skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brainstorm HN: How to Beat Facebook - Non-tech Strategies
Notes: I want to try out a brainstorm session on HN. The first topic came up in my mind was facebook, probably because it got so much coverage with the privacy issues and Diaspora etc.

Topic: Assume you are Diaspora (or any competitor), also assume that technical issues have been solved. What are some strategies to convert users from facebook?

Rule 1: Be as far-fetched as possible - quantity over quality

Rule 2: Only reply to someone's idea when you can build on top of it. If you really want to express that certain ideas won't work, start a separate comment with your explanation and an alternative idea.

For example: I will start with a few ideas in the comments below.
> How is a producer of that content to get a return on that investment if people don't pay for the product after it is produced?

That is the question! Now copyright is looking very inappropriate we need some good answers. I expect it is a matter for evolution: try lots of things and see which work best. There are already some incipient examples out there.

> yours

(With information, it can only mean acknowledgement -- 'ownership' doesn't make sense.)

> those creators have to make money somehow.

Broadly, yes, just not by old copyright-oriented ways.

The point is seeing the two things separately. We need only pay for production, not for copies. That is economically optimal, and more practically fitted to current technological circumstances.
I pretty much assumed it's for the small/medium journalists on a deadline who can use some of the mumbo-jumbo as filler so they have a full article without having to do more than a little bit of their own research.
Speaking as a tech blogger who has seen thousands of these, I really don't know who they are written for. The trick is to simply skip over anything that's a quote (which often make up around half of the words). Those quotes are rarely actually said/written by the person they're attributed to, and if a journalist includes them in their article it's usually just filler.
Maybe Microsoft can leapfrog this, though. I hear Windows Mobile 7 will be as good as Windows 98. ;)
Just to continue this, you deleted your official Facebook page. Why?! Here's the only customer made Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101242166584007

It's pissing off a lot of people who yet still continue to want your product. Listen to them, talk to them. And by them, I of course mean us.
I grew up in San Francisco rather than New York, but a lot of this column resonated with me. I was very hesitant to send my kid (almost 5 years old) to the local public school in San Francisco, largely because of my own experience attending these schools in the 70s.

After doing a lot of research (and much convincing from my wife and friends), I have come around to the same conclusion Brooks reached (I'm actually quoting Podhoretz, in the link Brooks references) - "my small city is the same and yet it is not the same, because it is today, in almost every way, better".

There is some loss. San Francisco isn't as open as it used to be, not because it has become less tolerant, but because it has become so expensive. Harvey Milk would have had trouble showing up in SF and finding his calling in life, simply because he never could have afforded the rent. So SF is closed off in some ways.

High Tech is a creative field, and plenty of those folks are still coming here. But there is also a different type of creative person, the kind who is only half aware of what he or she is working on, because it doesn't exist yet... my suspicion is that these people are going somewhere else now. But I'm not 100% sure of that, SF is still a draw. Guess we'll find out in another 30-40 years.
QA with Fedora Project Lead Paul Frileds on "Grown Up" Distro
It runs FreeBSD 8. We use SSL between the robot & cloud, but user logins to the web interface use passwords over https. I'd like to support something stronger. Can someone point to a website with truly secure logins I can poke at?
My news feed is full of strangers as well. This is the only place I've found where anyone is discussing this particular Facebook privacy issue. Every single one of my friends' comments and whatever they are posting on (sometimes a pretty private status update) is showing in my news feed. I doubt that all of them suddenly changed their posting privacy settings to "public" or "friends of friends" at the same time. If I'm in some testing bracket then I'm pretty sure that when everybody gets this they are gonna freak.
"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."

It's much more complicated than this.
Everything JS has my approval.
In the meantime, if you have an iPhone try the "Sleep Cycle" app. It uses the iPhone's accelerometer to track your sleep cycle.
That is their old blog:

P.S. You’re not crazy — our blog has moved! The old blog is still available at http://wakemate.posterous.com — though it will redirect here for a couple days.

Here's the current one: http://blog.wakemate.com/
1. Who says growth must come from hiring better or even more employees?

2. Does Google feel they already make the most of the talent they have?

3. Do existing Google employees feel they themselves are in the best position to shine?
Organize a national quit facebook day (Sept 1). Build website for it and ask people to publicize the url in their facebook profile, status, twitter, etc.
well... damn I wish that Google had bought Sun. That would have been one hell of an invention machine. I guess they are taking the back door way of hiring the ones who are leaving.
I'd just be interested in knowing what sort of bias would it have. How would the government like new science to look? Would it be at all productive to fake experiments?

The government has its issues, but funding science is a great thing. Sure, I'd like for less money to be controlled by the pentagon. But I'd love to see even money spent on basic research.
While you're right the GP has a strong smack of "conspiracy" to it I think it is equally naive to believe that GW is not a political arena as well.

