skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pr0n.ly uses /stats after the URL to show stats. But unfortunately it's being shut down for being un-Islamic.
Mark Zuckerberg: answering Facebook privacy concerns with new settings
If it's "one if the hardest things" he ever did, I'm guessing that option occurred to him.
I read the other day (HBR?) that 85% of venture-backed startups are dead within 3 years. Say what you will about VC firms, but the companies they fund tend to be a notch above the mean. And they are certainly the types who get (and maybe even ask for) advice. Creating a business (the kind that supports 2+ founders) is HARD.

Thinking your chances are better because you're (by your OWN assessment) smarter, more open to advice, and more hard working than the mean is a dangerous attitude. If you walk into a room and say, "raise your hand if you think you're an above-average driver", pretty much every hand goes up. 50% of them are wrong.

Normally I love Gabriel's posts, but I think this one smacks of Mr. Rogers ("you're special because of who you are").
Fun practical joke, here's another.

http://steveblank.com/2009/05/13/gravity-will-be-turned-off/
<contributor-bias>

I seriously think Clojure is too much to take in at the first introduction. It's really hard to get your brain around everything done right, when compared to traditional programming. You need to use it for a while to really get why it's approach to state (not concurrency) is awesome.

</contributor-bias>
I disagree. Data lock-in is flat-out evil. Proprietary formats and stores are fine, but everything needs to let data back out in open formats.

Every app should have some sort of "I'd like to take my ball and go home" bulk-export.

Because no matter what you tell users up front, they won't read it. Most people simply assume reasonableness.

Pretending otherwise is just seeking to take advantage of human nature.
There is if you're interested in the future development of the django framework. I am, and I found it interesting. Alex is one of the core leads of the django project and does a lot of good work with django and python.

There's obviously isn't high interest for most people here so they're not upvoting or commenting. If you're not interested skip over the slides.
That wouldn't help the boot times or cold app starts.
The editor states

"Most small companies start by copying a EULA from a similar company, possibly even a competitor. That's a copyright violation, but perhaps you can use it as a guide with a lawyer of your own."

I'm naive in legal matters, so I cannot understand how a relatively entry level EULA can be copyright. Aren't these things pretty similar?
One reason that Apple is able to so much with such a small R&D investment is that Apple doesn't develop much technology.

As an example on the other end of the spectrum, Intel develops a LOT of technology -- though a lot of that R&D, IIRC around half, is dedicated to the fabrication side of things.

The difference is that companies like Microsoft and Intel create technology, and companies like Apple put it to use and convince people to buy it.

Microsoft is funny about technology R&D though. Not in a good way. It's probably related to having someone with the imagination of a bacterium running the show while the person responsible for the company's rise to dominance is off trying to save the world or something. :)
So you think someone entering a startup blind (no advice, no methodology on customer development/hiring/etc.) has an equal failure rate to someone who's spent years taking in good advice?

The other subgroups were capital intensive vs not and low marginal cost vs high. I think all three would decrease your chances of failure.
1) Most things on the internet don't last forever.

2) My idea of internet is that when I make impact I know about and can use that to make better impact. You are entitled to have your own idea of internet, but not to its superiority.

3) If you don't want me to know that you click on a link I sent you, don't click on it.
My friends don't use e-mail socially.
I agree. It's a good idea to add .io to the logo.

There is a 30-day free trial for paid plans (unlimited users and projects). Do you need a longer trial period?

As for per user pricing, a lot of vendors charge a much higher per user fee (four or five times as much), and they greatly lower their pricing as the number of users increase. I think charging a flat low fee is better because you pay a lot less when you are first starting out. There is also an annual payment option, which gives you two months free.
The problem with that list is that it is going to be different for each person who got a CS degree.
if you're a Javascript hacker out there and are interested in helping out: the scanner is having intermittent Firefox issues (http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/issues/issue/9)
Your comment made me think an obvious thought that has not occurred to me before: If we have open source code for systems as complex as the Linux kernel, why can't we have open source legal documents. You still would need to consult with a lawyer to go over it (similar to how you need a coder to add features to a source-code project), but the savings could be enormous.

