skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Informational copies aren't infinite, they take server space, electricity, and maintenance.

2) and more importantly, how do you overcome the hurdle that production itself requires resource consumption? Stuff at the lower level of Maslow's hierarchy: Food, Shelter?

Producing quality content requires investment. 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?

I agree that we should all produce and share, but not all sharers produce. Just because you have the bits on your hard drive does not mean the product those bits define are yours to share. Those bits are not simply bits, they are the definition of something that creates value. It takes risk to create the order of ones and zeros and if that risk is not rewarded, then the risk/reward ratio becomes too high and there is no incentive to take the risk to create the product.

I know that many people create for the love of the game, but those creators have to make money somehow. They have to have day jobs or something that distracts them from the many hours it takes to create quality content. If they could get paid for the content after it is produced, then they could spend more time creating more quality content for us to consume.

There was a quote from Ayn Rand about money where she describes money as a battery that stores labor so we can benefit from that labor over a longer time than it takes to perform the labor. Well, those bits are just like that. Bits are a battery that stores the labor required to create the order of bits. Content production is the opposite of entropy and to defeat entropy, we must take energy from outside the system. The artist in this metaphor is the closed system -- the artist's brain is the system that creates the content. The consumer is outside that system and must put energy into it in the form of food so that artist can use that energy to create order from a disordered set of random bits.

Money is that energy required to oppose entropy. Without a transfer of energy, there is no way to create order. Without order, there is no content. It's just white noise and consumers don't want that...

If consumers don't pay for the content, where will the energy to produce it come from?
Just go back 50/100 years ago before the food industry. I mean in my previous comment I'm taking as example traditionnal dishes which where already quite complete even when people couldn't afford meat/fish at every meal.
A GPGPU Compiler for Memory Optimization and Parallelism Management
I have the bad habit of throwing myself completely into my work, and not doing any of the other things that I know would make me happy. When I inevitably get close to burning out, my wife has to remind me (often quite forcibly) that I should spend some time doing those things.

The wife in this story may have been in a similar position - completely willing to let him do those things, but having to remind him that he's been meaning to do them for a long time.
The program my dad used was developed by Evelyn Wood. It's old school, and one of the main techniques is underlining each line of text with your finger or a pen, so it doesn't really work as well for reading on a computer. However, once you train with underlining on paper, your speed without it will still be significantly faster than before. It would probably work normally on a kindle or ipad.

I dabbled with it when I was in high school and had something like a 50% speed up after a week, but I'm not a particularly disciplined student. I'm sure that if I had kept with it I'd have been able to double or triple my reading speed.
I love RT. Real solid product with great hackers behind it. And you did not mention that it is open source and takes hardly 1-2 hours if you know your way through CPAN and Apache.

The latest 3.8 is not that bad with new theme.

I can even do a free install/setup for any non-profit.

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

And don't forget the http://hiveminder.com/ from same company.

EDIT: Added links.
Check their other blog posts. They are perfectly readable. Its a joke, lighten up Francis.
Sounds similar to a recent comment that someone made on HN about how irregular rewards are more addicting than regular rewards.
"I think you have a very thin skin ..."

Pretty ironic.
> Why do you find it harder to code these days?

I don't know. Too many distractions and anxieties? There's a lot of noise in my head. Yes, it bothers me.

> Why hasn't anyone advanced the ball past delicious with bookmarking?

I don't know. I should restart Muxway (the delicious predecessory)

> Do you believe in the Ron Conway style of angel investing?

I don't know enough about Ron's model to make a judgement. All we know is that it generates more "buy" decisions. I think that having a larger portfolio is stronger. Sometimes I do participate in follow-on rounds.
My gut reaction is usually right, but I guess I don't trust it completely yet. Also, I don't need to meet in person more than once, or in some cases at all, but I usually have follow up questions that I want answered.
> "Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights."

What total, utter bollocks. How does religion provide insights into any of these things? At best the only one of these on which any scripture has to offer anything is morality, and then with little or no justification for a given "law" or command. Not mention of course that, the bible anyway, is riddled with contradiction, nevermind that much of what happens (or at least the lessons we take away) is morally dubious to say the least, if not outright bloodthirsty (that is, morally dubious by my own standards derived, hopefully, from my own objective analysis of the world).

Religion has given fuck all to the world, other than wars and hatred and much letting of blood. Science has given us everything. Did religion build your mobile phone? No. Did religion give you life-saving drugs or an empirical, educated understanding of the world? No.
Boy, we really could have used that feature when the iPhone prototype was hot news. It felt like we were rehashing the same threads over and over and over again, with very little of each discussion specific to that particular post.
+1 for RT. It's gotten a little prettier since 3.8:

http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#s...

Incredibly powerful, free, customizable. Expect to learn a little Perl if you want to integrate with external systems, as you can write Perl scripts to handle any transaction.