I'd even go as far to say some of the science has been biased by politicians - or at the very least misused.

The hard truth is that there is no real consensus. Enough for us to start adapting and weight options certainly (and who can argue that a greener future is a bad idea!). But not enough for scientific certainty either way

We are still at the evidence gathering/observations stage and will likely be there for a while yet. :)
Fighting the Man
Further information about how and what to trigger things with the Magic-Sysrq-Key is documented in $KERNEL/Documentation/sysrq.txt, which you can access for example in Linus' GIT tree at...

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...

One very useful function, for example, is to force a hard reboot when ssh'ed into a server:

echo b >/proc/sysrq-trigger
Everything you need to know to make the most of the new Facebook “Like” Button
I'm not a moral relativist, but yes laws are different by locale.

> but murder, or the killing of someone, is validated every day, whether it be through execution or self-defense.

Killing does not murder make. Murder is specifically used to indicate moral fault in killing.
This Wakemate think is terrible fiasco. It's just ridiculous at this point.
What if Skype had an API?
Thanks for the feedback Hugh! What voice or type of voice would better suit you?
The Second Order Effects (of Startup Incubators)
Build a tool so that a facebook user can scrape email addresses of her friends, which can then be used to jump start a new social network.
Very cool. No more physical appearances at conferences needed anymore.
Justin.tv Beats YouTube in Time Per Viewer by 2-1 Margin
Apple tends to have a flurry of commits right before a new Safari is about to be released, or a new OS release is made. That is when Apple commits the latest and greatest they have to offer.

It will be interesting to see when this happens again.
I had to double check which site I was at, those pages look remarkably similar to most made for AdSense fluff content sites. I wonder just how profitable those pages are.
I'm also in the hunt for a python framework. I've had a look at several, most have already been mentioned here, like Flask and web.py. Personally I'm probably going to go with custom framework built on Werkzeug or modifying Flask.

I think Tornado Web (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) might be an interesting option for you. Should be highly scalable and is being used by FriendFeed. There were some things that I didn't like about it, but I've seemed to have forgotten what exactly.
London (UK) mayor plans citywide wifi network by start of 2012 Olympics
"We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit)"

Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers.
It's not just your help desk though. If you want to escalate tickets to other teams or have your whole company be responsible for customer service (like ours) having users for 20 people isn't that extreme. We have <20 people and everyone has a Zendesk account because we all do customer service. Plus we use it to track resumes, sales opportunities, etc. The users add up fast.
Then as now, the adaptability of the medical profession was impressive.

To provide better care or to make more money?
pretty unnecessary & exclusive in my opinion.

unnecessary, because
1) generally you need to carry some baseline amount of cash and a credit card. the credit card is not really a burden in the wallet.
2) "which credit card" to take is hardly a problem, you don't generally spend above the limit of your credit card in a single day
3) the iphone can get stolen just as easily as a credit card, and in such cases it is more expensive to replace than simply locking up the card and getting a new one.

exclusive because, the app is just designed for the iPhone, there are many users without iPhone, android, or blackberry. they should be given the same ease of use.
>All well and good; but what if you want to change the size, maxlength, or add a class ?

Adding a class: Django gives every element of the form id values for easy styling in CSS. Just do {{form.as_p}} and see what it outputs.

size and max length: I'm fine with these in python as they correspond to the max-length that would be validated into a data member. If you mean pixel size on screen, this belongs neither in HTML or your template but in CSS, since browsers render forms completely differently regardless of their HTML attributes, you have to style their width\height in CSS to get anything consistent.
Wildfire receives $4.04M in Series A funding
> They don't yet know what the results are going to be

I think one of the points this article makes is that it is possible to look unconsciously for the results/proof you want. Science, especially this science, is rarely black/white. And if you are set on a specific shade of grey there is a natural positive bias towards that.

The argument is, I guess, that Federal funding is likely to favour scientists that support the shade of grey govt. wants to see. (again, a natural bias - though perhaps not so ethical...)

Not a conspiracy certainly; just a combination of slight bias and belief ending in a slightly off center result.

The problem with climate science is that to disagree with the GW theory right now means being branded a denier and a loon. So the bias shift is a emphasised.
>The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.

It sounds like her dreams were achieved. His dreams we never hear about.
A Dismal Guide to Touchscreens
Making BitTorrent Safe to Use Over Tor
" (and the lack of hyperlinks here is more a limit on the concept of ebooks not a fault of this particular one)"

Lots of PDFs have hyperlinks, both within the document and to Web resources.
That was just a Monte Carlo simulation.

