skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I have always thought Facebook was the devil -- it uses a growth model that co-opts human behavior in a manner not in the best interests of the participants

Having said that, the media coverage is starting to get the feeling of piling on. Reporters have decided the media narrative around FB is something like "Big company goes evil. Users revolt"

I think we may have reached the point where the leaders of FB really want to do this correctly, but the momentum of the company and the overriding media narrative may continue to drive lots of stories like this.

So. I'm going to be careful to double-check the "Facebook is killing your grandma!" types of stories. The media is famous for getting tech wrong. My guess is that most all of them will have a grain of truth. And most all of them will need some technical clarification before we can make heads or tails of it.
The missing factor in all the books about software development success is "how to deal with politics".

No factor has more impact on the outcome of software projects than politics.
Get a syringe. Fill it about a quarter way with water. Turn it facing up and squirt out any air bubbles. Block the end where the needle goes with your finger. Pull the plunger back hard as if you're filling it all the way up. You'll pull a hard vacuum and you'll see the water inside bubble as it boils at room temp.
Looks like your product is very resource-intensive. I can understand why you wouldn't.

I could be entirely wrong - but it seems like the freemium model works pretty well for SaaS when the resources per account are negligible, even if some free->paid conversions take months to mature.
With a sleep phase disorder, I don't necessarily wake up in the "morning" after my primary sleep. So sometimes I'm eating dinner within 5 minutes of getting up. Usually, though, get dressed, wash/teeth, tidy up house, make baby's bottles, computer. :-)
The Unanswered Questions About Google TV
"He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain."

Why was that? Does the low pressure force oxygen out of the blood in the lungs and thereby having oxygen "free" blood arriving in the brain? If you hold your breath you can easily hold it for a minute without loosing consciousness. So the low pressure must be actively taking oxygen out of the blood, otherwise I can't see that you would loose consciousness in 15 seconds.

How long did it take for Dave Bowman to exit the pod and pressurize the airlock? :)
If you do this for every transaction, you'll have more overhead than you'd have if you had just performed distributed consensus. But in principle you're right. It makes sense to put all the primary copies that are often used together on the same node. The problem is that it's hard to decide the ideal placement strategy. VoltDB puts this responsibility into the hands of the developers.
Don't have or need an alarm because we have kids :) Somehow all family manoeuvres go smoothly (thanks to wife!) and they're all out to school/work @ 8.45am. I'm straight on computer from that point (I work from home).

Now unless I have work/deadlines I need to do then I'm often just going through my emails & schedule. I find my brain is a bit "thick" in the morning! So any good procrastinating is hopefully wasted here (on HN, Stackoverflow, online Chess etc) and strangely it does help sharpen the mind (a little!)

I then go for 30-60 minute walk and when back make and eat lunch. This happens early so from 12.30pm I'm ready for work and my brain is in far clearer state for coding.

This ritual is something I've now pretty much kept to for last 7 years.
Wow, i didn't know that the coolest toy I ever had was called an "Erector Set", now i know what i want for Christmas :D
Is there hope for music?
Music is free. Free is good. Free kills sales. Sales fuel industry. Industry funds new music. I think music is broken.

I think the fix lies in balance. U2 said it best, "I tied myself with wire, to let the horses roam free". Would you agree?

http://restoringMusic.com

best,

JedidiahRoots
This is where it's better to live with other motivated people.

When I get up there's about a 75% chance I'll be motivated to get out of bed and go downstairs and get the nuclear coffee brewing and the bacon under the grill.

The other 25% of the time someone else has (usually) been motivated instead and so I get tempted downstairs by delicious smells. Then we do 30-60 minutes on a shared project before we disperse to various workplaces.

The only trick is to make getting up more attractive than sleeping in.
Ask HN: How do you end your day?
Just saw "How do you start your day" thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366479
Personally, my day-start is almost always waking up late and self-regret about doing so for the first couple of hours. I just love it when I do wake up on time but its the last night's schedule which prevents me from doing so. (Well, a lot of it is something I cannot help: long work hours)

Please share fellow HNers, how do you end your day and how do you manage to sleep on time?
I'll second this opinion. Experience under pressure will lead to a stronger you(smarter, faster, better at making decisions, weighing the odds...).