However, it has both the features that the GP wanted out of the box.
IIRC the kernel needs to be compiled with the magic sysreq keys enabled, so if this doesn't work for you you will likely need to rebuild your kernel. Or grow a couple extra digits.
Newly Revealed Apple Patent Hints at Deep Facebook-iPhone Integration
Not entirely. It's a scale, that goes from "expensive" to "mind boggling expensive". There's just plain expensive (The V-22 Osprey program), and then there's really expensive (The total expenditure of the Social Security program, from inception to 2050).
Knowing a bit about both you and Gabe, my impression is that your strategies differ due to your wildly different personal circumstances. There aren't 30+ deals to throw money at in Philadelphia, and if there were, you probably wouldn't want to spend your entire life doing deep diligence on every one of them.
Is this similar to what AppJet originally attempted to do? If so, have you attempted to contact them to see what types of problems they encountered before focusing on EtherPad?
Potential disruptive improvements to wound healing and treatment
Why would you need that much scotch tape? Scrap booking?
Evidence caffeine may slow Alzheimer's disease and other dementias
The fact of the matter is that your eyes look directly in front of you and your fingers are typing at 90 degrees to that.

I don't know from experience but I can only guess how uncomfortable it would be to have to lift my arm up to have manipulate on screen objects as opposed to using a mouse and/or keyboard. Maybe I'm just lazy..

I don't think the iPad will displace this traditional method of input unfortunately. The mouse and keyboard will be around for a long time to come.
Seems more likely that any discounts would go the other way. Facebook provides Zynga with a massive installed and networked user base. What does Zynga offer Facebook that couldn't be replaced?

If I were Zynga, my biggest fear would be that Facebook would decide to compete with me. So I'm guessing this agreement prevents that from happening, at least for five years, and in return Facebook gets a bigger chunk of Zynga's revenue stream.

Disclaimer: I don't pay a ton of attention to this stuff, so let me know if I'm off base.
It's awesome to see a second Anybots product - hopefully there will be a long line of them!

TLB, can you share anything you learned from the QA? Were there any unexpected use cases?
Backyard Star Wars - Jordin Kare's Laser Mosquito Barrier
To write a 300-word article about an alarm clock app?
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/robot-lawnmower-kills-dan...

Just saying, lawn mowers are not exactly the safest things in the world. I'm working in field of robotics (more outdoors than anybots) and I wouldn't really want to see that yet. Robots are great at detecting obstacles to avoid with Lidar, they are not great at handling edge case scenarios. With our bot even in "autonomous" mode somebody is watching, not sure if I want to add a spinning blade to it.

All of the military bots are remote controlled, not autonomous. I can't think of any major autonomous vehicle being used for fluid tasks (i.e., not inventory robots). So what, you are going to have someone sitting there watching 10 robots mow lawns remotely? How much cheaper can that be than just hiring people to mow lawns.

I don't think robots are very good at replacing people in low wage jobs. A lot of uniformed people think that makes a lot of sense because robots replaced factory workers, but robots did not replace factory workers because they were cheaper. Robots replaced factory workers because they were better. They were faster and more accurate. A paint job done by a robot is better than one done by a human. I worked on a project automating the assembly of a medical device - it was just too damn small to be done by a person reliably. The system cost almost a million dollars, you could have paid the girl it displaced for years and years and years before you pay it off - except that the liability of making a medical device incorrectly is astronomical.

So I do not target low wage jobs as a prime market for robots, there is no money in it. Robots are good for replacing jobs that are the dull, dangerous, dirty, impossible for humans to do, repetitious etc.
Linode Newark datacenter offline since 1.5 hours ago
Highly context-specific macro sets would be where it's most useful.
Running Vim within IRB
so Farmville and Fishville are the High Fructose Corn Syrup of the internet? :)
The last animals left will be the cockroaches, Eric Burdon, and of course, Keith Richards.
> The florist may offer only 5 flowers so she can give more to more people and still charge a reasonable rate. Or maybe she only has 5 left.

That argument holds true for a literal florist but as an analogy to filesharing it really breaks down pretty quickly, after all the garden would never empty of flowers 'taken' if they were copied. Your argument below that they are not 'free' because they take up server space and electricity and so on are also not valid because the storage, electricity and server space is not exactly provided by the original authors in the case of a pirated copy.

The whole piracy thing is a backlash against people that have been stealing from artists and consumers both.

Go read Janis Ians writing on this, or Courtney Love, or countless of other artists that have spoken up about this.

Times are changing, we'll find a new equilibrium and those that had a free ride for a long time will have to find a different racket at some point. Technically speaking they're already dead.

It will just take a while longer before we get there.