If you change the parameters of the simulation, you will get different outcomes.
What's horrible about it? I ask because I really want to know, not because I'm defending JIRA (which I've never used).
Right.

And there's nothing wrong with raising your price by a large amount, even if people are locked in with your product - you simply grandfather existing users.

You accomplish what you want, and your existing users win too because all of a sudden they're getting a great deal.

Nobody leaves. Nobody complains. Everyone's happy.
Which microsd slot on your iPhone are you clogging up, exactly?
I'm just unpacking the semiotics. I'm not making value judgements.
Nvidia puts Tesla GPUs inside IBM’s datacenters
recently brought my wifes ipad to a conference and was really stoked to have it versus laptop. got lots of little things done, bu didnt totally zoneout which is easy with the laptop and miss the event, very nice balance, but also a pretty specific use case.
Give us a ring if you wanna meetup! Fellow HN'ers always welcome.
WSJ Europe: EU to trash non-European private equity firms?
Woa how'd you know about that?
Anyone know how much EU startups depend on this source of capital?
>I'm well aware of inspectdb and migrations. The OP however stated that he didn't want to use an ORM.

That part I missed, my bad.

>And what if you need to support composite primary keys ? The ticket on that is 5 years old with no fix in sight:

If it were me? I'd patch it myself. I've patched django for local use only multiple times because when I looked at the relevant ticket, they refused a fix. I've no love for the politics of the project itself.

>Frankly, the more I've used Django the more I've run up against it's limits. One of these limits is that the apps such as auth and admin are tightly coupled to the ORM and template engine.

If you're straining against it that much, I wouldn't even necessarily bother with using SQLAlchemy, it can be rather painful at times. I'd just use nodejs or http://wiki.github.com/defnull/bottle/ with an amalgamation of preferred tools.

>I've given my experiences with different frameworks, the pluses and minuses of each. It's up to the original poster to decide naturally.

That's pretty much what I said.

>However, yet again any criticism of the One Holy Web Framework brings ad hominem arguments and angry rebuttals.

Cut the martyr bullshit. It's a technical decision, not a chance for you to air your ego.
I don't care what weaknesses you can find in this post or Google's strategy, the fact that they're thinking about talent in this way is impressive.

Typically HR and statistical analysis don't mix.
> Learning has never been easier,

The demotivation of seeing all the things you aren't learning and how vast the scope of things you could be learning has never been easier, either.
Kiva.org Co-Founder's New Startup Wins $50,000 |
To answer your question (the one without a question mark), much cheaper, since people in poorer countries are willing to do same jobs for much less. IIRC that's the master plan behind Anybots.
Keep in mind that we're talking about prices here. What is a stock price?

If I put in an order to sell one share of GOOG for $1, would you start to believe that the market price of GOOG was $1 per share?

A market price is only as valid as the degree of consensus. Increased liquidity means that there is a high degree of consensus about the current price. This means that one can feel additional confidence that one is getting a fair price.

The main concept to think about here is an order book. Think about the psychology behind orders that are a ways away from the best price (both bid and ask). Those parties are willing to transact, but at a premium. In other words, they prefer to hold unless a sweet enough offer is made.

Thus, for a very large order one has to pay that premium.
Shazam tops 75M users, 1B song IDs
joshu is not unique in that regard- there are many other angels also executing the conway shotgun strategy. The main difference is that he's doing the deals under his own name instead of setting up his own "fund".
You know, my position is that I'm unconvinced that climate change is being affected by Humans quite as much (it seems rational we affect it a bit) as some people say.

(straight up; I'm not here to argue that out. This isn't the right forum, it's just setting the story).

I usually get branded a climate denier (and sometimes a loon :)) even in relatively high brow discussion. Which is amusing because you get real idiot deniers sucking up to you and sensible people you want to have a discussion with ignoring you.

This raises two points.

Firstly a poor assumption has been made; because every time I start trying to compare which papers I have read with others in the discussion they either a) point me to a magazine/paper article or b) don't know what I am waffling about. It's annoying because you quickly realise that the most well read [non climatologist] on the subject are almost exclusively in the "bit of both camps" category - and, sadly, we are all still branded deniers.

The second point is it worries me that this is a Scientific field that is based on the idea that not-believing in man made GW is akin to being heathen sin and crazy talk. I hate that, it seems so irrational given the fact we are still developing the theory!
There was a common smugness to the tone of the article - borne of the comfort of parroting conventional/majority opinions - which your summary/comment makes explicit. Thanks.
Business Success Requires Specific Goals
Nigori: Storing Secrets in the Cloud
Trademark infringement fight over the shape of a chocolate bar and a brownie pan
Synopsis:
Ben Laurie proposes Nigori, a protocol and open source implementation for storing secrets in the cloud. It doesn’t require you to trust anyone. The storage server(s) are incapable of getting hold of the keying material. Users just remember a URL and a master password.
Teaching Geometry in Alabama
Google probably didn't want Sun's hardware. They have the dubious honor of having some of the largest processor design teams out there, and yet some of the slowest processors in every generation.