Any lawyers among us care to elaborate?
Miro is really nice. The issue is mostly just that, as data policy, we require ourselves to host/control/backup our data. Miro seems to be about a front-end for YouTube where users can comment and see the videos in your site. And that's wonderful for a lot of people, but it isn't what we're looking for since our policy is that we need to host the video ourselves.

I don't necessarily agree with the policy, but I understand it: other sites could take a video down that we don't want to lose or we don't have control over things like watermarks or whatnot or YouTube could (conceivably) break Miro in the future. That last one might not even be on purpose - if Miro is relying on YouTube acting a certain way and they change it, it could leave us scrambling a tad to get it working again.
$10 was an example price, but for most small sites you can't expect to make hundreds (or thousands) a month. I consider 'small' less than 1k uniques per day.

How you display the ads largely depends on your site and traffic. If you're only receiving a couple hundred pageviews each day, you'd want to have that ad showing as much as possible (to get a better price from the advertiser).

For a lot of these ads, you'd have multiple placements. ie. 4 ad spots for 125x125 pixel banners. On a site with a couple hundred pageviews it's realistic to assume you could get $15 for each of those ads (depending on the topic).

You're delusional if you think Adsense or other advertising networks will make you more than $15/mo. You're lucky if you get a $1 CPM (cost per 1k views) with most networks, assuming 6,000 views/month on a small site (~200/day * 30) - you can do the math there.

Again, this varies depending on the content. I worked for a small content network and we could charge $500/mo. for a banner spot that received about 20,000 views per month. But we only made $100-200 max with Adsense (across the whole site - roughly 45,000 impressions a month).
> What exactly is so wrong about profiting off intellectual property? Software, music, movies?

Because the current system works by an artificial monopoly. Monopolies harm the public. The compensation that copyright is supposed to provide -- incentivising production -- is not clearly supported by evidence. And the restriction inherent in monopolised distribution is fundamentally opposed to the new benefits that the internet offers -- if we want one, the other must be reduced -- and we want the internet.

The problem is not people profiting from creating, it is that the system has been rigged by current encumbents to rip-off and obstruct the public.
It did occur to me, but given how badly they treated me through the entire process I decided that $300k wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with them.
"Microsoft Word startup went from about 12 seconds to less than 3."

What is it about OSX that makes applications to launch so slowly? Microsoft Word always starts in under 5 seconds on Windows, almost regardless of the hardware, and has been for as long as I can remember. Sluggish application launch was #1 impression after getting an MBP - nothing on it starts like Notepad/Wordpad/Mspaint on Pentium III winbox circa 99.

My gut feeling is that it's dynamic linking. How wrong am I?
The vast majority of URL shorteners return the full URL with a HEAD request. Not practical for everyone, but the best way to do it if writing a service that might consume shortened URLs.
Funding Support for Women
Show HN: Funny Tweet Ranking Site, laughlitm.us 
About 6 months ago I made a joke twitter feed (@sustainabletips) that gained a small amount of popularity. It's since run its course, but it really opened me to the idea of twitter as a comedy medium.

With the success of @shitmydadsays and others, I set out to make a kind of 'funny or die' for tweets. Laughlitm.us is the result. I'd really like to get some feedback from HN, especially in regards to the voting method and the nomination page.
70 at the moment.
This seems a bit like electric lights and horn on my horse-drawn buggy. Nice, but making my buggy like an actual automobile is not the answer. I don't see much of a future for these, even in large corporate applications. They can simply mix HDDs with SSDs more efficiently.
Buy.com Makes Its Biggest Sale Yet: Itself
EDIT: "Each tile is 256 pixels square and the number of tiles across at each zoom level is given by this formula: Math.pow(2, zoom)"; ops I missed the word "across" :)

How did you come up with that number? The sum loop that follows reports 524287 tiles total.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
int main(void)
{
int i;
double tot = 0;
for(i = 0; i <= 18; ++i)
tot += exp2(i);
printf("tot %f\n", tot);
return 0;
}
I fully agree - the point of using GC is that it cheats!
Here's a diff between the old and new versions:

http://drp.ly/13YD4B
I may be missing the point here, but I don't think that this announcement actually says much about what we as individual publishers can expect as rev share.

