skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where did this $750M come from? Traditional capitalists. What rubes right?

I have a hard time with someone trying to assert facebook isn't a success. However, if you think success is 'profitable in 2010' then far out they are a failure.

This obsession with equity as debt is very strange to me. By this metric Apple is a hugely indebted company.

When you break down a company you look at assets and liabilities. Facebook has few liabilities in the form of debt because so many wealth individuals and institutions think having a stake in its future is a desirable proposition. I would call most of their assets the intangible ones of being of the most visited, used, and widely-known websites in the world. If you think this is worthless, okay. But I think its a little bizarre to assert they are $750M in the hole.
A New Approach to Printing with Google Cloud Print
I was trying to talk to a group of residents, some young and a few elderly, about the Olympics. Nobody wanted to discuss the Games, which were dismissed as just another government-staged event. All they wanted to hear was news from the American campaign trail.

That doesn't sound like any Chinese I know. The Chinese I know are completely apathetic about politics, anyone's politics. They are concerned with their day to day lives and making money. As long as the government isn't too bad, they ignore it.

I think this piece is wishful thinking; the author is projecting his deep feelings about politics and democracy onto the Chinese public and I just don't see that as reflecting any kind of reality I've observed there.
I want to point out something. The majority of these 'swing-for-the-fence' ideas are expected to fail. It's what is supposed to happen. Doesn't mean anything is broken with the system.
Lauer and Needham are to events and threads what Popek and Goldberg are to virtualization: a distraction. The theoretical equivalence in expressiveness between the two models has very little to do with the practical systems programming reality of implementing them.

This paper also handwaves around the difference between preemptive and cooperative threads, as if to suggest that event-scheduled I/O implementers are naturally opposed to cooperative threading. In fact, I/O loads seem to be a motivating driver for coop thread libraries. In that sense, this paper seems to be an attempt to manufacture a controversy where none exists.

Finally, the notion that cooperatively-schedule concurrent I/O is automatically synchronized only on uniprocessors is true but irrelevant. Anybody that builds a cooperative system that needs to run on multiple processors knows they need to synchronize. The point is that coop systems are explicitly synchronized and have stated that is unshared by default, which eliminates large classes of errors (not just straightforward stuff, but also thread serialization and performance issues).
OK, so someone was scratching their own itch..
I think Ning is trying to maximize the size of success, not the likelihood. Trying something very, very few other companies have managed is precisely the point.

Most of us would rather increase the likelihood; but most of us are also not Marc Andreessen. It's important to recognize this. There's nothing wrong with rolling the dice and going big, if that's what you want. [EDIT] It's foolish, however, if you think playing that way will increase the likelihood of success.
>>Sounds like a pyramid scheme where earlier investors continue to dupe later investors.

Funny way to put it, but it kind of is, except that it isn't previous investors duping new investors, it's just an investor mentality. People are still buying into Facebook at a $15B valuation with no real precedent for a company like them being worth that much. It will be really interesting 5-10 years from now after they've IPO'd/been-acquired/fallen-out-of-favor where their revenue and market cap really settle.
Imagine your bank saying (discounting the existence of the FDIC) "sure, you can deposit your money here, we'll probably have some cash around if you ever want to withdrawal it — maybe!" Obviously, there are multiple sides to the story, but this is the gist of what I'm interpreting from it thus far.
But I also notice you say it involves hardware and software.

That's a tall order. Hardware has been moving from specialized to general everywhere. The Android/iPhone is replacing the remote, the camera, the phone, the music and so-forth.

Creating a new piece of hardware seems really tough compared to just writing a PC/Android/whatever application.
Does it interfere with Gmail's vi-inspired keyboard shortcuts?
Will do -- likely tonight. http://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/issue/116
How does that help? Puts expire.
-------------- some links ---------------------

http://www.freeciv.org/ ( my favorite )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

-----------------------------------------------
In addition to escape, link hints (type "f") also work on that [x] button.
Pixar's use of Harmonic Functions
"In January, students at Churchill High School in Montgomery County broke into their system to change grades, but that involved stolen passwords, not hacking, and did not involve Blackboard, Montgomery police said."

Implying that the kid did it technically rather than via social engineering or password theft.
35+ Rockstar Mac Software Developers and Their Apps
"A search engine is a perfect example of a product which would fail if they tried to sell access" Name a search engine that failed because they tried charging people.

"But you can continue to pad your ego and think you know everything there is to know about business." What's your qualification, oh internet anonymous? At least they're speaking from years of knowledge from hard work.
I'd like to think Andreessen as the guy who never made profits, only products
Our biggest lack right now is of documentation for the compiler tools. I hope to address that in the next few months.
That's a good point and I should have stressed that this was in the past. It's fair to say the have reached a critical mass (in terms of members, photos on the site) where they could raise more revenue now but won't see a huge loss in usage.

