skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're not marketing to tech people, then you've got nothing to gain and everything to lose by talking about it on places like HN.

As usual, I'll give Patrick of Bingo Card Creator as my example. He has been completely transparent with us guys about what he's doing and how he's doing it. We have a complete blueprint for how to compete with him. None of us are going to bother, because it's a very small market opportunity and Patrick's business relies upon generating lots of data, lots of inbound links and the Googley momentum that comes with it.

Imagine if his position was slightly different. Imagine if Patrick had discovered that a very specific group of people were prepared to pay him good money for very trivial software. There are plenty of examples if you go looking for them - software that took days or hours to develop but that sells for serious money because it solves a real business problem in a low-tech industry. The value in the business is the domain knowledge needed to identify the market need.

If you're selling a web app to nerds, then stealth mode makes no sense. You need to engage with your market as quickly as possible, and chances are that someone is developing the same product anyway.

If you've spent good time and money on researching potential market opportunities, you'd be a total idiot to give away the results of that effort just because it's the done thing. I love getting to see the innards of so many businesses, but it makes me cringe at the stuff people will make public.

I don't think many of us realise that the rest of the business world considers our culture of openness to be absolutely fucking crazy. Just look at Apple - not even Jony Ive is allowed to speak freely. We see that as weird and Orwellian, but the rest of the business world calls it "not blabbing all our trade secrets to the press".
JS doesn't have direct access to browser history, it can only find if an exact URL is visited or not. Even that will soon go.
If by backend you mean the server-side, I don't think that's really the case. The server-side is usually less than 20% of the page load timeline:

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

...if you include sites with JS widgets, it's probably even less.
Is a social media bubble ready to burst?
Ask HN: new app idea
Just finished reading techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/buywithme-16-million/ when an idea popped into my head. Not sure how original it is but I figured I would throw it out here on HN and see what kind of discussion it sparked.

Recently, I have been stumbling upon more and more of these Daily Deals type websites. However, there isn't really an easy way for consumers to keep track of these websites and check their daily deals without individually bookmarking and visiting each respective site daily. Imagine an app which consolidated all of the websites and listed each sites daily deal. Discuss!
I always thought the point of being a stealth startup was that your idea was relatively easy to copy in a not-quite-as-good way.

Thus, if you were wide open some "entrepreneuring" company comes along, replicate it, and gain the first-to-market boost, while you are still trying to finish.

With a "stealth mode," a company can make a polished product and spring it on the market all at once, leaving no time for half-assed copies.

So, I'd say it upholds the thought that it's about execution, not the idea. The stealth enables you to release better execution without competitive pressure to release.
It really depends on the market and your positioning in the market. pg's startup didn't have awesome design, but it served a need that people had in a way that worked. "make something people want" doesn't have to mean "make something mass-marketable", though it frequently does.
For those of you not familiar with the type of articles printed by the Daily Mail, here's Dan and Dan's Daily Mail Song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

(Scaremongering cancer headlines near the end here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI#t=1m51s )
If you burn it and inhale the smoke, probably!
That however is very much one-way street. Porting native Itanium assembly (I know, I know..) to VAX would be substantially more challenging task.

Similarly, if you attempt to port this (admittedly neat) system to ARM using such approach there'd be a lot of bumps. Beginning with all those clever SSE2 hacks not being able to expand automatically, through deficiency of caching and optimization assumptions made for original architecture in new circumstances, to conceptual mismatch of certain parts. E.g. what if you want to handle a case when system has to boot up in ARM Thumb mode? You just can't abstract that away with assembly.
Ah that's brilliant! Love it. We could definitely track calls and maybe directions as well.
Flash said in an interview not too long ago that he practiced until his hands were bleeding. I think they do hurt themselves.
http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/

I use vim for so many other things that I find it tricky to switch unless I'm going to be writing lisp for the rest of the day.

I do miss paredit mode...
"with less hassle for less than 3%" - not really, there is always a transaction fee. So on $0.99 the cost is a much greater % than 3.
And a continuation of it here: http://dailymailoncology.tumblr.com/
Even AppleCare knows the 4.0.1 update will not fix the iphone antenna issue
On the other hand, searchyc.com seems to have a copy of everything on HN. And I believe jacquesm has siphoned off much of the database for his personal offline analysis. And, of course, Google and other engines download, cache, and index the content. If you really want it, discreet spidering seems to be the way to go.
Just like cpr commented... worked for me. (10+ years now) http://www.fortknoxmailbox.com It's well worth the investment.
It looks like pg was right 3 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
You mean like a hosted Lamson app? There could be a market if the price is right (not to high), because Lamson makes this already simple for developers.