However, make sure that the start up does have a chance of succeeding. If not, then make sure that you actually have the authority to change directions to make it so.

All in all, if the opportunity doesn't have a short term gain(via salary), then make sure that it has a long term gain. And weigh things subjectively.(yes, that's not a typo. follow your heart)

Of course, this is all just an opinion of some dude on the internet. So take it for what it's worth.
The term "suffering" in the GP's post should, IMO, be understood as "pain", which is nowadays more tuned-up to the Buddhist/Nietzschian concept of suffering. Maybe we westerners have identified too much the term "suffering" to "sadness", the latter being the worst, most passive way with which one can react to pain.
wow this looks surprisingly like hacker news, good choice, chime!
F5 Friday: Secure, Scalable and Fast VMware View Deployment
6.45: Wake up to alarm - press snooze
6.53: Wake up to alarm - press snooze
6.59: Wake up to alarm - press snooze
7.03: Get woken by the awful thought of hearing the alarm again. Check Blackberry for any interesting email/Facebook/tweets
7.05: Make my sons a warm milk and plonk them in front of morning TV for half an hour
7.10: Make cup of tea for wife and me
7.15: Iron shirt for day
7.20: Try to persuade son #1 (age 3) that Mummy will get him dressed because Daddy is running late again
7.22: Have shower while son #1 discusses with me what he will be wearing that day (football orientated)
7.30: Try to persuade son #1 (age 3) that Mummy will get him dressed because Daddy is running late again
7.32: Give in to son #1 who is too sweet and get him dressed
7.36: Get dressed at double speed because now running even more late
7.40: Raid cupboards for lunch
7.42: Kiss goodbyes
7.44: In car on way to work
8.15: Arrive at work, make toast/coffee, spend 30 mins on web to catch up with the stories of the day
Very true. I'm definitely more weary of them as they get bigger and expand into more and more markets, but I think there will always be alternatives in the future. I mean, who knew Microsoft would be second in so many areas at this point?
In the UK I have a 'unlimited' (10G cap, tethering allowed) for £6/mo with T-mobile.

It's good enough that I used it as my only Internet connection for six months. No problems with iPlayer/streaming video, the speed stays at 200kb/sec even after you go over the cap. Just don't do that too many months in a row!
Hitting people with a house brick makes them stop chasing you.
Easy there, crusader. There was no clear intent, and no selling of anything involved here. Read the story, not just the title.
7.8% is incredible. Based on my experience, I think 1-2% is benchmark.

But really it depends on how widely your service is known, and to what extent it appeals to the mass market. Make either of those variables higher, and you'll get a ton more free users, and quite a few more paying users, but your %age will be worse.

Bottom line: looking at your traffic, I'd focus on getting yourself better known and getting more users, rather than converting the people already coming to your site.
I sure hope Britain can set an example. I recently moved here, and I am surprised how many CCTVs there actually are. They are even indoors and inside buses. I hope some of these, obviously LibDem, policies can come through.

I'm not sure though, most Brits I've talked to actually want the CCTVs. What scares me most, is that the Chinese people I've talked to think that the Great Firewall is a good idea too. I don't hope Britain and it's people go the same route, and I hope I'm mistaken, when I say that oppressed people don't mind, or even like, their oppression.
Google programming Frankenstein is a Go
How much of the work is Hamilton Smith's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_O._Smith compared to Mr. Venter's? I know he's not the type, but I'm really surprised that at least his name isn't mentioned more often.
I can give a couple of answers here, so I will. All numbers are expressed as "percent of free trial accounts which turn into sales", and ignore sales of my desktop software to folks who never sign up for the online version. (That makes up about 25% of my sales these days, declining fairly rapidly as customers get more used to web apps and I keep exiling the downloads further and further into Siberia because their conversion rates suck.)