Artists that make music for the love of their work will continue to do so, and will find a way to make money. Artists that are creations of the media machine will have a problem, but then again, most of them weren't in it for the art to begin with so there is probably not much lost there.

I can't even name one band launched in the last 5 years that stood out for me that was not an indie band.
Very simple parallelization with Ruby
Instead of sketching out notes and ideas on paper, I use Adobe Ideas on the iPad

Try using Popplet as a mind mapper. This has the potential to subsume the entire functionality portrayed in the Microsoft Courier ad.
Well, it might have been a success from your point, but I liked your service a lot better on the previous level. I haven't had the need to scraping LOT's of pages yet, but one the previous plan, I felt like I could experiment with it for almost free. Now it's too expensive for that...
Honestly, what it sounds like you need is more RAM and/or an SSD. I recently upgraded to an i7 MBP just so I could get the 8GB of RAM. My last C2D MBP could only use 4GB. If it could have gone to 8GB I would have stuck with it and just added more RAM since that would have been the most cost/benefit way to improve performance with my usage (VMs for Windev, XCode for Apple dev, everything in between).

Now that I have an i7, my next big performance changing upgrade will be an SSD. I'm just waiting for the next gen or maybe the next gen after that.
>It has an excellent data mapper layer you can use with legacy databases, without having to drop down to raw SQL:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#inspe...

>These are great, but if you are building on top of a legacy DB then you won't be able to make much benefit of them, and unfortunately the Django ORM is tightly coupled with these apps.

InspectDB > migration > populate new models

My current job is converting old systems and old databases for use with Django. It's pretty easy to convert old schemas and migrate data in Django.

>Django without these apps is not IMHO that compelling, as other components - such as the template engine - are done better elsewhere.

Nobody said you have to give up those benefits.

Please don't give advice on decisions when you haven't actually dealt with what's under discussion. It doesn't sound like you've ever actually migrated anything to Django.

I'd say pylons or Django, fiddle with both, see which one catches your fancy better. Don't take the advice of others outright.

The more time I've spent with Django, the more my complaints have faded away. The more I learn about it, the more tricks and tools I find to deal with anything I encounter.

There's really no point in dismissing it just because you don't understand inspectdb and migrations.

Edit: For the actual migration process, if you're dealing with a rather large table (millions of rows) you might want to drop down to SQL for convenience/speed, but that's still relatively optional. Most of our migrations are in python + django ORM, not in SQL. (All but 2, out of ~15)
Good password? That doesn't sound very secure. Why not at least use an RSA token generator. It takes 5 lines of code.

What OS does the robot computer run?

Great product BTW ;)
I'm a little disappointed... I was looking forward to an epic showdown. Also, this means fewer opportunities for the smaller app developers.
Not exactly a job per se, but just go and spent your time in vegas. It took serious thinking to beat the house in roulette, poker, blackjack, or baccarat.
ZenDesk pricing has always confused me. They always pitched themselves as 'for the small smart guys' with all the 37s type philosophies that were popular at the time.

And I looked at the product and thought "Wow, this product is actually quite nice!".

But we had 5 staff and only one full time support person, but everyone needed an account. The starting price was a bit rich for how small we were and I met the head evangelist and told him I thought the pricing was a bit off.

I said it was too much for the small guys, and not high enough for the big businesses who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software services (Joel Spolsky has a post on this somewhere...).

His response was "Oh, you guys can have it for free for 6 months!", and I said "But then we'll be locked in, and have to pay heaps in 6 months time."

We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit) and now we have a different set up of support users, we could justify the cost of ZenDesk given the current size and set up of the company but now we're locked in to eSupport!

If they just had lower prices for the little guys they'd have got us. They're bloody mad, I tell you.
So by strategic relationship, would that be a less than 30% cut?
This assumes from the outset that you know the difference between a good future employee and a bad one. Restating the problem so that the hard issues are out of scope makes any strategy look good.

How to find the perfect car: Just pick one better than all the previous cars you've owned.

How to find the perfect date: Only ask women more attractive than all your previous girlfriends
Akshell targets more "heavy" applications than AppJet. E.g., it has a relational database and AppJet had key-value store. I contacted JGate guys. JGate is an AppJet successor http://apps.jgate.de/.
Ask HN: Still holding out for a Chrome OS based netbook?
Just wondering how many people out there are still holding out for a Chrome OS based netbook instead of buying an iPad.

After multiple visits to the Apple store I could never see myself spending any serious productive time on it and for me that's a deal breaker.
> There is still a huge benefit to the internet. ...

Well, OK, those are the parts that copyright doesn't interfere with.

> Available on the internet, doesn't mean it should be available for free. There are still costs for ...