"It still requires app developers to install, customize and maintain"
That's kind of the job of a developer, right? if he uses a "simple service" he's not developing but he's a "User" using a service and outsourcing the development to the service provider.
Ideas aren't worthless, they're worth 1/12 of a dime, because "Ideas are a dime a dozen"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_State_Quarters

"The idea of a circulating commemorative has been around the hobby for decades, but frankly, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Far more rare is the ability to move an idea to reality,"
The fact that data is publicly available from other sources does not change the fact that the CRU conspired to hide their data set.

The conspiracy is proven conclusively by the hacked emails. The email linked here is part of the conspiracy: http://junkscience.com/FOIA/mail/1107454306.txt

Seriously, what more would you want in the way of proof? Videotape of Mann/Jones writing the email? A brain scan showing they weren't joking? I'm beginning to have doubts that you are arguing in good faith.
We run a webapp that partially solves this problem: http://ActiveInterview.com

Create a custom interview questionnaire on our webapp, and include the link for your candidates to take that interview (w/ webcam through browser) as part of your posting on these various job boards. We aim to solve the problem of having to sort to 'thousands of the resumes of the worst type'. Save time, get a better understanding of your candidates (on video), and collaborate on judging candidates with you extended hiring team.

Sorry for the gratitude plug, but I hope it's a relevant and useful answer. Hit us up on twitter and we'll give you the HN discount :) @activeinterview
>> "Veruca Salt is spoiled by her parents who simply love her and so give her everything she asks for."

That's not love. That's the point Roald Dahl is making (IMHO). The only family in the story that really knows and understands what love is, is Charlies' family. He is the richest boy in the world, because he has a family that truly loves him. Even though they are financially poor.

Love isn't about giving people what they ask for, it's about giving them what is best for them in the long run.

I don't buy my kids toys every time they ask for them. Not because I don't love them, but because I don't want them to take money for granted, and I want them to have a good life balance - because I do love them.

I agree it's not all easy, but I think a lot of it does come naturally if you're in the right mindset to let it come naturally. The most important things IMHO are to be relaxed, confident, and make sure you give the baby as much time as you can etc. babies and kids pick up so much on parents that are uptight. Relaxed parents = relaxed kids.

>> "Should I encourage him to play or forget the game (that I know he enjoys and has been nice to play together). If I get him to play should I let him win?"

I'd encourage him to play again and let him win a couple. If he's a bad winner (Gloating, taunting, saying you're rubbish etc), beat him brutally the next game. I remember my oldest had a year or so when he absolutely hated losing and didn't like playing games with me unless he won. He grew out of it though.
We'd like to eventually create a few templates to choose from that have more of our look and feel. Thanks for the advice, glad to know others feel the same way!
Compare this to the number of notes a decent jazz pianist plays. Then compare the number of hours required to really master either craft.

(Jazz because jazz is generally extemporaneous, like gaming)
I talk at conferences a lot (like 20 presentation in May/June much), and I know I've done it right when I get a lot of questions.

If I don't get any questions, I go back and review my material because questions means that people's brains are working and no questions means that for some reason I switched everyone in the room off.
The probability of me being female is 100%. Not sure what to make of that!
Not a particularly well written piece; it claims that subscription-based monetization is difficult for web apps but somehow perfectly acceptable when it's for a mobile app, yet gives no evidence or reasoning for this.
I can't click through in Chrome but I can in Firefox (linux)...
No it's not. You don't know what you're talking about at all. If you just right click to move somewhere once per second that'd be 60 apm already. But that's not enough. You need to update where you're going more than once per second most of the time, especially to make sure your character doesn't attack anything and waste his attack cooldown. Then add in casting spells, using items, muling, looking at other parts of the map, extra control needed during hero fights, etc

And BTW don't think apm is the only thing you do. You need to be constantly scanning the minimap, keeping track of where enemy heros are, keeping track of what items the enemy heros have, how much mana they are at, where your team is, starting a mental timer every single time a spell is cast so you automatically know when the cooldown will end (both enemy and friendly spells), and more.
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493976
The Cost of Spam: C02 Emissions
Should infractions be seen as an opportunity for profit?
The monetary value of an idea that lives in your head is like the monetary value of your liver. It may be priceless to you, but it is worthless to everyone else until you surgically remove it (execution).
Most people are too busy to stop whatever they are doing with their life and steal your idea.