What I understand from the article is that 68% of the aggregated revenue generated by all the publishers is payed back by Google to the publishers, probably not evenly.

If the figures given are simple averages (TOTAL_AD_REVENUE / TOTAL_NUMBER_OF_PUBLISHERS) then it is not an useful figure for individual publishers. For example, it may mean that a handful of huge publishers are getting a revenue share of 90% but the vast majority of medium and small publishers are getting 20%. You would still not know how much is the typical publisher getting.

Until I see more information about how the 68% and the 51% figures were calculated and about whether all publishers get the same or similar rates, then I will still have no idea what the effective rev share for a typical small publisher (less than 1,000,000 pageviews/month) is.
I like using vim in emacs, but it makes it too easy for me to fall back to my emacs muscle memory.
> Legendary computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said:
> "Computer Science is no more about computers than
> astronomy is about telescopes." But if programming
> is not about the computers, what IS it about?

Well there is an instant misrepresentation. Dijkstra referred to "Computer Science" and this is instantly morphed into "programming." Clear and distinct separations, or at least definitions, of these is the first step to understanding what Dijkstra was talking about.
FTA, those are the two things that don't seem to be improved.

"Application results were much more impressive. Because the drive learns, the first time you bring up an app it happens at disk speed. But the 2nd time!"

"Boot performance sucked compared to the old drive’s ~45 second boot"

Boot performance was improved by doing a clean install, however, the best the reviewer got was close to the old HDD speeds (45 seconds) not a Macbook Air's boot times with SDD (15-20 seconds).

If you watch the videos, the speedups being boasted on the review involve opening the application, closing it, and opening it again, without running anything else.
The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued investment in AdSense

Where did Google's honesty go?
Google is wildly profitable. This post tries to convince you that they charge you for their costs only. That's just plain misleading.
My issue is there is no content. The slides basically state Django backend is tied to SQL which is extremely obvious to anyone that's read the documentation. (My opinion)

What would be far more interesting would be some discussion of the approach to handling NoSQL in Django. (Slides are really lame for conveying information by themselves)
all the data on this is fuzzy, and may always be fuzzy. what type of startup it is is important, as well as the quality of the founders, none of which is easily quantifiable. I think the reality is that you make your own odds. a brilliant/determined/flexible founder can and will make something work.

I've always felt that what kills a startup are commitment/flexibility issues based on factors outside of the business itself - your spouse doesn't support you, you're only willing to live on peanuts for so long, children on the way, etc.

but I don't look at startup success as determined by Idea X, sink or swim. If you stay in the game long enough, and find a way to feed yourself in the meantime, you'll find a way.

also, as in life, you alone determine what is and isn't success. for many people, a lifestyle business that just allows you to work on your own terms (not too far past ramen profitability) is enough.
HouseOfThe   IPhone
Why Apps are the Future of Mobile Health
I don't think microsoft mac apps are a fair test of how fast mac apps start. native apps are better, in general. and for Word in particular, I bet microsoft optimized the hell out of the startup on windows.
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution
Doesn't MS Office offload some of that load time to startup by running a helper app on login that preloads some stuff? So your tradeoff is boot time vs app launch time.
protip: adding "awesome" in all caps will turn people away from your submission.
Note that there is a good open source implementation of the .NET framework, Mono, so you can develop in C# and F# and target Linux, MacOS and other platforms.

