floor. I guess businesses in other sectors may have to generate more than ten million dollars of revenue just to be par with your bottom line.
I think there's a rather strong correlation between people that are used to the command line and people who don't pay for stuff online because they use opensource products. It doesn't make things better that tarsnap works only on linux of course. (If I remember correctly?)

That might be part of the problem as Davidw is hinting at.
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Think about it rationally. There are 300 million facebook users. How many people are out there who want to steal your identity? What are the odds of those people actually stumbling upon YOUR profile? What is the damage that they will do, and how much of that damage are you going to be liable for?

Worrying about identity theft is as rational as worrying about getting your eyes gouged out by crow - yes, it can happen - but fact of the matter is that it's not very likely to happen.
(this is the author here ... wow i'm amazed somebody actually found my article and posted it to HN ... cool!)

most of the interesting clubs or school activities aren't a road towards high school popularity. (e.g., death metal hate bands aren't exactly for popular kids, nor is film club)

Edit: Re Fine, you can start zillions of other clubs or activities. I think the key point here is that starting a club isn't really a path towards popularity, because the whole point of high school popularity is to conform to an already-existing 'cool' path, like being a football player or cheerleader. Being entrepreneurial and creative will likely lead you in the opposite direction (make no mistake, i think it's more fulfilling and useful ... it just won't get you to be popular)
In fact, my experience is that the "dude" would be the one more likely to quit over bracketing. Issues like that are simply boring to real programmers (which I consider myself). A more valid reason for a real programmer to leave a company would be that they can't get anything done because people keep complaining about their bracketing. :-)
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this is the author here ... ummm i'm pleasantly surprised to find my article on HN. anyways, here are two other articles that are probably better than mine on this subject:

- Why Nerds are Unpopular (i'm sure everyone knows this is by Paul Graham) http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

- Is there life after high school? (by a retired elderly man who went to high school 50 years ago but whose observations stand the test of time)

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/after-high-school-guest-ar...
I wouldn't go so far as to say everyone knows that part of their Facebook profile is viewable to the world, but one should still assume that any information posted online is public, even if said person has some quaint notion of privacy.

Simple rule: if you don't want it made public, don't put it on the internet.

As for ethics, I don't find anything wrong with using information gained using this method unethical if it's used in an aggregate. If, as the article suggests, you use it to find out that the majority of your users are gay, you might be able to fine tune your site to better serve their needs. Or it could reveal to you that your site is too niche and make you generalize it better. If you use it to cold contact random people using their personal information gained surreptitiously, then your ethics could certainly be questioned.
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I've been following tarsnap from afar and think it looks like a great service. That said, an "unprofessional" look & feel is a deterrent for most people because it implies the service may be unprofessional (people tempted to click away before diving in to see whether you're qualified).

Think of it like the crackpots who submit their own math/physics theories. Sure, a professor can critically examine every submission, but it's not a good use of their time. It's easier to just read results in refereed journals.

If someone eccentric is doing something truly groundbreaking (Perelman solving the poincare conjecture), then most people expect somebody to tell them about it. Craigslist is like this -- if you saw the same layout on bobslist.com, you'd know it was some rinky-dink site. But craigslist built a reputation and that reputation is what made it spread.

Unsolicited advice, but long story short: people make snap judgements to save time, and often times they are correct (I suspect most unprofessional-looking sites are not run by professionals in that domain). This can be overcome with word of mouth, but it's ideal to not have to "overcome" their initial snap judgement and make a good first impression.
What is "affordable" though? Since prices have yet to be published, we can only speculate (and articles praising the unit so highly will almost assuredly raise the price).

The Vertex 2 Pro should come in cheaper than Intel’s X25-E in a cost per GB sense

The Intel X-25 M G2 is $299 for 80GB at newegg. Let's say that the OCZ is the same. For me and my work habits, that is more than affordable; it actually costs me money not to use it.

If I compare this to my 10k RPM platter drives, boot up and wait times for me are 4 or 5 times longer than they are on an SSD. Paying "just" $299 to do things 4-5x faster will give me a great ROI even if I throw the thing away in three months and buy another.
I think the best martial art for long term health and well being is Tai-Chi

It's simple to learn, for young people it will not even seem like a workout, but it's likely the most powerful of all the arts and it's integrated with a chinese system of medicine if you want to explore nutrition as well.

You can also study push hands, swords, and even beautiful fans[1], all very gentle and peaceful.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5RzZC0aB6I
Being in a death metal band would make you popular among death metal fans. What is the definition of high school popularity anyway? If the definition is "being rich and beautiful", then no, being in a death metal band might not help.
or, like myself in 7th grade, you can start as a newcomer already at the bottom of the pile :)