skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd just like to point out how astonishingly cool it is that we get to read first-hand comments like this.
Civilization has been a blight on my family. My dad brought it home from a trip once only to have it contaminate first his brain, then mine. For years, one of us would hide the thing or break the CD or just throw it out only to eventually buy another copy or a new version when it comes out, being careful to ignore the fact that we were both hopeless addicts.

The problem with the Civ games is that they make it easy to get into "flow" state where you're just clicking around, doing stuff, constantly stimulated etc. It's trouble, trouble I say.
> It probably would. But that is irrelevant - the relevant question is, "would consumers benefit?"

I see the point you're making. But it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Obviously there is no way to make 100% sure a drug is safe without tests lasting at least the average lifespan of a person (etc.). But I think we have a reasonable medium at the moment; some drugs have long term affects that slip through, but for now the benefit is tipped in favour of "consumers"

With deregulation I feel that barrier would start to move. We might start seeing drugs having side affects in, say, 5 years rather than longer. Or causing unrelated illnesses in a certain set of people. I can't accept that it would be a good thing.

Also there is space for duplicitous companies to make a fast buck and endanger people. Look at how homeopathic remedies are popular; imagine if such people could play with real drugs?

A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.

I don't understand this argument. Partly because it's a meaningless comparison. But also because we are dealing with peoples lives; that is not a trivial thing!

(in actual fact I think a real analogy would be if the govt. regulated that the components of said laptop had to be proven stress tested for 6 months before release. Clearly that would be limiting - but the quality of the laptops sold would be much higher. Regardless I still think the example is too trivial).
This sucks. Get Satisfaction tried something similar recently (eliminating even basic admin tasks from free plans), but realized their error and elected to grandfather in current members. Ning should do the same thing with their free networks, perhaps with a total traffic limit. (If even that's not economically viable, then I don't know what the hell they were ever thinking.)

I sure am glad I never made an investment in building traffic to a Ning social network. I'd be pretty hot under the collar just about now.
Let's keep it accurate -- that's rule 3.3.2: "No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

When the C64 emulator was released, that "or" was an "and". Now they don't allow non-Apple interpreters at all. (Unless they feel like it.)
>>but the US government is democratic (at least apparently)

Well (apologies for the political rant), the Supreme Court is trying its best to get us out of that situation, proclaiming corporation have the right to buy "the best politicians that money can buy."
Numbers Guy: Are our brains wired for math?
Learn/Measure/Build--we've had the cycle backwards
Working now, I had to restart chrome...
Perhaps I'm missing something, but syncing contacts between different devices seems to be pretty much a solved problem.
I actually know something about this! My son's best friend's mother's sister's best friend (hmm, I think that's right) is the wife of the guy who started Club Penguin. He started it because he couldn't find anything good for his daughter to play at online. So yes, it was a classic organic startup. It matches the description in another way, too: no one would take it seriously. He tried to get the guys at the ISP he worked for to buy into it and they wouldn't. It was only once it took off with children that anybody gave it the time of day.

When something proposed as a counterexample turns out on inspection to be a classic case, I consider that pretty good evidence for a model.
I'm using Vimium as a key tool in my efforts to become completely mouseless.

http://luigimontanez.com/2010/mouseless-monday-1-vimium-goog...
> It almost feels like Facebook

I've noticed that drift, and I'm not on FB. I think that's not where they need to go.
2008. Great author mentioned in this article, author of a more recent book

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

about reading.
And brings me one step farther from never having to use a keyboard. Well, actually no it doesn't affect me at all -- but I do hate keyboards.
..that was the joke
Vimperator for Firefox does the same.
http://vimperator.org/vimperator

One hint: have an alternate browser for normal users to use when they borrow their laptop for a second. Because not having an address bar or any icons or tabs tends to confuse them :)
That was most likely Petra Haden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Haden
Today's address books are broken. For one they can't handle volume / thousands of contacts, for example.
Demos Delivering Electricity Without Wires
I like your website and the concept behind it, but let me just say that the moving star background is really distracting. You should do something about that.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - a 1999 docudrama
I'm a founder, I'm at Bootup Labs
You must be an Apple user...
The synching of contacts/info between everything, and the single system-wide address book/etc was the primary reason I moved to OS X + iPhone.
This may not apply to private institutions, but public schools are subject to boom-and-bust cycle of generous government funding in economic booms and budget cuts during recessions. It's easy to justify almost any project when you know that leaving money on the table means it may not be there when you do need it.
Reach out to Kirsten Winkler - http://www.kirstenwinkler.com/

She's like the techcrunch of online education (someone else said this once).
I've missed Vimperator https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891 since moving primarily to Chrome. It's so nice to not have to go back and forth to the mouse when coding and testing, and my brain doesn't have to shift gears as much.
Thalidomide didn't endanger the people who actually took it, but it wasn't exactly harmless either.
Unfortunately, that in itself is fairly common (gets past one reviewer but rejected/removed much later by another).
This is flagrant linkbait. I start to write a witty comment responding to this post, but then I realized that's exactly what they want us to do. They even told us, explicitly in their book, that their forumla for success was to create controversy in order to attract attention to their business.