I think they will be able to raise revenue in a lot of creative ways. People underestimate how much the data that they have is worth.
A pity it's over for this year. I couldn't find any results or list of entries. How did it go?
You do know of OpsWare, right? :)
Yeah, but as others have pointed out, you haven't paid Google anything (you could have but probably not).

It would be nice if facebook were public. Then we would know how much/if they are losing money on each user today.
Since the link hints are exactly like vimperator's, I'm sure he's seen vimperator before.
I really like Chrome, but not enough to switch from vimperator.
Thank you so much for posting this. It is amazing how you can spend years doing something and realize it doesn't make sense anymore :-)
Is Marriage Good for Your Health?
This is the one feature I saw that was a marked improvement over vimperator.

However, there are still too many small annoyances like not being able to open a new location in a new tab with a single command.
"Despite the survival of Google Chrome and the fall of Internet Explorer 8 (running on Windows 7), all the browser hackers at the contest maintained that Microsoft's browser is by far the most difficult to exploit. For starters, IE 8 is the only browser to fully -- and properly -- implement ASLR (see explanation from Nils)"
Ning is also a site that is 'visited', 'used', 'widely-known' and 'had stake in future'.
How long until emaxium (to keep the same pronunciation) comes out?
I was slightly hopeful as I looked into their careers section. There are 99 open jobs apparently, which is great! And I'm just graduating with a BS in mechanical engineering, and they need interns doing tedious tasks as much as any other company right?

But of course, due to government regulations, they only hire US citizens and permanent residents. Unfortunately, that rules me out of even the slightest chance. Oh well..
Are you trying to suggest that for a website like facebook, it costs them more money to serve a few dumb HTTP requests, than they can make from adverts?

That would be quite an achievement.

>> "I like Facebook well enough, but unlike my early interaction with Amazon I have never made a payment to Facebook for anything."

Many advertisers have.
I agree that the overall situation situation for a person in the United States is totally different, I just thought it was a bit interesting that the same types of sentiments can be found in very different countries.
One of the events that comes to mind, as I read through the roller-coaster that is Bootup Labs, was an event that happened about five years ago in our company's early history. We had a tiny little engineering staff, and were working out of a small office in San Mateo, CA, and had invested a _ton_ of time and energy into fund raising, but finally had managed to get a term sheet from a good second-tier VC. Based on that, we managed to get a board member, hired a few employees, and in general thought that we had 6-9 months of runway...and then the funding dropped through. The VC basically just walked away - to this day, I don't think we know why - certainly no developments on our side.

We had to scramble to make payroll (and pay the rent) and our executives _truly_ earned their salary/equity for those months while we tried (and eventually succeeded) to raise funding from somewhere else. It was a defining moment in our company's history.

I guess this is just my way of saying that _every single_ entrepreneur should be prepared for their funding to disappear until they have the check cashed and sitting in their bank account. You have to have a Plan-B that leads to success, whether it be consulting, credit-cards, friends-and-family, or living on zero dollars.

That's just the reality in this completely unfair world of ours. I particularly like the fairly positive attitude of the statusly guys - they aren't vindictive, or whining - they're just sharing their war story, and they finish off with just excellent advice:

"If you’re a Startup, and you’ve been accepted into one of these incubators, be sure to get some sort of paperwork done where money is provided, or proof of income is shown, or something. No matter how nice the people seem, and how badly your heart wants your business to succeed, don’t get yourself into a similar grey-area/possibly unethical situation."
Not that I don't applaud the effort but it's kind of awkward/clunky to drag & drop from the desktop to a browser window..
The things I'm really feeling are missing are being able to open a new tab with a URL by only typing one key more than the URL itself. In Vimperator this is "t", but with all the chrome-based vim-ish plugins so far I have to open up a new tab, focus the location bar, then type what I want. Sometimes that covers the tab I was looking at so I can't reliably see the spelling of what I wanted to type. This one is huge for me, and is one of my most used commands after "d".
I wouldn't exactly call Chrome heavyweight. It runs fine on my 10 year old thinkpad running an Lxde desktop (256 MB, 550Mhz machine).
I wouldn't go that far. A star sign and blood type are almost never relevant. A degree might be relevant, but it might not. You're correct that it's not a good way to filter resumes, but that doesn't make it completely useless.
I think DiBona's position was and is eminently reasonable. As I understand things, the Android team tried to upstream wakelocks, and the kernel maintainers basically said no, but without any proposal for something better.