BCC converts 2.1% of trial accounts into sales, which in my business model are one-offs.

That is the consolidated conversion rate and I rag on that metric regularly, because it mixes high-volume low-conversion user acquisition strategies with low-volume high-conversion strategies.

I just got done with (finally) building first touch conversion tracking yesterday.

Consider a user who Googles for [cub scout bingo cards], clicks the organic result, signs up for my free trial, comes back a day later via [bingo card creator] and clicks the AdWords ad, then converts. Google Analytics and the vast majority of tracking systems would score this as a win for AdWords. I'd like to be able to track it back to the win for organic SEO. So I built a way to do that. But I don't have good data on that yet, aside from one conversion which was literally the above example.

However, I have other ways of torturing the data to get at its secrets. For example, my Halloween promotions (high volume, reaches way outside of my core customer segments) converted at a rate of 1.3%, just among web app users (which works out to several thousand in sales... and it would have been better without that pesky "Ah whoopsie the signup button vanished in IE" bug).

On the other hand, organic searchers coming for e.g. Spring bingo cards who sign up for the trial convert at 3.4%. Sadly for me, they number less than a tenth of the Halloween deluge.

Looking at uber-niche organic search folks as a group, my conversion rate is better than 5%.

P.S. The "canonical" post on this subject, and the source of a lot of myths we have to kill in our industry, is the "SXSW Web App autopsy" from a few years back, featuring our friends at Wufoo among others. Google it, you'll find it easily.
OK, the few posts I've found:

http://news.buzzgain.com/the-metrics-we-track-and-report-exa...

http://sixteenventures.com/blog/the-reality-of-freemium-in-s...

Mite is SaaS, no free accounts at all: http://blog.yo.lk/en/2010/03/08/facts-and-figures-the-first-...
Do iPhone Users Face a Draconian Future?
To be honest CCTV doesn't really worry us (well, not me at least). Not on buses (for example) which are after all private endeavours!

Street CCTV may be another issue. I mean it doesn't concern me too much (we have a few CCTV cameras on the main street in my town, have done for years, and they have been useful) so long as it doesn't get expanded...

But I'm tentatively hopeful. The ID cards were all but scrapped anyway (we fought very long over than one and luckily the prev government lost) but it is good to see that confirmed. Nick Clegg made a big point the other day of talking about scrapping the "Nanny State". If he really does then that will be extremely popular - it's been the most aggravating thing of the last few years.

They also talked about increasing the number of coppers on the beat; I've said for a long time that should be a #1 policy for any government so it is good to see it talked about properly.

(Incidentally the Lib Dems have really laid into the Digital Economy bill recently - they might win too!)
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 free now
Degree or not, no one will have heard of "pointcare's" conjecture. However, I do not have a college degree, but I am familiar with the Poincaré conjecture.

;)
I don't think the parent meant it that way. I guess what he really meant was that something or the other will always be wrong. Ignore the small things and focus on fixing the larger problems.
You will have tough competition from i.e. Xobni. They are free to use, well integrated with Outlook and let you display LinkedIn info about every email address that you are dealing with. http://www.xobni.com/social-outlook
The problem in Britain seems to be that largely people don't fear their government, they fear other people. Whether this is due to the class divisions in British society or a culture of hatred and fear promoted by the two most widely circulated newspapers in the country, I don't know. But I do agree that most people see the filming of public spaces as a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Did anyone actually read the articles?

"Mr Assange, 37, told The Age newspaper that half an hour after his passport was returned to him [...]"

Of course, the passport being returned did not make the headline; not sensational enough.
Exactly, do you have any idea how bad phone software is? Have you ever tried to use Nokia's MusicXpress? God what a nightmare. Most phone related software is diabolically horrible. The sheer torture I had to go through to get playlists synced to my phone is unreal.

The reason the iPhone (and more recently Android based systems) are doing well is the great software, which has been lacking since phones started doing more than calls & SMS.