I'm still waiting for the day when I see a 37Signals post about how they intend to build great collaboration software, and not about how people should run their businesses. Making inflammatory statements statements about other people's companies is definitely one way to make it. But so is thinking and talking about your actual product.
"..has been proven time after time over the last few centuries"

Could you come up with some examples of this? Not trolling here, but I can't come up with any pre-internet free models off the top of my head.
Using Ruby Gem to root a box
One of the most gratifying things about the "Game Jam" is that it puts all those flame wars over development environments to the test.

Most of the time, the people who stick to C/C++ tend to get demolished by the overhead of fighting the compiler. There are always exceptions - especially since the tiny scope means that code isn't the only bottleneck - but for the most part, it's shown very clearly that making games in a short period requires fast code iteration.

http://wolverinesoft.org/event/contest/48hourcontest7/

I'm pretty sure Sid used Unity, while the students are using all sorts of things: SDL, ClanLib, SFML, C#/XNA, Flash, and Java.
same! really liked vimperator but not enough to switch to firefox.
vBSEO is just one example. They are lucky that vBulletin hasn't added this functionality to their main product line.
Go to ning.com (logged out if you are a member) There is literally no attempt to sell you on anything unless you create a network. No feature listings, no pricing, nothing. There homepage is half dedicated to showcasing networks you might be interested in. To get a light overview of the features you have to go three clicks deep into the site.

They should be more focused on selling their product not the various networks. The networks should drive the traffic to themselves based on their own merit and efforts.

Compare that with a competitor, SocialGo, which is pretty clear in explaining what you can get from their service at various price points. Whereas Ning doesn't appear to be trying to sell me anything, let alone compare my options.
Awesome. I will reach out to Kirsten now... thanks!
Matt, co-founder of Xobni here. Adam and I started Xobni with the basic idea that google organized the world's public information, yet no one had done that for personal information (Adam's insight - not mine - he was in grad school looking for huge data sets to do stuff with). Not only are the personal data stores much larger than public data (most of which is in email), they also have to be treated different. Google (and products like gmail, google desktop, etc) don't get this. What we discovered after pounding our heads at this problem for 6 months was that Email Is About People and no current email clients understand that. Xobni was born.

We took that concept, and with $12k of YC money in the bank, we realized we would get Zero adoption if we asked people to switch to our new email client. We also realized the largest group of existing valuable email users are on Outlook (it has grown from 500M to 600M since we started Xobni).

So, we took our vision to Outlook via a plugin. People liked it. We solved some existing problems for people like keyword search (note: it is easier to acquire users when you solve a problem they know they have), and sprinkled in features that produce our true vision of organizing information around people and relationships.

Individuals pay for our premium Outlook product (Xobni Plus) and companies license it for their employees (Xobni Enterprise).

However, we've finally started to stretch the vision to new areas. We launched Xobni for BlackBerry - an app that takes our people-centric vision of personal information to the blackberry. And Xobni One, our cloud service that connects the xobni service between Outlook, BlackBerry, and upcoming new platforms.

Add onto that other cloud services (Salesforce.com, linkedin, etc) that you want to access and view from Xobni profiles on Outlook, BlackBerry, and everywhere else you maintain and manage relationships.

Would you like to be on your friend's Facebook page and see the phone number that Xobni extracted for you last time that friend called you on your BlackBerry? I would.

So, Outlook plugin can be seen as a means, not an end. Meanwhile, the plugin is damn useful :)
Funny how even the most simple things are overlooked. Thanks. We're going to add some text... let me know what you think in a bit.
Soon... we've got to work on our core product for now
I've found myself feeling the same way too. Unless it's something I really want to do on a computer or device that clearly wasn't designed to do that, my expectation nowadays is that something should just work. Especially when I (perhaps mistakenly) think I understand the problem well enough that I believe it could be made to just work.
I've used ScreenHunter for a while and it has performed nicely--you can capture a selection or an active window w/ a keyboard shortcut:

http://wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm

We just recently upgraded to Office '07, so I'm guessing I'll have to wait another 3 years or so for the Office 2010...
Just installed Chrome to try this. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts in Safari already so the one thing that stands out as awesome in this is the keyboard link picker (i.e. f or F). Please tell me there's something similar out there for Safari.
Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers)
Filling in a vendor's niche is about as old a business model as vendors and there has always, always, always been the risk of being replaced by a built-in solution.

