skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the general consensus is that if you find something useful, after pirating it, you will pay for it. Pirating removes the need to buy first to see if you really like it or is it something you really want.

I can only speak for myself. I have pirated many softwares and books to see if I find value in it. If I do, I pay for it later. For instance, I recently pirated a book (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and I loved it so much, I bought two copies the same week and gave them out as gifts to people who I am sure never heard of that book or the author and who doesn't like reading books on their computer. I will admit that I pirated "Things" for mac and now that I find myself using it everyday, I paid for a legal key (after using it for few months).

Obviously not everyone does it, but this is how I justify my pirating habit (I am not proud of the fact that I do it).

I think some people don't like pirate bay because they glorify doing what they do instead of trying to spread the ideology or message of pirating.
I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible.

There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - since the form is the same - you will realize that they must know about that problem, for months even, and have never fixed it.

We were paying $100/mo for ZenDesk around a year ago, and the price was fine. Theoretically good value for the money. But every one of my team hated it so much, they would never actually log in.
For them, having a dedicated space for giving talks and workshops is really, really smart.
The problem with the approach you just described is that it's missing analysis. You got a list of features, not use cases. Maybe the customer wanted to solve a particular problem, but the only way they got to elucidate it was in terms of incremental functionality. Better than the wrong thing, but not the way to delight your customer either, I bet.
Ask HN: Will a ruling against Bilski have any impact on software patents?
With speculation that we might even have some news in the next few days - what's the current view on this case? If Bilski loses will it pull the rug from under software patents as well or will the judgement be more narrowly targeted?
FWIW, the previous default was "Friends and Networks", not "Friends and Family". That includes Networks like the United Kingdom with 20M users and no restrictions on who could join.
I disagree. I don't have a fancy mobile phone and I'm unlikely to ever be at a PC without an internet connection. £5 for unlimited ad-free music is perfect for me. In fact I just signed up and didn't even have to pause my music for it to recognise my purchase. Sometimes too many plans can be confusing but I don't think Spotify really could have made it simpler.
A lot of friends are in the business. A bunch of the things I have invested in are things started by friends.
Podcast on DevInEU: Discussing EU Software Startups with Curdy of TechMe2
most easy way of remembering is : BUSIER, only backwards.
Uninstalling any on-access antivirus protection will help too.
I have often found that most college lectures have a hard time with distance learning. There normal lecture style translates very badly on a TV screen and people tend to fall asleep in front of a boring TV. The best distance learning teachers I have found come from a community college background. They tend to have to be more interesting to their students and know how to work an audience.
Agreed. What exactly does this add?
In my specific case? I have all sorts of data mixed up in there; also, I change the software I use over time so a clone would fall out of date.
I do wonder if the enterprise market is entirely standardized on cloning though...
Here's the article that hints about the 20th May being a possible day for the decision: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/05/17/another-day-without-bil...
I wish it were this simple but it's not.

Most small and medium sized businesses still run at least one web applications that was written when IE had 90% of the market and which relies on Microsoft's backwards implementations.

I suspect Microsoft couldn't make Webkit backwards compatible to those apps if it wanted to. The trident code base probably has quirks Microsoft itself has completely forgotten about. But many small web based programs rely on those quirks to run.
The thing people don't realize is that there is no standard WebKit browser, either.

http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html

So, even if MS did convert to webkit, which webkit?
Does anyone have any experience with ATS? Having read only that link, it looks quite interesting. I'm currently trying to tweak a trading platform I wrote in Haskell to work for a new strategy that requires very low latency. I'm worried I might run into problems due to gc kicking in at an inopportune moment. ATS seems like it would enable me to avoid that problem, but would it even be in the same ballpark as Haskell in terms of expressiveness?
Not to mention it gives TechCrunch a permalink of juicy, pissed off comments to write a post about.
That's a good question.

You have to talk to other entrepreneurs who took investment from the angel.

While any shareholder can cause problems, especially at that stage, a small percentage / non-board angel can't do TOO much damage, I think. But I've never really been in the situation. Ask grellas.
Interesting.

Still of course a world of difference from "publicly searchable".
Should We Use PrestaShop?
If you can't convince Mozilla to adopt WebKit, how can you expect MS to do the same? I really wish Mozilla and Opera adopted WebKit and devs from all the non-MS browsers worked together on WebKit. Then we'd have an IE and non-IE web. Right now, we have a IE vs FF vs Safari vs Chrome vs Opera web and it really really sucks as a developer.

