skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good luck. I think you will solve a huge pain point if you come up with a no brainier, no hassle affiliate/partner program. All I would need is a simple API to tell you which partner did the transaction and how much was the transaction worth. There are couple of inputs that you may want to consider:

* Allow setting of different commissions to different partners

* Don't force user to define plans. He may want to do a lot of custom plans and pay affiliates for it.

* Payouts using Paypal would be nice

* Don't know if you would like to get into this, but 2nd tier affiliate program is also nice to have

* Keep your commissions really low ;) (This is because already your users would be giving a lot of commissions: to affiliates, to paypal, to merchant banks, etc.)
Deactivate my account
Today I've close my Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, unsubscribed from FoRK, and I want to deactivate my YCombinator account. But I couldn't find out how?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers/...

* Jimbo Wales ‎(checkuser, founder, oversight, administrator) (Created on 27 March 2001 at 15:47)

Looks like Fox News didn't do a very basic fact check.
Like slime for vim
stop posting.

done.
PHP Snippet - Create Drop Down List from Array
Heh, I upvoted you for being funny and helpful at the same time.

But I need to remove any traces of me.

I can't be helped and would continue posting, until I close my account (as you can see I still post).
Reminds me of the interesting ways the SNES Sim City has been exploited:
http://incise.org/advanced-sim-city-strategies.html
mail pg to ban you.

that should do it. Then you can still post but nobody will be able to read it.
I'm interested too!
A 2nd tier affiliate would be very interesting addition.
"No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line"
In-memory compression is another technique not to be forgotten. If you can efficiently compress your in-memory representations of data you would otherwise have to hit disk or network for, you can dramatically increase the amount of data you can cache in memory, especially if you're aware of the structure and general patterns of the data.

Once I had to cache file paths, millions of them. I got a fairly easy 6x improvement by storing them in a Patricia trie, with each node's string stored as a range of UTF-8 encoded bytes, and indexed by arrays of bitfields - i.e. bit-packed arrays. Child nodes were similarly indexed using bitfield arrays. Turning what would be a 32-bit (or worse, 64-bit) pointer into (e.g.) a 28-bit integer really starts to add up when you have millions of them.
I would have preferred to give 17 teams $10k rather than gamble $170k on these guys. The whole situation is a mess.
...to believe that information on Facebook or other social networks is inherently private or “yours” is just wrong.

If the "victim" didn't want to get raped, she should have dressed less provocatively, not gone out after dark, and not had those drinks.

It's the same argument, and it's just as wrongheaded and lame.

The argument fails in both cases for the same reason: It ignores the larger social context of behavior. It's ironic that the "you shouldn't have trusted social media" argument is sociopathic and antisocial. It fails to see the social nature of social media!

The complex matrix of interdependencies that make civilization (writ large) and social media (writ small) possible depend upon a notion of trust that depends upon both parties seeing beyond "I'll do whatever I can to you if I can get away with it." The relationship between a user of a social media site and its user has to be one of trust because the media site holds the power.

If FB really cannot hold up its end of the deal, then it really isn't the social media site that will fill that need. It's positively stupid of Zuckerberg to think he's going to get good data in the long run by betraying his users now. FB will either be replaced via market forces or destroy the social niche through its monopoly. Bluntly, people will choose another option if they can or sabotage their data if they can't.
He forgot the fourth curse:

"Your thirteen year-old sister will crap her pants when she's told to download a social "node" on her computer in order to tell her friends that Abercrombie is having a sale."
The reason people have donated so much is because they are upset with Facebook's new privacy policies.

How diaspora can succeed: do the same thing Facebook does, but fix the privacy.

How diaspora can fail: by making some pie in the sky social networking platform that will elude most non-technical people. Unfortunately, it sounds like it's going this direction.

I truly want to see Diaspora work. And it doesn't have to be complicated...at the moment, all they need is a decent social network (one that's built with the help of a graphic designer) and chances are you'll have at least one new user for everyone who donated.

Lastly, make it easy for people to move from Facebook to Diaspora. Ease of use will be the pass/fail here.
I think another issue is their solution to the problem is flawed. Most users don't have a desire or the ability to run their own server.

Running a basic application on a web server seems trivial to nerds, but to average users it seems impossible.
Thank you :)

1) probably more for v2
2) were trying to be really flexible
3) in v1
4) Probably v2, but if we see a huge demand for it, it will be part of an incremental release before v2
5) in v1 :-D
My own. Except that it hasn't been posted yet. :-)
Fix the English. A large fraction of the sentences are awkward and in some cases read like a bad automatic translation from some foreign language whose grammar is not very English-like.
Not everyone has to run their own node. I believe the idea is that you can have people you trust run a node for you.