Is Mono actually usable with F#? The last time I checked (2 months ago) the F# plugin for MonoDevelop didn't work and the questions on how to getting it to work (by various people) went unanswered by the developer.

The runtime performance of F# code was shaky at best, the REPL had (on OS X at least) startup times to make it practically useless and without TCO the usefulness of F# really took a hit.

Not wanting to bash on Mono or F# (which is my favorite language), but writing production software with this combination is currently not something I would recommend.
Somebody I know of -- and memory escapes whether I have permission to mention the specifics, so I won't -- runs a rather successful software business based on solving one "technically undemanding but financially pressing" problem for one of these industries.
What Can The Boy Scouts Teach You About Being an Entrepreneur?
What do people think of Seagate's reliability, these days? I've switched to Western Digital for this reason, but the performance gains of these Seagate models are tempting.

Of course, I'm a bit gun-shy about being an early adopter of a new product line.

BTW, Amazon shows them available for pre-order. 500 GB is listed for US$138.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
Eh, many links to say, google maps are HUGE without, and get mangled by comment engines.
Couldn't these huge speed ups be do to caching or space in inactive memory?

Yes. The videos just show an embarrassing lack of understanding of what he's doing there. During the second launch most relevant blocks are in RAM, i.e. the disk is hardly touched at all.
Well the fact you've posted it here on HN means they're likely to read these anyway so now you've told them...

Secondly you might as well them - you can either work remotely or they'll have to agree to sponsor a visa for you. There's not any way around it, so why waste their time or your time
Involving Stakeholders in User Testing
Just tell them you don't reside in the U.S. and have them worry about it (ie., by consulting an immigration lawyer, etc).
DST: Facebook Is Going To Be The Social Graph That Unifies All Civilization
I am well aware of that :) Thanks for the advice!
Completely off-topic, but using "tilt-shift" photography on a code snippet is a little unsettling to me. I'm not sure why.
More accurately: sharecropping.
That's confusing weak/strong with static/dynamic typing, though. (A common error.)

"What To Know Before Debating Type Systems" (http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html) is a pretty good introduction to types.

Also, while I'm only partway through Benjamin Pierce's _Types and Programming Languages_, it's been quite good so far.
The Path To Immortality
New BN eReader: iPad's first real competition?
Selling to large companies can encompass all sorts of possible licensing arrangements, including patent licensing deals, source-code OEM deals, object-code OEM deals, site licenses, white-label deals, and license/development deals, among others.

Because the deals can vary so widely, the legal agreements that are required will vary as well, making it impossible to rely on any one standard form (of course, a "EULA" in the narrow sense of that term, i.e., the canned form signed by end users of licensed software, is highly standardized but that is not what is involved here).

The kinds of issues that can arise under these variations really go over the board, from who owns rights in various forms of development work that might be done with the licensed technology, to the scope, duration, and limitations of the licenses themselves (source, object, field, site, etc., exclusive, non-exclusive, or some hybrid), to the nature of the distribution arrangements permitted for the licensed technology (stand-alone product versus bundling, channel limitations, etc.) to the nature of the legalese that shifts risks one way or the other in the arrangement (IP infringement warranties, product warranties, liability caps, indemnity provisions).

Thus, from a legal standpoint, this is a complex area that does not easily lend itself to standardized forms.

As a starting point, however, you will be able to find excellent forms for these sorts of agreements by searching the EDGAR filings at sec.gov.
> Why does taste have to cost hundreds and thousands of dollars?

Because part of the point of "taste" is to exclude others, or, if you prefer, to distinguish oneself (which is the same as excluding others). Money helps reduce the uncommitted.
50% would be wrong if you said above-median driver.
Unfortunately, nagging about shorteners seems to work on average surfers, posters about as well as a teetotaler's sermon to an alcoholic.

