skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much do you pay for a search engine? You think that the 37s business model applies to every web business out there and it doesn't!
Obviously you can't predict these sorts of things. The question I have is how do these events affect FC's business? Did they notice a significant drop in app sales for the day?

As a somewhat related aside, I recently had the displeasure of taking a U.S Airways flight to Indy which stopped at Charlotte. The weather in Charlotte was foggy, which meant that our plane was put in a holding pattern until planes were cleared to land. Unfortunately during our 20-30 minute holding pattern, the pilot said the plane was running out of fuel and had to divert to Myrtle Beach. By the time we refueled and flew back to Charlotte I of course missed my connection and all others were sold out. So I had to sleep overnight in the airport because USAir doesn't put people up in hotels and wait for a flight out in the morning.

There are many unpredictable events in flying that you can't forecast. These events don't fit the models. But you can give context. A good example was a road trip I took to New Orleans. As I was driving down I-10 I checked my Google Maps app on my Iphone, and it showed red lines indicating lots of traffic was fast approaching. I quickly recalculated another route using side-roads and completely by-passed the congestion.

If FC can devise something similar (I don't know what that would look like) I would pay big big money for that.
But remember the crackpots (sorry homeopathists) were the innocent victims here - the nasty journalist said they were a buch of frauds - so causing them to lose money and their patients to go untreated.
Also worth pointing out:

a) Facebook only recently became cash flow positive after years of burning cash like it was the end of days.

b) Their revenue per user is miserably low

c) If the advertising market ever tanks, they're screwed.

Holding Facebook up as an example of a worthy business model to follow is horribly naive.
"Ease of enforcement" is an irrational standard for designing tax systems.

was the part I was addressing. While I agree that I've re-stated it, I don't feel that I've mis-characterized it, or if I've done so, it wasn't intentional/strawman-ish/troll-ish.

While I'm not suggesting that likelihood of collection should be the prime design criterion, I would have to rank it fairly highly, both for practical reasons (the money must be collected) as well as perceived fairness reasons (it would be ideal if people felt that everyone was paying their own share, rather than seeing material underpayment of tax, or believing that it exists, either of which creates incentives for that person to also cheat)
And how do you trust those commercial, unregulated, agencies?
For those of us that weren't around in the early 80s, what caused the video industry to crash back then, and what are the parallels to social networks?
> something you should do after you've already made some sexy cash on other stuff or at least made a name for yourself

You mean like cofounding Netscape?
I'd hate Apple more if they published a policy, and then cherry-picked when to enforce it for their best PR benefit.
I'm on it. Thanks.
"Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets…"

And they violated that rule in the dock, unless that's been fixed in the last couple of versions.
Advertising has been around for quite a while.
Good suggestions. Feel free to file these as feature requests on GitHub. Let us know what platform you're on because Ctrl+F shouldn't be bringing up the find interface.

We do allow remapping of keys. Check out the settings page.
Saw it, and to be pedantic, isn't that a bit of misquote? I've always seen it as:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
How many words did Shakespeare know?
Poor VCs not getting quick cash from their investments. They truly are victims for getting a stake in a hugely successful company.

VCs are not private equity. I'm sure they didn't mind quick cashouts during the late 90s, but expecting to get major money from an up and comer in a short timespan is delusional.

Equity is not debt.

By your dichotomy MySpace is simply amazing for paying investors (interest?) and facebook is a drain on the preciously scarce resources of wealthy individuals and institutions.
You know you can hit the little overlaid boxes with the arrow pointing to the upper right in the upper right of the compose screen to "pop-out" the new email composition into another, bare window, right?
True, but the ad is from 1994. I doubt many people had heard of Bezos at that point. :-)
Either cite some hard facts and data, or stop making sweeping statements.
This isn't a problem unique to educational institutions, it affects most entities that practice standard budgeting. That's one reason why I favor zero-based budgets, although they have their own problems. (frequently take longer, more work, etc.)
For some background,

One of the main sticking points is Google's wakelocks mechanism, which the kernel folks don't consider appropriate, but coming up with a useful replacement has stalled (esp. since a decent number of kernel.org folks think existing functionality is sufficient, which Google disagrees with). Here's two posts from last February on that: http://lwn.net/Articles/318611/ , http://lwn.net/Articles/319860/

In February this year, the Android drivers in the staging tree were removed, because there was no real progress on merging them, mainly again due to wakelocks and a few other issues: the drivers use wakelocks, and the mainline kernel has no interest in merging that framework as is; a mutually acceptable replacement for them hasn't emerged, so the drivers can't be merged either: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/03/android_driver_code_...