To my mind, that's begging for a fork. If it were _me_ getting that kind of feedback on a patch, it either means the functionality from the patch is completely unwelcome or that I'm supposed to guess the maintainer's mind on things. I've had this happen with patches, and I've had to call out a maintainer as being unreasonable in this regard. It was ugly, and I don't think I'd bother again, I'd just maintain and ship a patched version.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, and enjoy spending time with Chris. His office makes my job more fun.
Ask HN: Review my start-up Add yours while your at it.
www.sinkfloat.com

Discover and share emerging start-up websites.
Clickable link: http://www.sinkfloat.com/
Which ORM (or pure object database) did you use?
Doesn't look like it did.

http://www.tracked.com/company/opsware/financials/income/?t=...
I think your point is the most widely used justification for GOING BIG. But even big companies need sustainability. Clearly 37signals has their own unique message but if there's one thing I get from it, it's that businesses should be built to last. Whether you are trying to make space-travel affordable or running your own Italian restaurant, your venture needs to last.

So the question is not necessarily one of magnitude, it's that internet companies looking for eyeballs tend to be running on faulty logic counter-intuitive to lasting - forget about making money, or changing the world ; you can't do that if you aren't here tomorrow.
I recommend you http://getcloudapp.com
It's does that in a very conveniente way.
Is the code freely available to use to install it? If it's not, then this won't work.
Really cool actually. Good luck!
Fwiw, you can have basic vim shortcuts binded to google search results:

http://www.google.com/experimental/
I added my site, thanks!
The Best Exercise Any Entrepreneur Can Do
A $1.35 billion valuation compared to $1 million / week in profit is a P/E ratio of 26. For a consumer web company that's still growing, that is a very cheap price. For contrast, Google lists over a thousand public companies that have higher market caps and higher P/E ratios--300+ grow at less than 10% per year.
Why did they say larva every time they meant lava?

Do they think volcanoes make little babies that might grow inside an airplane?
It would seem to me, that to the hollywood mind, nothing would seem more outrageous and more insane than letting go of control over the distribution mechanism of movies and media.

However, it would seem that moviemakers who embrace no control would be a greater threat than the renegade filesharers.

They would probably already found a business model that embrace p2p. All it take is for a ruthless media entrepreneur to wreck creative destruction over the existing order of Hollywood.
Business isn't that clear cut at all.

For example, estate agents (realtors?) really serve 2 people - sellers, and buyers. They give their services for free to one party (buyers), and charge the other. They're pretty similar to ad supported websites.

Employment agencies commonly do a lot of work to get you a job, whilst charging you nothing in return. They instead charge the company that hires you.

Free papers are routinely given away, and instead make money from advertising. TV stations the same.

Banking is also free for individual customers (in the UK), and the banks make that money back on average, from business accounts and overdrafts etc.

Credit cards are another example. Usually free to consumers (If you pay balance in full), and the seller pays the fees. Of course they also make money if customers don't pay the balance off.

Receiving telephone calls, SMS etc is also completely free most of the time (The sender pays). [At least in UK]

There are countless other examples of real world profitable big businesses that give stuff away to customers for free.

Trying to pretend that every business on the planet, and the only types of viable businesses are ones that charge customers money directly, is plain silly.

We get that you hate/don't understand/have had bad luck with advertising in the past, but that doesn't mean it's not viable and very lucrative if done properly.
He should get a prize for still using IE6. Any suggestions?
Is this one (Y Combinator News Group, 234 ppl) dead?
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3426&trk=an...
I blame reckless use of native code. Would a browser within a bounds-checked typesafe VM have any of these flaws?
"So I had to sleep overnight in the airport because USAir doesn't put people up in hotels..."

For all airlines, it's generally not policy to put people in hotels unless the delay was mechanical or due to some negligence by the airline. Weather obviously does not count for this.
Software piracy strikes me as something most appropriately cast as a civil offense. Like physical theft, it allows the 'thief' to freely obtain something they would not otherwise have had without paying. But with physical theft, there is a risk of physical violence or damage. With piracy, there is not. So, while I can understand certain aspects of a physical theft to incur criminal charges, I think piracy is less deserving of a criminal label. Without trying to make a judgment about the pros and cons of piracy for an industry (because there appear to be both), I simply want to suggest that music piracy is very low on the list of things that I want my government to be involved in.

The RIAA/MPAA are co-opting the government into spending taxpayer dollars to enforce the recording industry's licensing policies. It's a crafty but regressive strategy that seems unlikely to be successful in the long term.
The goats are baaaahk
I don't agree with Obama very much, but this was a good decision. Bush clearly created this program in a quest to have his Kennedy-to-the-moon-the-cost-be-damned moment and it needed to be killed.
" have an alternate browser for normal users to use ..."