But you're right, for most people this will be a big hurdle.
A fair and completely unsurprising analysis, the spotlight is definitely on too early and I will be surprised if they survive it's hard glare. Jason's thoughts on taking money are well documented but I've always disagreed with this as an over generalisation, it depends on the people receiving the money. Certainly the scale that they're aiming at will require mountains of cash and having some early on doesn't have to mean they will get carried away.

And of course there is the fact that the story is the money, not the idea, which is the worst sign of the bunch in my opinion!
Well, torrents are also rather complicated and people seem to cope with that as long as the software is usable enough. I agree that running a server that's available for 24/7 with enough bandwidth for video and images is a problem.
I expect what any reasonable person who just invested $170k in a group of four strangers with vague plans and no proof of concept would expect.
These people are actively bringing about the downfall of the education of a large number of children, you really wonder what is on their minds.

If the United States does not get its priorities straight in this respect they'll pay the price in having a badly educated batch of people 20 years down the line in positions of trust and influence.

They should make 'The daemon haunted world' a must read in school instead.
... forms pipelines under rocks?
Running a Unix machine in your pocket also seems impossible—oh wait, 100 million sold you say? You just need to unlearn what you have learned.
Fact-checking Google's new privacy principles uncovers some shocking revelations
To be fair I don't think they were out to raise so much attention, just enough money that they could actually spend there summer on this vs needing alternate employment.

They could turn money down but at this stage they already have the attention and that money could fund years of an open source project instead of having to worry about supporting themselves later to if things work out.
Incurable itch: Hacking the human brain
All these guys did was try to raise enough money to pay rent and food (and barely!). Yeah, the whole world is watching, but they weren't exactly asking for the attention. They just struck a nerve.
I think their surest way to fail is to do a very close Facebook clone. Let's not forget that those upset by Facebook's privacy are but a vocal minority. Catering for them won't be enough to get everyone to move. For most people Diaspora would be just a harder to use version of Facebook with less people on it.
How diaspora can succeed

Get everyone I know from high school and college using it and I might sign up, but I don't want to have to send invites, and I also don't want to be invited unless everyone I know is already there.

Square that circle and they win.
This is just echo chamber hacker nonsense. Nothing wrong with a little starter capital.
"How diaspora can succeed: do the same thing Facebook does, but fix the privacy."

What is the definition of success here though? A super-niche social network that privacy-geeks use? The idealism is understandable but misguided. These guys won't touch Facebook by trying to make a social network with a feature better at X - in this case privacy - thats not how giants get toppled.

Facebook won social networking, Google won search. Each will be beat by their core business being displaced by something else, not someone coming along and doing what they do incrementally better. (e.g. socially shared links driving down search traffic is Facebook indirectly biting a chunk out of Google's business)
I paid them a little just to support them. A failed attempt is better than no attempt.

That said, I tend to agree with most of what Jason said. Their pitch is much more sales than substance at this point.
Predictions for Google I/O
db2 and oracle both implement similar compression algorithms. There's nothing terribly special about google's compression algos.
I wish we would stop calling drawings of small girls with boobs "child pornography". Not you thing? Sure. "Obscene" under the Miller Test? Possibly. Graphical depiction of the abuse of actual children? Nope. Drawn by people who abuse children? Nope. Enjoyed by people who abuse children? No more so than Fox News is.

In order to approach the problem of obscenity on Wikipedia rationally, we need to call a spade a spade. This has nothing to do with child pornography; that expression is only being used because it stirs up so much automatic hate. When all we can think about is hate and protecting our children, we can't think about the actual problem.

Criticizing Jimmy Wales until he deletes some pictures from Wikipedia is not going to prevent a single child from being abused. So if we really care about child abuse, we should think about focusing our attention on something other than Wikipedia. Perhaps child abusers...

(I guess this is a little off-topic, but having done a bit of research into this, I haven't seen anything on Wikipedia that remotely resembles pornography with children. But the media, even tech-savvy sources without a religious agenda, keep using that term, and it's not helping the discussion at all.)
I agree that they're probably screwed--on top of the normal how-do-you-get-enough-people-to-switch-that-users-get-real-utility-out-of-the-social-network issue, people now expect, by virtue of the fact that they've got $170k and lots of attention, that they have something ready to compete with Facebook by the end of the summer--but I don't think they would have done any better waiting.

By doing it this way, they got to strike while the iron was hot. Right as Open Graph and the dozens of "Facebook is pure evil" posts were fresh in people's minds, they asked for money. With startups, the best time to raise money is when people badly want to give it to you, and it's no different here. If they had waited a few months, not only might they have had trouble paying their living expenses for the summer and their tuition bills in the fall, but they also, had they asked for donations after a summer of getting a crude v1 together, would have had a much harder time getting the money because Facebook privacy concerns wouldn't be as strongly in people's minds as they are now. Do you think they'd get anywhere near $170k with a v1--which would be nowhere near ready to kill Facebook--but in a few months when most people don't care anymore? In fact, it's quite possible that having a crude version 1 today would get them less money. Right now, they're selling nothing but ideas, which are easy for anti-Facebookers to latch onto. If they had a rudimentary implementation, potentially donors would be thinking about all of the ways in which the product sucks, not all of the ways in which it could be great. By having no product to criticize, they get the donors to dream.