I read an article about how much the DB2 folks liked Sparcs, and would MUCH rather convince their customers to buy Sun boxes than IBM, Itanium, or x86 boxes. The reason? The DB2 group charges a per-CPU license fee, similar in magnitude to Oracle's. On a POWER machine they would typically sell 4-8 licenses. On Itanium and x86, they might get to 32.

On a comparably performing Sun, 128.
Lots of vendors are also MS resellers and will turn a profit by selling their client all the Windows and SQL Server licenses they'll need to run the provided solution.
You must be a programmer.
For a lot of employees, the project they'll be working on and what their manager is like are major factors in whether they want a job. Wouldn't a "no hiring manager" strategy cause problems because of this?
That was actually my decision! We bought the domain before the acquisition. I think I heard it on the radio as "del issy oos" and knew it had to be changed.
Gurus, Rockstars and Ninjas, Oh my
...and there's literally no risk to get caught.

I know someone who got sued, so I wouldn't say there's no risk.
Time Travel and Fresh Cherries
The issue with having individual fishing companies determining policies is that it invokes the tragedy of the commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

This is addressed in part by the Law of the Sea Treaty, but this only addresses waters out to 200 nautical miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_Sea_Treaty

Living resources past this zone are free game. If any fishing companies pull out of a region to allow the populations to grow, it only opens up opportunities for other companies to come in.
Tell HN: Someone deleted a submission re Wakemate
A few minutes ago I stumbled upon a submission chastising WakeMate for still not shipping. There were 6 comments. I hit refresh and the title changed to [dead] and the submission was removed from the front page. What is going on?

At this URL the comments can still be found: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358309
How to Lead Without Saying a Word
> it's tricky to not end up with extra echoes.

Is that because when you're routing the audio directly from robot to robot, that it's technically difficult to cancel the extra transmission that is being sent from robot speaker to robot microphone?
https is fine - just couple it with PKI enabled smart cards (these work generally by providing a client-side certificate for your TLS handshake).
This is the strategy the DoD is using for most/all web auth stuff now.
Shame there isn't a way (in HTML) to say "the src of this <script> is at http://.... and it's SHA512 is a5872... or it's signed by GPG key 0x1276e...". That would solve that problem.
Google IO keynotes will be live-streamed
How is that not an answer? Do you think ZenDesk has anywhere near saturated their market? Why should a company that's aiming to grow take the marketing hit that comes from pissing off their current customers? Why turn potential evangelists into angry detractors?
Clearly this story wasn't the whole story. If you read the followup article, you learn that his business recently failed, and he had lost his sense of self-worth - all of which the wife was aware.
I don't believe that two products are different simply because one is represented in bronze and the other in bits. No one would suggest it is okay to steal a bronze sculpture.

I've heard the arguments and when you take something without compensating the creator -- or otherwise rightful owner -- it's stealing. If you don't believe it is stealing because of some semantic argument, then it the effect is the same -- you're taking something of value without paying for it and harm is caused to the market in which that product exists because value is lost.
I didn't need more encouragement.
Extremely jealous about this.

We have a 20-seat shared conference room in the Monadnock building which is very nice, but the auditorium-style space is much better suited to giving classes.

We just got our new offices on the top of the building (an old architects space), and I was all psyched. Until Jason's team took the wind out of my sales.
Can we please stop saying ORDER BY RAND/RANDOM is slow?
The issue isn't about an OS being much more than a forum (whatever that means), the issue is actually size of potential market. There are millions of users who would use an OS, but do you think the size of market is same for forums as well? Software doesn't cost high because it costs high to make it, actually it costs higher because the company making it has to survive and make profit (given the total size of market). (Or, of course, it can start making OSes).
I don't know if that is fair though. One doesn't have to know how a microwave works to see how it changed cooking that much.

[EDIT] -- I had another point to go along with this but boss came by and I forgot it. It was a good one though.
Apple's Jobs blunders on options swap
How about we just crowdsource a DIY WakeMate? The hardware part is just a microcontroller, bluetooth transceiver, and 3-axis accelerometer powered by a watch battery. Sure, the package will be kinda huge when you build it yourself unless you're adventurous enough to etch a PCB and wavesolder it. The firmware just needs to periodically dump buffered samples over bluetooth and let an external app do the heavy lifting.

I should make clear that I'm not knocking on the WakeMate guys at all. Making a production-quality product at scale is a lot harder than hacking something together in your basement.