Or not, if you don't want to encourage borrowing. :)

"I'll just be a sec! No, really."
This exists, name and all! Though it's more of a real-life networking event than a website right now, it's still great and they pull some amazing entrepreneurs. I know, I've been to some of the events. Check out founderdating.com and sign up for an event near you.
I wonder if he's seeing things this way BECAUSE he doesn't want to be the next one to get cut. See, now Bootup Labs are "receiving something in return" from this startup like they wanted. (I don't mean to imply that this guy is dishonest, but when your situation is as precarious as his was just shown to be, you will want to curry favor.)
Hmm. I'm on Ubuntu as well (9.10). And in both FF and Chromium no controls. Must be an issue with the Flash Player 10.1 beta 64-bit.
I don't know anyone at a university that doesn't use Blackboard to run at least their online courses.
Absolutely. I find the notion that there's only one true business model that's ever successful to be extremely arrogant.

Organizations are like organisms, there are many different workable strategies. Take a look at nature, there's no one-best-way to be a successful animal.
It costs $750 to Pitch to Garage/Microsoft?
Emacs users already have emacs-w3m, but it would be nice to have something better.

http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/
Why does it have to take a specific concrete example like this to make you sit up and take notice? This is the sort of slow and lazy thinking allows despots of all kinds to take control. I can imagine in nazi Germany 'holding your nose lightly through all the flap about persecution of jews' and then being surprised when they take your neighbor away.
The fact that everybody at Bootup Labs keeps using the vague, single-word description of "contingent" is makes me suspicious. If the terms were presented to the founders that vaguely, I wouldn't blame some of them for not realizing just how "contingent" they were.
(You don't want to let anybody else use your browser profile. Especially with all those "smart" address bars. Rather set up a guest account and switch to it. It's also very useful for presentations. Recent Linux distros makes user switching very easy and reliable, so it's worth doing even for a very short sessions.)
society generally doesn't accept the argument that killing individual people is justified by some uncertain potential to save others

Isn't that what the FDA does? If you have fatal disease X you can apply to get into a drug trial. You can be denied (leading to your death). You could be accepted, but placed into the control group and given a placebo (and die).

People may die during the drug trial phase for the greater good of society learning if the drug is safe and/or effective. Maybe that's a good trade-off and maybe it's not, but we are trading lives for something we value more... knowledge.

I'm in favor of abolishing the FDA. But the biggest downside is that it might be impossible to determine if drugs were effective because very few sick people would volunteer for a drug trial where they might get put in the control group (and not get the drug).
Google's Goats
Hey guys, so that's my post. I'm the founder who was here with Jamie, who I consider a friend and think is a really talented and genuine guy. I've watched this story grow and I think even Jamie might agree that it's been hard (and largely inappropriate) to communicate all the specific details which might inform such a wide audience on the events around here.

I was specifically emailed by 'icey' to jump in and be a resource. He/she asked me specifically regarding the stated financing situation prior to my moving to Vancouver from Chicago and joining Bootup.

It was contingent on closing the round. I'm not sure what to say other than that was clear. I took that risk knowingly.
A few months ago I got contacted by some overly friendly recruiters working on behalf of Ning. I'm ignored them because I'm crazy happy at my current job and can't even really think about relocating.

Curiosity being what it is, I took a closer look and was surprised to find it such a large/heavily funded/fast growing organization that I had never even heard of.

I find my "thanks but no thanks" instinct vindicated today.
I don't think he said anything about absolutely needing to charge customers directly?

"They make a product or offer a service and their customers pay them for it."

In all your scenarios, there is an entity that is paying the company for a product or service rendered. They may not be a simple definition of the word "customer" but they are a customer none-the-less.

I think the issue is more about smart business. No one is going to knock ning (and there would be no reason for their new strategy) if they figured out how to make money on their freemium model. But they didn't! And that's not good business.

Obligatory google example: It's free. Yay, search all you want. Google's customers are the advertisers that pay for ad positioning. Yes the users are the customers too, but that does not mean that the advertisers aren't.
Not for the male students who don't get responses from the professor due to the stereotyping.
Agreed, Facebook is odd, no other way to say it. For developers, Facebook Connect is sort-of interesting but using Facebook is boring and I have never clicked on any FB advertisements (compare to, for example, GMail advertisements that I do hit and sometimes I buy stuff: profit for Google).

Off topic: I am half way through your new book "REWORK" and and I find it useful since it addresses so many of my own bad habits. Unfortunately, I need to constantly fight the temptation to explore new tech instead of getting things done.
I mean, you probably don't need to throw away all the software, but just a part of that, you have to modify that not to delete everything. About Marketing, I don't think that spend money in ads and stuff like that is a good idea. I prefer unconventional and cheaper ways to attract your early adopters, or at least at the beginning, (during first months). Only once you have found your first users, you have to find a way to scale the ROI with the lowest marketing investment, but again, I prefer unconventional stuff. Like Airbnb has made Obama and McCain cereal boxes to buzz the company name, and at that time they have found "already" their market.