DiBona's view on it at that time was rather less conciliatory, essentially that kernel.org doesn't care about mobile platforms, so there's no point in dealing with them, which spawned a bit of a flamewar: http://lwn.net/Articles/372568/
Thanks! I never realized there was such a big difference in which style quotes you use.
Yes, someone who knows about readability can fix it, but the default behavior of the website is still important.
Of course if he used them today the new father would tweet about it and the secret would be out.
Redheaded Ring of Death: Why a Conan O’Brien XBox show would've been a bad idea
reference? I've heard conflicting reports.

edit: did some looking:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...

" On Tuesday, those concerns were momentarily quieted as Facebook announced that it’s now free cash flow positive.

This doesn’t mean the social network is a profitable operation yet. Rather, the cash it generates from advertising and other forms of revenue now exceed the cost of servers and other capital expenditures required to keep Facebook running. One-time costs, like the reported $50 million acquisition of Friendfeed last month, and operational expenses like personnel, are not included in this equation. Outside investments in the company, like the $200 million it raised from Digital Sky Technologies in May, are not accounted for either. "

So, it sounds like if they fired everyone and stopped buying stuff, they'd be profitable, if money kept rolling in as it does now.

I obviously don't know for sure, but I would guess that servers and bandwidth are cheaper than labour, for a company like facebook.
Ctrl + F brings up Chrome Find window for me as well. I am on Windows XP + Chrome.
(ri)1 Rye Whiskey Review
The Resurgence of Gaming On the Open Social Standard
This is where my cynicism kicks in; look at the drugs companies. I suspect deregulation would see some very shady practices evolve and highly dubious drugs being pushed on hapless patients.

You clearly have the intelligence to make the decision you outline. You perhaps have the cynicism to see through marketing guff - or will take the time to read the research. Will everyone be able to make such an informed choice? Especially if the drugs companies are queued up pushing their merchandise!

What we have now limits your options, yes. But it also protects many others from a potentially dangerous uninformed decision. I believe at the moment we have the happy medium of morally protecting many people whilst still allowing an element of choice.

Here's a counter example too. Imagine you made your informed choice and then found that 5 or 6 years down the line these drugs left you with recurring, painful urinary infections. Or perhaps it causes memory loss. How would you feel about the choice you made then?

The irony is that with deregulation the chance of either of those drugs having such an effect seems potentially a lot higher....
How exactly does that help?
The home-row hints are much better than the number hints that conkeror and vimperator give you. Although I did get really good at typing numbers, thanks to conkeror.
The basis for the patent system reflects the tradition of individualism in this country. The idea of a lone inventor (or lone company) creating new stuff is romantic but unrealistic. Invention is often building on top of other ideas and knowledge. It's more of a collaborating effort, as this paper re-affirmed.
>c) If the advertising market ever tanks, they're screwed.

You know that has happened recently right?

People at facebook, and prominent investors like Andreessen, have pointed out repeatedly that they could raise a lot more revenue. However, most of these methods would simply destroy the site by making the user experience much less bearable.

>b) Their revenue per user is miserably low

This might be a problem if they didn't have an enormous number of users and a very impressive amount of active users.

>Holding Facebook up as an example of a worthy business model to follow is horribly naive.

Is an incredibly nasty statement that reeks of jealousy. Sort of silly too. I think you could say a similar thing about Microsoft, since there will really only be one PC OS monopolist.
I'd love to see him counter sue for, I don't know, besmirching his good name.

They accused him of lying right? Can he not ask them to prove that.

Would be amusing (but I realise, sadly, unlikely)
Thanks! I did several times use manually "Inspect Element" and then delete stuff and add margins..

edit: well, hum, strangely, it does not work so well on some pages, skipping section's titles.
"Likelihood of collection" and "ease of enforcement" are so dissimilar that I'm convinced you and I aren't on the same wavelength. It's ok. We don't have to be.
Author is either blissfully unaware of, or is not giving due credit to, Vimperator, which is incredible and was the first real Vim-enabling plugin AFAIK.

Great to see someone bringing this to another browser, though.
There's no reason why you can't implement an IDE on the iPhone/iPad. The only restriction is that you can't compile arbitrary code.

That's a pretty freakin' huge restriction for an IDE to have.
It would be interesting to revisit this using Go.
I don't like that I have to login to do anything
> No because they didn't lose.

Perhaps not legally (and so, yes, they probably won't be made to pay). But I think publicly they have lost on this.

If the aim was to ruin his reputation that doesn't seem to have worked and neither has trying to ruin him financially.

I would say Singh has won in every sense of the word but a legal ruling :)
"do it in one-third of the time competent people think possible", that is a huge red flag to me."

I think your response is wise. That sort of statement usually means that it's a sweatshop.
Best just to flag it and move on IMHO. (I agree completely)
Great design is a way of making products that aren't commodities, and for which there are no direct substitutes. Dell can be squeezed on price because I don't care whether my box comes from Dell or some other manufacturer, while Apple can't because they are beautifully made. I'm sure Apple's core customers wouldn't be caught dead with an ugly Dell laptop.