And at least this way, they're set financially. They'll still probably fail, but probabilistically, they were going to fail either way. This way, if they do manage to ignore the hype and get a great product built, they'll definitely have money when they need it.

Another way that this does help them is something PG has pointed to--fear of failure. If they were just friends hacking this thing together in their spare time, maybe they would have made some grand statements to a few friends and family members, but there'd be a pretty low barrier to saying, "oh, building something with Facebook's capabilities is extremely hard. And even if we do a decent job, we probably won't get any users. Let's go play video games." But now, they can't give up entirely. They have to at least build something that sort of gets the job done. Thousand of people gave them money to do so, so they have a duty to do it. And millions of people read the articles about Diaspora and will read about it again if they fail. If Diaspora becomes a joke, every potential employer of theirs will think of them as "the guys who failed miserably at building Diaspora." All of a sudden, failure comes with a very high cost.
Tupalo.com in beautiful Vienna, Austria is looking for experienced (mostly backend oriented) Ruby/Rails programmers. Join our team of 7 (plus dog) in a relaxed atmosphere w/ some perks, very nice people, interesting problems: http://tupalo.com/en/press/about-tupalo/jobs/software-engine...
If someone such as you, a technical person, is unwilling to take the initiative in signing up for it, then it's really just a self-defeating prophecy, isn't it?

My point is, adopting a creed of proactivity is for the good of us all.
Yep but it's another general rule that many problems look insurmountable when there has been insufficient analysis, brainstorming, experimentation, testing, and time/energy/money spent on trying to solve that problem. I for one have gotten the impression from this BP incident, and from everything I've read, that that is what happened in this case. There was even an interview with a so-called expert who helped work on the Exxon Valdez cleanup who said he's been shocked at how little has changed since then in terms of advancement in technology, process, etc.
This post hit the nail on the head and got me thinking about the whole thing again (Diaspora, not the problem they're trying to solve. I already promised myself I wasn't going to jump into that race with however many other groups see the gold mine and are going to chase it).

I'm starting to think this was something one of them through out as an awesome idea, they said hell yeah why not... and then the money REALLY started pouring in, and then the Times showed up... and it's just snowballed.

I wonder how serious they were even planning on being before it got so big.

Mine you, I hope I'm wrong, but it's just a gut feeling I have.
Why Does Jetsetter Stand Apart from the Group Buying Crowd?
This also reminds me of a story in the StackOverflow podcast (https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W24222), where programs executed as expressive bytecode ended up outperforming machine language programs on a low-memory machine, since the more verbose machine code executable was so much larger that parts of it had to be swapped from disk.

Not really at the same level of bit-tweaking as the XOR lists, but a nice bit of counterintuitiveness still.
I would possibly be interested.
You're asking about how did they manage to build the platform, lay the pipes, drill, put everything into place, etc., right? That's a good question. It seems like they spent a lot of time and money figuring how to get the oil flowing. The question is, did they also spend enough time/money addressing how to prevent and react to failure scenarios?
The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism
$170K isn't that crazy. Since when do programmers have to do the whole starving artist routine to get respect? Living close to the edge doesn't make you work any better. If it did, you would have to question companies like Google who give their employees really good benefits.

$170k split four (or more) ways actually doesn't sound like much, especially when you consider their location (NYC), and their massive student debt. NYU isn't a cheap school.

On a personal note, I lived in Harlem on a $24k/yr grad student salary this past year. It was a reasonably comfortable living, but being poor in New York City adds a lot of stresses to life that don't exist elsewhere. Walking around piles of dog shit and trash every day takes its toll after awhile.

I was actually surprised how well I made out, considering I was making the least amount of money I have ever made since age 19 and living in the most expensive city I have ever lived in my life. That being said I could be a lot more comfortable with just a slightly higher income.
For almost anyone on the planet, except a few nerds, this hurdle is as big as: "Wft? Fuckt this."
Ant ~ Lisp, Or, A Significantly Better Explanation of Lisp
Point still stands. Most wars are related to resources, in one way or another. We tend to squander our resources.

The DoD may not have direct control but they do have some influence, even if only indirect.
Basic engineering approach is to look at the direction and the rate of change to estimate where the system is heading. The decline of privacy in FB has been well documented by EFF among others. FB has taken 900M of investor money. What is their business model to make money? I think this is what worries many people here.
I've been investigating how to program my new HTC Incredible lately, and have therefore finally had to interact nontrivially with Java.