For the good of humanity this part of phone development must be taken from the phone makers hands. The next greatest thing to come out after sliced bread will be an Android -Lite for use in normal, low end phones, I look forward to this day with bated breath(Google Android developers, if your reading).
Ask HN: Which vitamin supplements do you take?
I would be interested in knowing what vitamin supplements you all take and why (Include the brand name).

I currently take:
- Centrum multivitamin
- Now foods vitamin D3 (2000IU)

I also just bought the Now foods omega 3 supplement. It smells rancid. I'm probably going to throw it away. Does anyone know of a good, purified brand? (Preferrably something that uses d-gamma and d-delta forms of vitamin E to prevent oxidation/rancidity)
For reference, Spotify has approx. 3.5% paying users:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/spotify-hits-250k-pai...

Might be that changes now when they modified their portfolio.
One of the bigger drawbacks to the whole open source movement was the inroads that it made on -surprise- people like me that made a good living selling software they wrote.

For every package on the windows platform there were suddenly 3 or more competitors available, 90% feature complete in a race to the bottom for marketshare, which they all got and then suddenly figured out they had to make money somehow.

And then they imploded, but the damage to the market was done, everybody expected 'free'.

Apple has bucked that trend to some extent, but I don't think this was a reversible process, all software, including operating systems and so on, with the exception of niche code and in-house software for deployment in a company, some firmware or as a back-end for a service will be free. And even some of the latter will be free (see 'reddit').

So, I changed tack, way ahead of the pack I aimed at a service driven income stream rather than selling bits of software.

My then partner Michael saw it coming with great clarity and together with another guy called Paul (who was founder of one of the first ISPs in NL) they changed my future in a fairly dramatic way.

So if you haven't seen the elephant yet, maybe you need a higher ladder, but he's coming for sure. None of the 'old' ways of making money can be taken for granted. Read 'being digital' by Nicholas Negroponte if this hasn't convinced you.

It's old (by internet standards) but it is in many ways a visionary book. Far more so than Gates' 'the road ahead'.
Funny you should ask about this when me and 4 others are having a hackathon this weekend.

The plan for us so far is to use fri/sat/sun and spend aprox.. 5/10-15/5 for a total of about 20 hours * 5 = 100.
Normally you'd probably opt for longer stretches but I want to ensure we aren't tired when monday comes.

Pair programming: Yes, if it feels right - but I'd rather call it group programming, utilizing everyone.
Sit everyone in the same room, face to face and side by side. A ring is perfect.
Have a whiteboard and papers in the room.

-- Time plan
Friday:
Set up initial plan - what to build
Describe initial functionality and spend a bit of time to make a few use cases
Discuss and lay out impediments
Create something like tasks for what needs to be done
Hack, hack, hack till a first iteration
Replan after first iteration that solves something - change the path?

Saturday will be all about iterating.
If someone feels to brainstorm something, do this right away unless someone is in the zone.
Try to include every one in every discussion and keep it under 10 minutes.
Decide and try fast.
By the end of saturday we should have something working thats about where we want to be.

Sunday will hopefully be for adding sugar coating and the features we thought of during our sleep.
Maybe refactor.
Final touches.
At the end do a summary, get input on how we felt the hackathon went, what have we learned etc.
Launch it and blog it.
-- Time splitting
We have a dedicated designer, some dedicated backend devs and some frontend so not everyone knows the same stuff - task delegation becomes logical and we dont have to split that much between these tasks.

Focus on function.
Design on a non completed function is worthless.
A completed function without a design is not (default browser styling)
Focus on value.

Regarding breaks I think I will try to take break whenever I'm NOT in the zone. For a hackathon your basically not producing unless your in the zone, you wanna be in the zone every minute you sit in front of the monitor.
The girlfriend is actually far more motivated than me, she's just learned not to wake me and I've learned how to sleep through the smell of oatmeal coming from the kitchen.
My photostre.am doesn't charge customers yet, but of the 160 users it currently has, some 55% already pay for a Pro Account at Flickr. Not bad, eh?