I think the problem is that CEO types don't understand design and how you can use it to position yourself in the market. Bang & Olufsen is a great example of this: They were known for beautifully designed products in the 80's and 90's but today they are in serious trouble and laying off people. Instead of working with their design legacy, which is what made their fortune (their new products look more or less like the ones they put out 20 years ago) they try to compete on screensize and sound quality. Top management doesn't see the obvious problem, and their brand is slowly eroding away.
yes dude, but how many technical writer uses vim as their editor?
I wonder how many Android kernel coders Google has now; this may put a number on the cost of getting your code upstream.
Of course! Stupid me...
"Is that all 2-3 months of 2 man full time work is worth?"

I don't find it too useful to think this way. In the end, our time ain't worth jack. Solving customers' problems is where value comes from. If 4-6 man-months was put toward something that didn't solve anyone's problem, then it's worth $0.
I saw a post on one of the usenet forums from an HR guy looking for someone with 10 years of Java experience... in 1995.
I remember having a feature like this in a business office using Microsoft Exchange (the server for which often broke down), so I have been waiting for something like this on Gmail. This could simplify a lot of people's lives if well implemented.
AWS for Startups, or what's up there in the Cloud
Notes from Amazon Web Services Start-Up Project Event - on costs, experiences, challenges, concerns
what does an email that has sufficient information to valuate a company look like?

That email has more than enough information to tell me that its probably a good candidate to find out more about.
It seems to me that people just don't like switching between input schemes.

If most of your interaction with the computer is done by typing - in a text editor or at the command line, for example - then being able to use the keyboard for those other actions like switching tabs, scrolling windows, opening files, etc. allows you to stay in the same "input mode" for longer chunks of time.

I'm not so familiar with vim, but it seems that it's so popular because of all of those keyboard shortcuts allow people to interact with the computer consistently without having to interrupt their "flow".

If switching from mouse to keyboard (or vice versa) involves a little bit of extra cognitive processing, that adds up over time and can make your experience just a little bit slower and more frustrating. I guess switching between different keyboard shortcut schemes can have the same sort of effect, so having those same mappings of keystroke(s) --> computer action(s) available across multiple programs must be satisfying to the people who have adopted them.
d'oh. you're right. my quick google had me thinking that html5 only allowed for in browser drag/drop so I concluded that it was the file api.
Do you want to elaborate?
Although it's risky, building on top of another platform reduces your marketing time by greatly since you get free eyeballs already. Plus its more rewarding to build something that succeeded but getting screwed by a new TOS than it is to build something and waiting to get an audience and never succeeding. In other words, it's better to fail early or succeed early than it is to be in neither.
The 37signals business model, also known as "a business", is the business model employed by about 99% of all businesses on the planet. They make a product or offer a service and their customers pay them for it.
What metric are you using to define success? It seems not to be the traditional capitalist one.

The score card for Facebook currently says minus $750M. Breaking even or a small profit is not going to change that.

Facebook totally COULD be a successful, but they'll need to get some serious PROFITS (not revenues!) going to make that happen. Certainly within the realm of possibilities, but it hasn't happened yet.
CSS3 Generator
Their revenue per user is miserably low

This might be a problem if they didn't have an enormous number of users and a very impressive amount of active users.

Somehow this reminds me of the old joke about the guy who lost money on every sale but made it up in volume. Yes, Facebook might make money enough to recover the investment of the first investors someday (I can remember when Amazon looked like it would never do that), but that all depends on the overall net earnings per user being positive. To date, even Facebook's own press releases don't report a situation that makes it clear the initial investors will ever be able to recover their investments. I like Facebook well enough, but unlike my early interaction with Amazon I have never made a payment to Facebook for anything.
No checkboxes: serious, mysterious Chrome bug that's been around for 18 months
Investors aren't buying stock in Facebook or pretty much any software startup (save yours) because they expect to someday get paid by the company. To make money off that kind of investment, they need liquidity. They all expect to see another financing round at a higher valuation, and with the size of Facebook these days, it'll probably have to be an IPO.

Regarding "Fashions change," I agree that that's the risky part, and from the amount of Farmville bullshit I see on my wall these days, it's a significant risk.
Having worked there, I'd say that's a resounding NO.
Drop the "maintainable" part.
People at facebook, and prominent investors like Andreessen, have pointed out repeatedly that they could raise a lot more revenue. However, most of these methods would simply destroy the site by making the user experience much less bearable.