Yes, indeed, and these are rather different, individually, systematically, commercially, from what the old laws are fitted for. What transactions there are, the sources of money, and where payment is attached, has to shift around. A copy in itself is now practically free for the individual, and that seems near optimal. Companies have to sell services that are a good deal for people -- that they cannot easily get for themselves.
I suspect people develop a tolerance and their bodies grow accustomed to the large sizes. I see a guy at my local convenience store who fills up on a 24-ounce (700ml) soda and a king-size candy bar every morning. I swear he's gotten fatter over the last few years.

Of course, I'm usually getting a similar volume of coffee so I can't say anything...though in my defense, that usually takes me until 3pm to drink (I don't mind it going cold).
If as you say "consumers really need more self control", then why does the content itself encourage the sort of apathy that you appear to be so opposed to? Look at most any torrent (latest Hollywood garbage, warez TPB top 100) and they are all encouraging apathy.

However, how a bout this -- what if torrents are encouraging efficiency. Think about this, the top (could have changed since I have been typing this) torrent on TPB is the 1080p version of avatar. Never mind all of the gag tv torrents That is 10900mbyte/(20mbit/sec/8(to mbyte))=4954.5sec (assuming.05mbit overhead 4954.5sec/60 = 82.6 min. So a bit more than an hour. What about going to purchase avatar 1080p on blu-ray? Thats waiting for the bus/paying for gas or buying it on amazon for $20 (with insane DRM restrictions)

so: waiting 80min to get a file that will play as many times as I want on whatever I want vs. waiting 48 hours for amazon to ship it out on a good day...
Much of recent FB growth, especially international, has been driven by gaming. FB has users, but Zynga has over 200M players. FB couldn't compete with Zynga in games without giving shady preferential platform features to their own games - even the other big, successful game companies aren't competing with Zynga.
Shoulda on Rails
Sounds like a regular non-conspiracy theory that is probably spot-on.
Hi dlnovell, thank's for the response! I have a book on the Evelyn Wood technique named The Evelyn Wood Seven-Day Speed Reading and Learning Program which I believe was written by someone who used to work for Evelyn Wood rather than by Evelyn herself. I haven't been able to get my hands on the original Evelyn Wood training material as of yet. It is really great to hear feedback from someone that this technique has worked for. Thanks again.
I don't know rc, or joshu well, so I could be way off base. But it seems it's doing a large # of the right deals, and all that follows from it. He seems to be in most hot deals, and so he's now developing a personal connection with all the major angels and vcs, as well as of course all the founders of the companies he has funded. So soon he'll be able to draw on this network, and that seems to be what rc is able to do.
Ironically, the top result for that query is this comment. How wonderfully recursive.
As gjm11 noted, the font software is copyrighted (as I understand it), the actual glyph design is what can't be copyrighted. If you are still distributing a portion of the copyrighted work (the font software), that would presumably be a copyright violation.

I don't know the actual extent to which copyright protection covers font software or derivatives. There is at least some related case law, but I've only skimmed it and am not an attorney.

That means you can not use the fonts for any electronic
documents whatsoever unless you convert them to bitmaps,
which means they are almost useless for PDFs.

Font licenses always specifically address PDF embedding.
I know... I was making fun of government contracting. I worked for various government contractors for around six years, so I feel like I'm morally obligated to make fun of the whole thing whenever I can.
They might be a little high on meeting room to desk ratio. We had 16 full time and a handful of contractor/intern part time when I was at Bug Labs and we had basically 2 meeting rooms (1 large, one the size of the 5 little ones here) and a workshop space, and it worked pretty well. At most 1 extra meeting room would be good. Having a little extra space for more desks when you expand is a good thing.

I'm not sure how applicable this is to 37signals, but in general I think it is a good idea to separate people who are on the phone all day (sales, customer service) from people who aren't (engineers). We worked fine with 15 people in an open plan, but as soon as we threw in 1 guy on the phone all day it made the open plan annoying at times. And for him if he is in the meeting room to be on the phone all day everyday, why isn't it just his office?

There was actually a tour of our office posted this morning:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bug-labs-office-tour-2010-5
People read too much into Tiobe. It bounces all over the place.
Have you looked at Bespin for an editor/IDE?
I tried sleep.fm once. The big problem for me is that the two voice options are either "overly dramatic American-accented movie trailer man" or "extremely bored-sounding American-accented woman", neither of whom I can deal with at six o'clock in the morning.

I'd pay good money for something a little less annoying and a little more customizable. Greet me by name, tell me what today is, what the weather is, how many new emails I have, remind me of anything I told it to remind me, and then launch into playing a song I like. It'd work better as a desktop app than a web app.
Terms of the agreement between Facebook and Zynga were not disclosed.

Any guesses as to the terms? = ) I'm thinking ~0.00% instead of 30% fees for the credits.

Edit: I meant that I suspect it's much less than 30%, not really 0.00%
JIRA is horrible. Don't use it if you can avoid it. While it kind of works once it's setup, the software really is terrible.