It's got nothing to do with the vendors being hostile nor is it even remotely curious or in any way novel. It is the way industry works. An enterprising someone finds a niche and either grows the niche and the niche is either paved over or absorbed. Rinse repeat etc.
Can a California company have unpaid interns?
Any chance there's some way of modifying the buffering in that video? It's excruciating to watch it stutter through every frame, when I know that 10x-ing the buffer size would completely solve my problem.

(This is a fundamental issue with Flash video players.)
>But as a Tools/Interface developer it's so frustrating to not be allowed to commercialize say an IDE that utilizes multi-touch to make software editing/navigation more efficient or enjoyable.

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. I don't want to say too much here because I'm working on a similar idea, but there's really no reason why the current iPad can't be used for development work.
Huh? You seem to be implying that a growing user base gets them unreasonably high advertising rates. Are you suggesting that advertisers are willing to overpay for facebook ads because of their strong growth trends? That may have been the case when Microsoft did their deal, but that was a while ago. These days, advertisers either have past experience to draw on, or they can dip their toe first without making a big commitment. Either way, I expect most of the ad revenue on Facebook is from people paying what they consider to be a fair price.

As for virtual goods, this has been part of their revenue mix for quite a while too. From the whispers I heard a couple years ago, it wasn't the majority of revenue, but it was a healthy chunk.

Facebook's estimated average revenue per user has hovered at the same level for a few years and is something like 1/3rd what MySpace's ARPU was. Both suggest to me that Facebook has still been favoring growth over revenue, and that as growth starts to taper off, they'll have plenty of opportunity to offer a "free" service and make a profit at the same time.
Vim can be used to write things other than code, so the "hacker" thing is needless...I think that if vim were recognized as simply a powerful editor, not specialized for code, it could save many everyday people a lot of time.

I say that this is a vim user's browser.
Awesome! Just switched away from Safari.
"At the end of July last year, for instance, some thirty thousand steelworkers in the rust-belt province of Jilin fought with police and beat to death a top manager who had threatened large layoffs after a merger."

I live in Pittsburgh, so this comment immediately reminded me of this:

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

People had to die on the way to getting some sane working conditions in this country. Perhaps Chinese workers are close to this point now?
I didn't had that problem but, was it just me or weren't there any controls on the thing? I couldn't pause it or anything. Near the end the dog decided to take a dump on the carpet and I had sit through the whole thing again after I cleaned it up.
NAG Releases Algorithm Library for Multicore
We probably would see more dangerous drugs. We would also see more beneficial drugs, and more drugs with a mixed package of benefits and harms.

Another hypothetical: we might see an anti-depressants with a lower risk of sexual side effects, but a higher risk of heart attack. The FDA considers heart attacks much worse than impotence, so they would probably ban this drug.

Since I don't care that much about long life, but I care a great deal about good sex, I would probably choose this drug over a safer one which causes low sex drive. What right do you have to deny me this choice?
Regrettably, this probably means the end of Ning. It's the classic dot com business model. Once you engage in "community breaking" activities, like kicking off your users or trying to force them into paying subscriptions, the amount of animosity and bad publicity generated by users who have invested a lot of time and energy into the service usually ends up killing the company.

However, I'm not sure that this has wider repercussions for other social networking services. I assume that Facebook is making enough out of advertising to be sustainable (although I could be wrong).
My current employer found me through LinkedIn. I get messages from recruiters on there every now and then that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise, so it seems like it was worth the 15 minutes it took me to setup and maintain my account. I'm the bare minimum user too, I have 18 contacts and 0 recommendations.
They knew that all of the funding was contingent ahead of time?

I wonder how that was communicated to them.
Wow. This is awesome. The shortcuts don't work in GMail but that's expected.

EDIT: You can disable the plugin for GMail by going to Settings and entering mail.google.com in 'Excluded URLs' box.

BTW, has anyone figured out how to focus on a textbox area on the page? Also, what does the 'insert' mode do?
Lightweight alternatives (to heavyweight Chrome and Firefox):

xxxterm; http://www.peereboom.us/xxxterm/html/

uzbl; http://uzbl.org/

surf; http://surf.suckless.org/

vimprobable2; http://www.vimprobable.org/
I didn't have any of those problems, actually. The video played fine and I had controls the whole way through. FF 3.6 on an outdated Ubuntu distro here, which I would have expected to have its share of problems if normal systems did.
With its length, it seems perfect for some kind of 30-minute episode on a channel like G4. The production was pretty good in my opinion.