The whole "develop for standards" doesn't work when each browser renders things slightly differently. While coding up http://bulletxt.zetabee.com I realized that each browser handles line-height, padding, margins, and font-alignment differently, especially when applied to textarea. Sure, most of the non-IE browsers handle things in a similar way but similar is not good enough in many instances. If I do margin-top: -4px, it works fine in Chrome and Safari but I need to make it -6px in Opera and -2px in Firefox. IE doesn't even work that way so I end up doing something completely different.

I would be completely fine with there being 1 rendering engine and 1 JS engine no matter the browser. And all browsers could improve on the speed/performance of these engines without changing the output or requiring different input. If I do padding-right:10px for a float:left element with position:fixed, I want it to look the exact same in ALL browsers.

I know standards try to do that but it just doesn't work. Standards work in theory but in practice, it is the code that works. WebKit works like WebKit. If I created the spec/standard based on WebKit and implemented it based on this new standard, it would NOT be WebKit. Standards work well for protocols and communication methods but for actually rendering arbitrarily complex window elements, they don't work and last decade of failed attempts at standardization have shown us that. Think of how many websites/tutorials/articles exist solely to help deal with browser inconsistencies. Now imagine if that effort could have been made towards something productive.
(I do not work in the industry, this is just a speculation) I believe the way algorithmic trading works is first the trader designs a strategy and estimates a success rate (from what I assume is past data). For example, a strategy may be successful (profitable) 53% of the time. This means that 47% of the time there is a loss. However if the 3% gain is large enough to cover the difference you're going to be up for the day.
All twitter photos. Live.
GTD is the Atkins of an Over-Stimulated Lifestyle
lots of requests for Beta sign-ups, http://bit.ly/8YUiv9
WebKit sucks, when it comes to performance, compared to Chrome and Opera. I'm sure you'll always find compatibility 'issues' but Microsoft is also planning to pull out all the stops when it comes to HTML 5 application performance.
FWIW, Checking code or reading API docs is pretty useful :P

firebug works pretty well for testing out code snippets.

The internet is full of enough incorrect information regarding javascript as it is, and if you think about it, % has to be encoded, otherwise anything containing a % would be decoded wrongly ;)
Toyota iQ 'Nimble as a mouse' campaign
It is a small part of a larger point, but the speech writer had to know it was a provocative, quotable line. I have some problems with this line that I mentioned in the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345882
What he is discussing is just a less extreme version of what I discussed.

I picked a fairly strong and apolitical example [1] because I didn't want to devolve into a more political discussion. But maybe I have no choice, so here goes.

Many liberals favor increasing distributional equality. In math terms, they wish to maximize L = (min utility) / (max utility). This means they should be open to arguments which argue "policy X decreases L, and should be opposed". However, many conservatives don't care about distributional equality, only overall utility, i.e. conservatives may wish to maximize C = 0.75 x (max utility) + 1.0 x (min utility). Therefore, such people would be unconvinced by any evidence based argument that "policy X reduces L".

Shermer and I were both arguing that evidence can tell you have to maximize your objective function. Only ideology/morality/values can tell you what your objective function should be.

[1] There is no clear political divide on torture. To pick recent high profile politicians, both Bush and Hillary supported it while McCain and Obama opposed it.
I don't see why changing prices is a big deal. Apparently there's some pent-up frustration, but there is a real cost to keeping services online. If the price of electronic books doesn't increase over the next two years, I'll be astonished.

And in fact, there's real danger to a business in terms of how they price their product. We were early adopters of RightNow, and we still pay an absurdly low price for their product (which we host) compared to other people, all because it's grandfathered in. Now this hurts them less because we host it, but you can imagine if they had to grandfather us in at the prices they were charging when they were new, it could really hurt them.
There is a theory which states that if we did adopt one rendering engine to rule them all, the healthy competition that keeps (most of) the various rendering engines innovating would collapse and progress would stall.

Eventually, some upstart would seize the opportunity by launching a new browser with a better rendering engine.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
What makes a movie good?
Very cool, thank you all for the info! Good to know that most of the Google Analytics stuff is good enough for tracking conversion rates via Javascript.
Kiva's doing a good job of it. "Kiva's mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty."

So try and think of ways to save lives systematically.
The Attention Contest 05/18/2010
The order of the keys is really not that important but the order of the functions each one performs indeed matters. Usually you don't wan't to reboot before you sync :P
Press buttons, mostly.
Tender App is especially great
Cool project. Some ideas:

- let users play with fonts/colors/spacing to find their optimum setup.