Also, if two people execute the same idea, because products change so much in implementation they will likely end with different enough products that they will not be directly competing by product launch.
Before succumbing to schadenfreude just remember that this will eventually happen to your favorite tech company in the future, be it HP, Dell, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Fog Creek, Amazon, Y Combinator, etc. Companies have ups and down.

Hopefully MS will see this as a learning experience, become a better competitor and then we as consumers will benefit.
Disney gets hammered with $269 million verdict over 'Millionaire' show
Includes are valuable for re-usability. If a website has a relatively low number of page hits/user or doesn't implement a standard across many pages, the benefits of includes are reduced.

This concept could be progressed into a proxy server!
Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly and then ported to C.

The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths.

If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html)

C is good.
Wikianswers does the same thing. Users can create their own answers site for subjects that theyre familiar with. http://answers.wikia.com/
Damn hippie talk. ;)
Or can afford to spend time learning without any financial pressure to actually turn that education into a job.
> As I understand it, Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining a balanced federal budget through budget cuts and tax increases.

You got it backwards. In fact FDR campaigned against Hoover's deficit spending.

Once in office, FDR reversed course and doubled-down on Hoover's approach.

Hoover and FDR shared a belief that excess production was the problem - that's why both pushed govt programs to restrict it. That's what put the "Great" in "Great Depression". (Previous panics didn't last nearly as long.) FDR didn't back off until the approaching WWII made it obvious that an "Arsenal of Democracy" had to actually produce massive amounts of stuff.

FWIW, Congressional Repubs at the time voted overwhelmingly for Social Security.
DaviN doesn't "school" Zacard. Even relatively low apm pros like grubby and tod played with 200+ apm, and grubby's apm has gone up recently.

I can play with 90 apm, and let me tell you I do lots of stuff late and some not at all. 90 apm is not at all competitive with pros (though you could still win sometimes if something big goes your way, e.g. unscouted expansion and some good creep steals).
Can you think of a project, a product or a company that succeeded with a somewhat negative-sounding name (even if meant somewhat ironically or as sort of a renegade mentality)? I'm drawing a blank.... It's odd that I can't think of a single one though. Even among game studios, etc.
yes! thats the one that prompted me to post but i've been noticing it the entire world cup!
Sorta. SendGrid lets you point an MX record at them and they will process incoming emails by posting them a webhook. Google App Engine does something similar... but neither option is particularly flexible or can handle emails with large attachments.

Personally, I'd pay for a service that let me point my MX records somewhere, then be able to specify if I wanted a webhook called, or to get the emails pushed to S3, or a message queue... or some combination thereof. I'd still be developing, just not worrying about the mail server interaction itself.

There are lots of "simple services" that make developers jobs easier. Why write my own file storage system when I can use Amazon or Cloud Files?
It all depends. You can get VERY frugal if you really want to.

Also, consider the possibility of spending 500$ on a plane ticket and 500$ on a cheap place somewhere sunny (with internet). This should buy you about a month or 8 weeks, depending where you go.
> There's no presented reason why Minix drivers should have fewer bugs / LoC than linux

On a monolithic kernel, each and every driver is aware (or at least can be) of each and every other driver linked into the kernel. It may create added complexities that should be absent and abstracted in microkernel-based OSs.

Microkernels are not a silver bullet and buggy drivers will be able to put the system - buses, coprocessors, whatever - in weird states that can hang or crash the machine.

I like the idea of parameter validation on every function. That and extensive unit tests built into the kernel. Tests could be invoked on boot with a specific switch and the kernel would perform a self-test (with crash detection) before bringing up your system. This could help find hardware incompatibilities and other weird defects that could affect reliability of the whole box.

I don't think we would need a Haskell-like language. You can do very Haskell-ish things in C. All it takes is lots of discipline (just as much as writing Haskell)

Maybe forcing kernel developers to learn Haskell would help ;-)
My company is currently in stealth mode. I don't think the tech or what we try to accomplish needs to be hidden but we signed some partnership deals with big old-school players and they're the ones requiring us to remain stealth until we release.
"The Condom Is In It's Essence, A Compromise: At The Moment Of Greatest..."
> As far as what the majority of historians said, if it's them or you, and you're not saying something very very persuasive, I'll tend to believe them.

Why?

The last time I looked, nothing about history was subject to "nature". If all historians agreed that Hitler had 7 arms and flew, nothing bad would happen.