Signup conversions are equally good but that's because they mostly come via the Flickr App Garden.
On an unrelated note, I hate it that reddit (where content is not localized) defaults the interface language to that of my OS (why would I need that?), while most websites of multinational corporations (where all content is localized and country-specific) make me manually select my country. Country != desired language, but both can be easily determined with comparable precision (although by different means).</rant>
That song's from a Japanese Ennio Morricone collection, and the song appears to be an italian cover of Solitary Man by Neil Diamond, retitled "Se perdo anche te":

Japanese version:

http://musicbrainz.org/show/release/?releaseid=636641

Version with titles translated back to original language:

http://musicbrainz.org/show/release/?releaseid=620439

I think the service to match the songs to play clips has gotten confused by some part of this, either the Japanese text or the Musicbrainz convention of putting the composer (in this case Neil Diamond) as the main "artist" in orchestral works which makes sense for an Ennio Morricone collection, but is somewhat surprising when the "composer" is a pop star.

Some details on the cover from Wikipedia:

In 1966, famous Italian singer Gianni Morandi recorded a cover version titled "Se perdo anche te " ("If I lose you too"). The author of the Italian lyrics was Franco Migliacci, who was Morandi's producer at that time, and eight years before had written the lyrics to Domenico Modugno's international hit "Nel blu, dipinto di blu (Volare)". This song was arranged by Ennio Morricone, who at that time conducted many tunes published by the Italian RCA Victor, and was the B-Side of "C'era un ragazzo che come me amava i Beatles e i Rolling Stones " ("There was a boy who, like me, loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones"), a song against the Vietnam war.
Thanks! Love the detail. I'll respond in time... our backend system doesn't (yet) help track where customers come from, when they upgrade from Free to Paid, and actually, not even how many upgrade as opposed to signing up as paid initially. Which I know is dumb. :)

In terms of where traffic comes from, though, we also see a huge difference. Search traffic has the second highest signup conversion rate of nearly 4.5%. We rank very well for several keywords, and quite a few people seem to search for us by name, too. Indicating more WoM.

The traffic source with highest conversion rate (5.8%) is one very targeted micro-banner on a specific blog I bought with BuySellAds, but it's not free and it's not as much traffic as search :)

By the way… I think I maybe was unclear. My 7.8% is talking about the percentage of the body of accounts. E.g., of all the accounts we have right now, how many are paying?

EDIT: Clarity.
it's back
% host discokenny.com
discokenny.com	A	38.106.76.52
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364912

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1340492

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342038
How long did it take for Dave Bowman to exit the pod and pressurize the airlock? :)

(SPOILER if you haven't seen 2001: A Space Odyssey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e92vSua8XJY

In this clip, he ejects at about 0:20 and hits the lever around 0:27. You can see him go limp just after 0:34, before the chamber has finished pressurizing. 14 seconds.

So regardless of why the real-life (1965) test subject blacked out after 14 seconds, it appears that the makers of the (1968) film had done their homework!
Web sites need to just look at what your browser says is the prefered language. Google still shows me german because I'm in a german speaking country even though my settings are english. Drives me mad.
Yoga Cushions - Making the Art of Yoga Easier and More Comfortable
Your definitions and my definitions are the same, I think.

Both turn out to be P / (F + P), for P = "accounts currently paying" and F = "accounts currently free".

P.S. You use Rails, right? If you're interested I'll blog on the code for this -- it is under 25 lines for the stupidest thing that will possibly work.
Great! Someone else has done something similar! That means there's a market.
A lot of users run on misconfigured operating systems. I expect that Google has done some homework on whether language-by-GeoIP makes sense for the general case. They probably don't do it just to annoy you.
Will trade secrets or trademarks usurp software patents?
I don't mean to paint a doomsday scenario, I know that if google turns evil we'll find a way to break out of it.

It's just that in my opinion MS' lock in set the computer industry back at least 10 years. I think we could have a lot more advanced technology today if we hadn't been locked into an inferior platform for so long (today it's not as inferior, but imo everything pre-win2000 had superior alternatives).

I would hate to suffer another set back by too many people betting on the same horse again.

EDIT: Clarification