- aggregate user preferences to find good defaults

Then you have an interesting blog post to write.

I think you should blow away the scrolling and have just two controls: chunk size and speed. Personally I found chunk size ~50 to be ideal.
It's a big market out there and I think both Gabriel and Joshua will do fine. They're investing in different kinds of companies and providing different kinds of value, and they'll end up with the kinds of companies they can get most mutual benefit.
I guess so. I really dislike uncapped notes, obviously. Many notes convert after a fixed period of time.
microsoft should switch to webkit-ish.
My guess is that at a certain point we will have to reconsider our animal based food habits, not based on ethics but on efficiency mainly. We gain some specific contributions from them (B12 vitamin etc) but for others (most proteins included) there should be more efficient ways to get them. The higher you are on the food chain, the more efficiency you loose on the process, so it would better be for something specifically produced at that point of the chain.
I have had this book on my shelf for a few months now, yet I had never read it, nor really planned on it.

That's different now, I will try to start tonight.
Exactly. Anchor that price high, sell it low. Everyone at the old price will think they got a deal and "now its back to normal". Everyone coming in now won't know any better. If they didn't have sales at the old price, they wouldn't have anyway with the higher price anchor. There is never a reason to go too low early when you can just put that price up as a "discount" from the start.
I don't think there is anything wrong with raising your prices. The main problem here is how they handled their existing user base. "Grandfathering" is not a short-term, temporary thing, what they're doing is a grace period.

The right way to handle this would be to just let everyone who was on an old plan stay on those plans. Then, instead of a backlash, they'd be getting a sales bump as people who were on the fence signed up before the price change deadline.
This post is relevant to why this advice will not and should not be heeded: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-hard...

In summary: "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what."

Building runtimes (and a web browser is a runtime for web apps) is a core business function to Microsoft.
Definitely not. I'm investing now, let me price it now.

I've noticed that both very hot and very cold deals are debt. Hot because they can demand it, and cold because they can't scrape a real round together.
vs was poor and hasty diction on my part. I didn't mean to come across as adversarial (or critical), so I apologize if it reads like that.

Can we still AYA, i.e. what about your actual strategy will you divulge? Am I at all close that you're trending towards being the next Ron Conway?
Mass syndication is "A Party Round"
Maybe I completely missed the point, but, why WebKit? Why is WebKit better? I mean, I could use the exact same arguments for Gecko, and even for the IE rendering engine. I mean, if everyone uses the IE rendering engine, it'll always look the same, but that wouldn't resolve all problems.
The argument for one browser vendor switching from engine A to another engine B "just like that" is entirely invalid unless engine B is strictly better than engine A. And by the looks of it there are areas in which IE9 Trident is going to be better than WebKit (e.g. hardware acceleration), which means that the argument is invalid. The argument for Mozilla switching to WebKit similarly falls flat -- Gecko is better than WebKit in several areas -- it is the only engine capable of rendering Firefox's interface, for instance.
So many jokes to be made..."Compatible drivers" or, not so funny: "No apparent software acceleration"
I'd like a "wallet" from which I can use whatever card I want to.
That was pretty much my point. I think for many reasons (and no ones fault) that startup advice tends towards one size fits all, and that is really not appropriate. Companies are in a continuum along many different dimensions, and what they should do in terms of fundraising should vary as a consequence.
Germany Gives Google Deadline on Data Use
Review my startup: Akshell, now with CommonJS support
No, one company controlling the rendering would be a bad thing.

What they need to do (IMHO) is to have W3C create a reference implementation of the spec (and tests) and release that open source with say a BSD like license. So the different engines can use that if they want. Also if the browser doesn't display it exactly like the reference implementation then it shouldn't be called a web browser.
Objective-C Tuesdays: changing default property names
I'm not sure you're right.

The backlash would be expressed elsewhere, here at least it's in a place they cannot afford to ignore.

Their actions going forward, e.g. if they purge the posting with the links to competitors, will tell us a lot about them and how they're going to deal with this.

Also note this could be part of an internal faction fight, one faction who's against this move may have wanted this so that they can show this immediate and detailed feedback from current customers to those in the company who put this in place.

In general, I find most "supress information and communications" strategies to not work well, and this is ever more true the more we build our communications infrastructures.

"The truth is out there" and pretending otherwise is likely to be futile.
The "Back to the Future" bit at 7:05 or so was very funny.