I agree about the development tools. Another thing I kind of missed was that I felt they could have shown the top few games (and Sid's) being played more than the brief snippets they gave us.
Insert basically passes keystrokes through directly without having them perform their special function - for example when you are typing into a text area. Its basically like switching from normal mode to insert mode in vi.
What I really miss is the '?' shortcut in Firefox for searching on the page only in links. (There might be a different key combination for US keyboards)

If chrome would implement that, my life would improve at least 5%

it makes navigating though links very easy and much more intuitive than the link search that's demoed in the video.
We have a whole weblog dedicated to talking about our product and calling out new feature launches: http://productblog.37signals.com/

Most people aren't that interested in just reading an infomercial, though. Lots of people are apparently interested in reading opinions and discussions about industry topics. Be they VC funding or whatever.
Semi-related: LittleBigPlanet 8-bit calculator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRgYBHoAoU
Do the same and my bookmarks will no longer get synced with my iPhone. This is cool enough that I'm swaying that way.
With the python FUSE bindings you could setup a .jpg file on your desktop that could dynamically change based on the contents of your clipboard (and could disappear when the contents aren't an image). It wouldn't be too much more than plugging a bunch of libraries together.

edit: (missed the mention of Outlook, guess you aren't able to run FUSE)
The way you worded that question creates a subtle and significant difference in meaning from the idea I was talking about, and therefore doesn't address my comment.
This is just more blindness from the folks at 37s. I would like to know how much David pays Google to use their service? That's right he doesn't, so why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is and pay for each and every web service he utilizes.
To focus on a textbox, hit "f". Then hit the key combination for that textbox. It works just like links.
I like and I'm using it, now, but the extension or possibly the extension hooks have some shortcomings. For example, J and K move forward and backward between tabs, except that it fails on certain pages, like gmail (likely JavaScript interference), so you get stuck unless you use Chrome's built-in Ctrl-PageUp or Ctrl-PageDown commands which still work to switch between tabs.
I went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.
Broadcast radio and television.
a) Facebook is a definitely the odd man out. They made something happen that very, very few other eyeball companies have managed.

b) Facebook isn't winning shit for their investors YET. They've allegedly just turned cash flow positive, but they're still $750MM in the hole from VC infusions over the past SIX YEARS. Add interest and risk premium and Facebook has to make a TRUCK load of money to pay back their investors. Not just break even.

c) Fashions change. Remember when Myspace was the golden goose? Friendster? It is far from a guarantee that Facebook will remain hot shit for long enough to pay back $750MM with interest and premium.
Congrats to Matt & Adam! It is amazing to watch Xobni achieving its dream.
Lightspeed Ventures’ Jeremy Liew Says Lots of Growth Left in Virtual Goods
OT: Summify is a fancy Snap (http://www.snap.com/) and is equally annoying. Is there anyone who likes these link preview plugins?
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/508462349/infographics-are-the-...
WTF are you talking about? I pay for plenty of services. In fact, I love paying for good services. Dropbox is a great example. So is Campaign Monitor, Zendesk, and Survey Monkey.

Give shit away for free and people will take it for free.
Their settings page allows you to disable this plugin on GMail.
Gmail: Insert a calendar invitation
For me:

LinkedIn=Business

Facebook=Family/Personal

HN=Fun/Information/Learning/Peer Group/IT outside of Business
While real communication skills are valuable, 'excellent communication skills' is certainly vague corporate speak implying whoever wrote the add doesn't even understand precisely what communications skills they need and why. Try this instead:

Wanted: The ability to explain complex technical problems and concepts clearly and concisely, to make things as simple as possible but no simpler (a la Einstein), so that the group can make sound, correct judgements and choose the best solutions.
I've been using this for a little while and have been really liking it.

I wish there was an option to make it so you would have to manually switch to insert mode, I hate having it automatically switch and find myself doing the wrong thing - either typing and find myself jumping around, or trying to jump around and having it not do that.

I wish ctrl+f didn't pop up the chrome search box though and actually scroll down a full page...

I also wish the searching was more fully featured like vims, for example the * key to search for the word would be great, and being able to :set noignorecase would be nice.

I also have in my mental model of vim that ctrl-t is backwards in the tagstack, so I often hit ctrl-t to go backwards in history and accidentally open a tab. Until they allow remapping of keys, theres not much to do about that one.
In case, you had a new idea. Would you try to get the MVP before writing the first line of code? If yes, could you explain us how and why?
Unfortunately Safari doesn't really have a well-developed extensions system. Until they add one, extensions like this will only be available for chrome and firefox.