And, since I instinctively refused to look at Eclipse, I've been learning about Ant, which turns out to be almost completely isomorphic to a not-extremely-well-thought-out set of Lisp macros to form a build system.

So, since XML syntax bugs me, I figured I'd write a thing that took a Lisp-syntax file and spit out an XML-syntax file, which led me to google for 'ant lisp,' which led me to this document.
I don't know if you've ever worked on Wikipedia, but in my experience, they get really, really pissed when you mention any kind of obfuscation of "objectionable" content. Of course, now that Godking Jimbo has gone an anti-porn crusade, the story might be different, but just look at the talk page on clitoris and you can see the rabidness with which they defend graphic depictions coming out of nowhere.

It's not that the content shouldn't be available or that a photograph of a clit isn't appropriate for the article, it's just that unsuspecting users may not want to be innocently clicking "Random Article" and end up with a picture of a vagina on their screen, you know? But the Wikipedia people don't know.
[business]

http://www.wsj.com/ (pay-site)

http://www.bloomberg.com/
In my experience 'technical' and 'early adopter' aren't always the same thing.
I was going to create a new answer, but the "meet tons of girls" thing made me think this would be a good place to reply. :)

I haven't been an employee myself, but I took a few cruises in 2007, and got to know some of the staff members. The pay is pretty basic, and the food apparently sucks, but there was no denying how much fun (and how much sex) they all seemed to be having, and seeing passports so full of stamps they had to order new pages every few months was pretty impressive as well. They hired computer-literate types for tech positions (the ships all have sat Internet) and newsletter-publication jobs - there are probably others for which I didn't speak to the employee.

If you were up for an adventure-type job, this might be something to explore.
Last I heard, there were some quirks in matching the memory model between C and Python which caused excessive paging (?) that PyPy can avoid. Can't find the reference, but maybe it's a clue to help you look.
Tiny suggestion -- maybe make the default avatar gender ambiguous? Or pull in Gravatars at least.

edit:
Minor quibble -- Sign-up now! should be without the hyphen -- sign-up is a noun, sign up is a verb.

Also -- facebook connect seems counterproductive. Does it just post the link to your facebook feed or is it only for getting a user name? It just doesn't make sense to me to link those accounts.
A truly inspirational resource of how not to design websites: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/awful-links/
While the article makes very strong points, it fails to address that Diaspora wasn't seeking attention and merely had attention thrust upon it. Since everyone else seems to be following suit, I'll throw out my two cents worth as well :)

Diaspora needs to be exactly what they said it will be. To do that they need to Ignore Everybody (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350292) and stick to their original timeline :)

Lets also not forget that they've actually got some code. That's better than some bloggers seem to realize.
You can implement it on your own and advertise it. There are several networks where you can post the information.
> buy a bigger memory chip per unit, adding one dollar to the cost -> charge $1 extra for your $300 unit

Devices containing little enough memory where techniques like this are useful rarely cost $300 per unit.
有中国的同胞吗？
新人报道，本人英语不是很好，请问有会中文的朋友吗？
Agree with your take on gore versus porn. I've looked at 4chan a few times, for example, and I didn't mind the "occasional" porn/sex/nudity pic but what was repulsive was the "ambush gore" pics you'd stumble across. That stuff can literally make you nauseous, give you nightmares, etc. I can't relate to what I see as the puritanical subset/movement in America, the one that protests pictures of naked boobies, sex talk, consenting sexual activities, pictures of reproductive organs but they don't complain about violence, gore, our military in Iraq & Afghanistan killing (even when accidentally) civilians & children, etc. The message I get from them is, "Sex bad -- but violence is good or at least we are apathetic about it if the victims are not American." Seems mentally sick to me, actually.
Looks like the pitch-bendy expressive companion to my AXiS-49's tappy-tappy buttons. It'll probably hold up better when you drop it, too! (twice now I've had sensors die by accidental damage...fortunately, they're cheap to solder replacements for)
I love this remark... Since it is so true - as far as I have observed, what gets people into philosophy is (usually) a misfortune in relationship or some other traumatic experience.

Maybe that's why more men are into philosophy. Because male angst is so different from female - an insecure male is much less likely to get a sexual partner than insecure female.
28 girlfriend pictures list of Cristiano Ronaldo
It's not "hacker nonsense". 37signals is generally fairly different in their opinions from most hackers (e.g., I strongly disagree with their opinion that Moore's law means web companies shouldn't wory about scalability: Gene Amdahl may beg to differ).

What Jason is saying is common business sense: don't sell something you haven't built. Build something as you're selling it, iterating on the product and adjusting to customer feedback. When the product gains traction, take external money (if needed and desired) to scale the business.

Facebook already had (measurable) traction _before_ they took VC funding.