I was kind of skeptical to watch a video with content I had already seen as a TED talk and nearly clicked back before it started. Once it started, I was immediately engaged, and reading parts of the talk satisfied a certain part of my brain.
Try SmartGit.
Anybots launches QB proxy robot
Anybody here successfully raised prices without a major blowback? I'd love to hear how you did it (as opposed to these clowns).
Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan
That's not grandfathering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfathering), that's a grace period. Calling it grandfathering is one of the worst parts of this whole mess.
"The HTML5 spec is 900 pages and hard to read. HTML5 for Web Designers is 85 pages and fun to read. Easy choice."

The HTML5 spec is current, uses hyperlinks and free. Easy choice.
There's plenty of academic studies now that show that pirating and digital distribution don not hurt economically the developer but only the "middle men".
See Boldrin and Levine's "Against Intellectual Monopoly" to have some numbers:

http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-...
Free to download here: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html

It's time we move away from the stereotype "if people download my stuff, I lose money". Greatest majority of those who download would not be your customers.
A recent WWF report says tuna (bluefin) could be wiped out by 2012.
It seems like they could just create a new product/sku/whatever for each of the new pricing points and then stop selling the old products. You can't buy into the old subscription but it's no biggy to continue to bill it.

The way they're doing it looks like a money grab (pay more now or pay up front for a year and then more later!).
Template inheritance is the way to go, and it's one of the most important features necesary to create modular sites.
Agreed. Monoculture is always a poor situation to find yourself in. It's bad in agriculture, it's bad in politics, and it's bad in computing.

Not only does monoculture kill innovation and induce complacency on account of a lack of competition; it creates the perfect security conditions for malevolent exploitation. Imagine a security bug that is exploitable in 99% of the industry's web browsers. Yikes.

We are actually in the perfect position right now. Webkit (props to the original KHTML team) is receiving accolades by the heap and has put intense pressure on both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident teams. The result will be 3 very fast rendering engines (and if it suits them, they'll be standards compliant too).
His name is Doctorow.
I meant Max was sounding adversarial. He seems very angry, anyway. Big chip on his shoulder maybe?

Some of it I will divulge. Some of it I'd be happy to tell you directly someday. I should have dropped a note when I was last in Boston.

My investment serves several goals. I have a bunch of markers, horizontal business types, and vertical industries by which I evaluate things like the nature of competition the startup will enter.

I don't do as much due diligence, because I am following on with other investors who DO do more of this. I also feel that there's a lot less value to it at the earliest stages.

I am also looking to be more connected and more present in the Valley. Consider it sowing seeds.
Easy: Grandfather every existing customer, permanently.
Here's why people are so angry:

* they clearly didn't hear about it in advance

* it was buried in the midst of discussing (minor) new features

* it locked them out of features they had before (XML export)

* it's a 2-3x increase for many people

* the grandfathering option forces them to come up with thousands on short notice, or not at all

* ZenDesk's blog managed to sound totally smug

* nobody from ZenDesk is answering emails, phones, or even comments

Basically, it's a nuclear disaster.

EDIT: Fixed line break issue. I never remember...
Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science?

It would be pretty extraordinary if it somehow didn't, wouldn't it?
Cruising on the cloud.
Clearing the XaaS disturbance.
Maybe it's just me, but his article pretty much made me want to keep my iPhone 3GS. There are only a few things that would make me want to switch at this point. Even some of his pros are cons to me.

Pros:
- Share button
- Exchange support
- Back and Menu buttons
- Native Google apps
- No iTunes
- Voice Control
- Keyboard with a comma
- Status bar
- Replacing cursor

Cons:
- Application availability
- UI is clumsy and/or incoherent
- Painful browser zooming
- Copy/Paste is unpleasant
- Typing is just better on the iPhone
I think a lot of "bulk" investors feel that trying to guess the success of early stage companies is a lot like trying the guess the success of a person when they are still in the womb. I'm always amused at the extensive diligence you see with some early stage investors-- diligence where Google or Facebook wouldn't have passed muster. I remember Joe Kraus recalling that someone passed on investing early in Excite because they said, "Who's going to SEARCH the internet? They'll just find the sites they like and bookmark them!"

I think it makes sense to get a gut feeling of the founding team (Can they sell? Do they have a passion for the space? Do they seem like they are in it for the long haul? Do they seem willing to pivot?) and it makes sense to hear/believe the narrative of the market size ( http://is.gd/ceLQU ), etc. Every investor is going to have the secret trait/quality in a founder/market that they think is critical.

But trying to guess what founders and markets are going to do over a period of 7+ years shouldn't be about dozens of hours of diligence.