And thus uber-shortening will probably continue until someone develops alternative processes that are ~sexier~
Across my sites my revenue looks like this:

Amazon Associates: 60%

Adsense: 25%

eBay Partner Network: 10%

Other affiliate networks(CJ, LinkShare, miscellaneous): 5%
History of Games, 3100BC to 2010AD
A graphic history tracing games from their origins in ancient Egypt to the modern phenomena known as social games.
Ah. Looks like it's a pretty clueless review then. (and Seagate need to work on their algorithm) Sorry, hadn't read the whole thing when I posted.
Has anyone used Amazon Payments? I'd love to see a few sites using it for subscriptions.
TechCrunch Disrupt Live
What is a MS in Computer Science worth?
That does seem to be the new business plan: 1) develop service, 2) let others figure out a monetization strategy 3) do it yourself and change your TOS 4) repeat from step 2
It has been my experience that it is difficult to get a bug passed the
Hindley-Milner type system.

Amusingly, this typo (passed instead of past) is an example of the challenge facing language and tool developers. We can make a checking system isomorphic to a spell-checking system, but then we need a grammar-checking system to ensure that even if a word is correctly spelled, it forms a legal sentence. Once we have that, we need some sort of logic-checking system to make sure that a word with the correct spelling and the correct grammar is meaningful in the program. And so forth.

It's type-checking all the way up.
Twitter’s Most Influential Users (Infographic)
I also wish Twitter would allow 1 link per tweet as part of the tweet's general metadata and not count it in the characters restriction.

Shortened links are annoying and misleading, I've been wasting too much time clicking links I've seen already and links to sites I just don't like.
Starting with version 2.7.2, Scala added an experimental feature (which will no longer be experimental as of 2.8.0) called Manifests that allow you to selectively reify erased types. See this blog post for more: http://www.scala-blogs.org/2008/10/manifests-reified-types.h...

This, combined with specialization (compiling primitive-specialized versions of code with generic types to improve performance of, for example, using function types on primitive collections) will make it easier to write performant, numeric code in Scala than in any other JVM language (up to the limits of the JVM, of course).

The NLP communities at Stanford and Berkeley, which do a fair amount of machine learning, have a long history of working in Java (http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/, http://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/Main.html#Software) and have recently started using Scala as well (http://www.scalanlp.org/).

Scala's interface with Java collections IS a bit clunky. Thankfully, this is a library issue, not a language issue, and can be solved with better libraries. See http://github.com/jorgeortiz85/scala-javautils (for Scala 2.7.x) and http://github.com/scalaj/scalaj-collection (for Scala 2.8.x).
These benchmarks are pretty useless. Sounds like a potentially good idea, but I'll be impressed when I see real benchmarks demonstrating worthwhile improvements.

He starts off by saying that boot times have gotten significantly worse. Reinstalling the OS (not something I want to do) gets startup time back to the same as with a standard HDD. So far so bad.

Secondly, application tests are completely unscientific and show a lack of understanding of how the OS works. After you open an application the OS caches it so that it opens more quickly next time. The startup improvements he's seeing can be entirely attributed to this: Consider that on my MBP with a 5400rpm HDD Pages took ~7 seconds to start the first time and ~1.5 the second time (using the same technique as the videos).

This is a better benchmark of the same drive, but I still think the conclusion is too favorable without more thorough real-world tests: http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_...

Edit: Spelling and slightly overzealous language.
And the Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/) has again been updated:

s/2\.3\.6/2\.3\.7/

I hope this doesn't start happening every day. :-)
The reason some members of the public are so ready to distrust them is because many members of the public are conspiracy-theorizing morons. They can clean up billing practices as much as they want, it won't do anything to convince the tin foil hat crowd who will distrust them solely on the basis of the doctors' rightful authority.

In the case of vaccines you'd have to believe that nearly the entire medical profession was willing to kill children just to keep profits on one particular vaccine, instead of just the one ethically challenged doctor: Andrew Wakefield.
Memorable Utility. Evaluating Convenience through Quick-MI.
I think this book is somewhat related to this article:

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Hardcover)

http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accele...