If, on the other hand, engineers decided to act as if steel was less dense than air at 1 bar, things would go wrong.
Force of habit from my Twitter addiction. No, it's not an Amazon affiliate link :) I suppose the original wasn't all that long I could have used it instead http://www.amazon.ca/Boundaries-Pb-Cloud/dp/0310247454
We need more startup weekend events that will challenge everyone to work together - regardless of the world around them.
If your room is 400$/m, you can likely get by on 800$-ish a month, being very very cheap. Read some frugal blogs to learn how to eat really cheaply (the simple dollar is a good start).

Let's say you get a room at 300$, and hobbies are cheap (ie. walks, ...), and food is cheap (rice, ...), then 600$/m should be possible. If you make it a sport to be cheap, you can go lower.
why not provide the source http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-rank-and-file-felt-...

Clearly Kin was a big flop, but the "only 503" sold claim lacks credibility.

[edit] I see that I was mistaken on Gruber's source, thanks for the correction AlanH. (of course, I still think that the "503" claim doesn't have much credibility)
Tell HN: No, it really isn't turning into Reddit
It frustrates me when people question the relevance of any article that does not involve iPads, Android, Erlang, Steve Jobs' hubris, Steve Ballmer's sweaty armpits, or TechCrunch being useless.

I don't think these critics are destructive members of the community, nor is my intention to berate anyone.

However, I see a lot of people ignoring one of Hackers News' very few guidelines--"Please do not ask if HN is turning into Reddit if your account is under one year old"--to ask if HN is turning into Reddit even though their account is under one year old.

"How is this hacker news?"

They always get downvoted, the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" guideline always gets cited, and the wasted time makes me wish there were a way for the critics to just understand instead of making those comments. This is my (likely futile) attempt at promoting that understanding.

I have asked "How is this hacker news?" exactly once in the paltry 412 days that my account has been active (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175891), and I understand why people are motivated to ask. However, the average critic has their "relevance threshold" calibrated far too low. Either that, or it is measuring relevance to the wrong standard.

The part in our guidelines about "gratifying intellectual curiosity" must be taken seriously. Hacker News likes to learn about anything unintuitive that we usually take for granted, such as how drowning doesn't look like drowning (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835), or about where the five-day work week came from (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494361). These articles have nothing to do with programming, and many of them have nothing to do with running a startup, but they are appropriate for Hacker News, because they challenge our preconceptions and, above all, make us think.

I would like to see a reversal in this trend. I want someone to look at the next thread about the iPhone's antenna and ask, "How is this hacker news?"

I would rather have 10 posts that don't mention programming but make me question my assumptions about the way things work, than 5 posts that are all re-affirming my existing knowledge that PHP has crappy OO support, or that Jason Calacanis is a blowhard, or that the gorram app store is a tradeoff between consistency of experience and freedom of development.

I am not a veteran member of Hacker News, and I do not presume to know "what is best for the community." I have recorded in this post nothing more than my completely non-expert opinion about what makes Hacker News enriching in the hopes that it inspires a few would-be doomsayers to rethink their approach to what this site is for.

To everyone, whether you have been here 1 day or 1 year: The next time you are about to ask if something is appropriate, wait 10 minutes and see what kind of comments are posted. If nothing makes you stop and think for even a second, maybe then you can be more certain that your criticism is justified.
Yes please. AppEngine is just sucky, there's really very little value in its scalability for 99.99% of all apps, so the only thing it's got going for it is that it's free to start. That's not much.
Century-old Color Photography of Prokudin-gorsky
Data modeling competitions facilitate real time science
Indeed. The whole paper is pretty much devoted to scaring the shit out of readers, spouting bizarre stories devoid of any real basis of fact.

eg "Immigrants linked to terrorism cancer causing pedophiles"
If you hit your kid, your kid will try hitting other kids. And, according to statistics, they are also more likely to hit other people in their lives, including spouses and their own kids.

Your kid will almost certainly hit other kids no matter what you do. (At least if your kid is a boy, I'm not so sure about girls.) Of course you should punish it when it happens, but you shouldn't be surprised, and you certainly shouldn't despair that now your kid is going to grow up to be a wife-beater.

Which makes them less likely to respect attempts at discipline in other child care settings, such as detentions at school.

As it turns out, by the time I went to school I was well-behaved enough that I never got detention. I can't give all the credit to corporal punishment for that one... or can I?

And therefore there is no good reason to use corporal punishment.

Out of curiosity, what punishments do you give to your kids? Do you have a "reserve" punishment saved up that you've never had to use? One so powerful that the mere threat is enough to get 'em to behave?
503 Service Unavailable.

Heh.