I don't see that as a meaningful statement. If it would destroy the site, you cannot use this method to raise a lot more revenue.
Hollywood loves to take a small, clever European movie and turn it into a big, stupid American one. This strikes me as the application of the Hollywood process to Stephen Potter's _One-Upmanship_.
I still see this rather nasty bug on Chrome version 5, 18 months after the bug was reported. Very strange, and only seems to happen to people running XP's classic theme -- I love Chrome, but I also love my classic theme. :-)
this has been possible for a long time if the drop target is the input type="file" ... which can be styled to look like something intuitive.

It's funny that this sort of UI is finally coming to the web. I had sort of revamped my whole work flow to avoid it, partially due to using lots of web based apps and partially due to linux.
Touche. Brain's a bit foggy this morning.
I built a seaside app on Squeak last year and ported it to Pharo in October. So far I've liked Seaside a lot better than Rails, and Pharo a lot better than Squeak. Pharo is a nice, clean smalltalk with a professional UI useful for the developer. We've even started selling the app. on a very small scale and have had great feedback on the flexibility we gained by using a Smalltalk, Seaside, and an object database
As opposed to such paltry fields as literature, mathematics, physics, history, etc.?

As the (16th C?) Scottish poet Dunbar wrote, The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
This article is opinion (poorly) disguised as facts. For example:

Chinese technocrats, goaded by a multitude of analysts and foreign leaders, have known for years that they would have to diversify the economy—steer it away from investment and exports and toward consumption. Yet Wen, in office since 2003, has not made much of an effort to do so. His stimulus plan targets the creation of infrastructure and aims almost entirely to boost industrial capacity even further, which would only aggravate the unbalance of the Chinese economy.

Contrast that with actual facts:

China's domestic demand, as the government had long wished, has started to become more of a driving force for the country's economic growth than in the past.

Signs of a domestic consumption boost are apparent as people are spending more on domestic commodities, export falls, and the government plans for more consumption stimulus.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) last Wednesday showed that China's domestic consumption had maintained an upward trend since the beginning of the year. For example, China's retail sales rose 14.8 percent in April year on year. It was 0.1 percentage points higher than in March.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-05/21/content_1141192...

Or maybe this:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stressed the importance of promoting domestic consumption and independent research and development during a three-day inspection tour of the central Hunan Province, which ended Sunday.

http://english.china.com/zh_cn/business/economy/11021617/201...

A real analyst would write an article about why this policy is taking time to work properly, kinda like this one: http://seekingalpha.com/article/157568-ramping-up-china-s-do...
Odd that they don't mention where the company is located.
I'm loving it, but I have a silly question: Is it possible to close the help menu without mousing over to click the [x]? I can't seem to find a key-combo for this.
OpenSolaris Governing Board mulls forking
Hit escape.
Boy, 9, accused of hacking into Fairfax schools' computer system
It was a surprisingly reasoned response for officials in my neck of the woods.

Oh, and Blackboard makes products!? When did this happen? I thought they only made lawsuits.
"Even your dreams should be in SSA form"
Sounds like a pyramid scheme where earlier investors continue to dupe later investors. Eventually it's my 401k that loses out when all of this blows up when you run out of investors. I hate the stockmarket. If you want to make money, sell a service or make a widget.
The Measurement Challenge
Anecdote:

I'm involved in online ad campaigns for a number of medium sized advertisers. I would love for Facebook's advertising program and 'stuff for businesses' to get a bit better. I think I could get several $100 - $1000 budgets. It would be a fraction of what they spend on adwords, initially at least, but still significant.
Why am I getting downvoted?

If you want Scratch for your students, you can use ad-hoc install for them? Buy a $99 dollar account, sponsored by the school, and install it for them? What is the problem?

I understand, and I wish Apple did not put such restrictions, but they've put them. Yet, still there is a way.

It's not like with Sony and the latest Ps3 firmware, where even if you want to pay (And I've already paid $69 for YellowDog support) I can no longer get it, or I can't use the Sony Service...
Would you mind sharing a link to the app? Many of us haven't had a chance to see many Seaside apps out in the wild. I think DabbleDB and Auctomatic are Seaside apps, but other than that I can't think of any.
Some people wanted a board that wasn't beholden to Sun, but maybe they got more than they bargained for: a board that's completely disconnected from the development of the project it supposedly governs.

Also, doesn't OpenSolaris have public Hg repos and nightly builds?
About Selena Gomez Info
But you think it works for all 100% of businesses. And that's where you're wrong. A search engine is a perfect example of a product which would fail if they tried to sell access. But you can continue to pad your ego and think you know everything there is to know about business.
I would actually bet that's a case of Apple relying too much on familiarity. It's in the same place as the (more clearly marked) lock switch on iPods and roughly the same size and shape, so logically it's the lock, right? Except that won't work if you didn't have an iPod.
"unmap all" would be nice so that you don't have write 30 lines blasting the defaults if you want to go custom :-)
I wonder if this guy would be seeing things this way, if his company was among the 4 that got cut and not the 3 that didn't.