skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The stations you watch have ads because that's how they make money. The cable or satellite provider you pay charges you monthly because, in addition to other fees and services, that's how they make money. I have a feeling that Hulu's business model doesn't quite work like that.
I think one problem they had early on is that technology is not the answer to an editorial and writing problem.

Many people on the newslabs lists questioned their experience in journalistic and publishing oriented endeavours - the founders' answers to quality and editorial concerns weren't very convincing - and always came back to technology. Ideas like building mass-comment moderation systems, crowdsourced editing, etc - don't work if the people moderating don't have literary taste.

But it was a good try - and I hope that other people tackling this problem space would think about some of the questions raised by the newslabs contributors.
Show HN: mail2brain, email attachment timesaver
People pay close to a hundred dollars a month for similar and non a-la-carte amounts of content that has about twice as many adds. Its called cable. Does $10 a month really seem like that much money to you for something like this? I don't watch TV so i am interested, however I just get frustrated with the trend of people refusing pay for anything tech related such as apps or even services like Pandora. Seriously, my non tech friends refuse to drop a couple of dollars on iPhone apps that they will use all of the time yet they don't hesitate to buy soft drinks when they eat out or add bacon to their burgers for the same price...

Sorry, I don't mean to single you out. This is definitely more generally directed.
Goodbye Tokyo Cabinet, hello PostgreSQL
Sorry, the compiler/interpreter division is nice but it's just one design pattern.

Works good till you reach a problem domain it's not appropriate for.

Models are great till you take them for reality.
I feel uncertain about how much wisdom there is in a post about "Microshit".
I don't think your co-workers realize just how fast they're going to run out of things to watch. The thinking is likely, "Whole seasons will be like 5x better than just 5 trailing episodes!" But the thing is, you were already getting the whole season before, just not all at once. It's the exact same amount of content, not 5x more. The only difference now is that you can burn through it all as fast as you want. Unless Hulu has multiple all-time favorite shows of yours with huge replay value, this won't be worth it.
While VoltDB's persistence story is perhaps bleeding edge (active replication with rolling snapshots as a double backup), MySQL MEMORY storage has none.
Wow. Maybe it's because I've never been either of those guys, but I have trouble rustling up as much compassion as you seem to.

One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon? Who does that?

And, after just a couple months, the passion dies? What kind of commitment does that show?

I agree with your take-away, though. Don't try to get hype, until you actually have something solid to hype.
I tried few free shows on iPhone 4 over 3G. Video quality is spectacular. I am not going to buy it because I am already paying for $120/month for cable and dvr.
This is exactly how I feel about it. It is very close to the a-la-carte cable that I want. Who wants to be forced to watch things at certain times?
Tangentially related: Despite the 2009 season being a bit of a rough one (what with a new ball park and all), I don't know if calling the New York Yankees of any team in the game of baseball 'scrappy underdogs' is accurate. It's not at all the Yankees (or any sports team, for that matter) have started their season off uncharacteristically poor, and ended up winning it all.

End completely unrelated tangent relevant to only one sentence.
No there aren't ... notions of order like older/younger don't enter the equation (as the problem was stated).

Oh well, I guess this is what the article is talking about :)
Who Owns the IP Rights to Custom Software?
$5 is a lot?

edit: it's actually $7, but still
and that week was a complete waste of time if you don't have mathematics integrated into your daily life
I have never read a "how to get hired" book ever; and if those books sound like this, I am so thankful that I did not read it during my college. What is the crux of whole write-up? Is it trying to say that anybody who keeps stalking a company receptionist/HR gets a job!!! This can give a serious misconceptions to people who are looking for a job.
Yep, if you have a PS3 try to go to hulu.com on the browser.
Tesla IPO Surges against declining stocks
Same place as everyone else - SABRE.
HTML/CSS is portable across all browsers, but you aren't guaranteed absolute control over the final rendering. This is by design, and there are a lot of good reasons for it. Most of these abstraction layers sacrifice all of that so you can get more control on the 2 or 3 supported browsers instead of the giant universe of alternate user agents.
$12 / month gets you 10 repositories / 5 collaborators. I guess it's subjective but that seems pretty cheap to me.

I'd rather pay and know that the service is being run as a viable business because that gives me confidence it's going to continue existing.
I'm Paul Biggar, one of the founders.

There's a lot of speculation and reading between the lines going on here. There is really no information to go off, and jumping to conclusions based on that email is a little unfair. (By contrast, the journalists to whom that email was addressed had tons of context.)

I'm in the middle of writing a "what went wrong" piece, which I'll link to here, but I'll ask you guys to hold off judgement until then.
The cable/satellite companies also pay the networks directly, using the money from your subscription, as the ad market is too volatile for the networks to rely on alone. Obviously, Hulu is also going to have to work in a similar way, paying the networks to gain access to their content, to attract more subscribers.
This is from 1995, is this still relevant?
You know, the problem with that conditional probability is that the sex of the second child is in no way conditioned by the sex of the first child, so ...

p(boy = 2 | boy >= 1) = p(any child = boy)

And this was the original problem that led them to the 33% probability.
You will get hired with this approach, yes. But it is the best way to destroy your own value. If someone is constantly asking for a job at this special company, he is also willing to make a lot of compromises for it.

As the author stated, this is an "employer's point of view".
Good luck finding a nice place for < $2000 in the LES.

Fun fact: if an apartment is rented for less than $2000, it becomes subject to rent stabilization.

Many landlords would rather have an apartment go vacant than become subject to rent stabilization. Better to lose a year's worth of rent now than 20 years worth of rent in the future, not to mention loss of flexibility (i.e., you can't sell the apt without permission of the tenant).
The FBI warnings come at the very beginning, while you're still settling in, turning off lights, passing around food, or whatever, not while you're in the middle of watching.
link bait!
Don't get a co-founder just because the gurus say you need one. Like any other person you involve in your business, get them when you need them to advance your business.

Build something cool and it won't be hard to find someone who wants to help out at the executive level.
The Micro (smallest) plan is actually $7/month for 5 repos and 1 collaborator. It's not cheap given that you could host an infinite number of git repos with an infinite number of collaborators on any shared host, but that's not the point.

GitHub is pretty. GitHub doesn't require you to ask for SSH keys to add someone as a collaborator. GitHub lets you comment on lines of commits. GitHub lets you host blogs/websites with GitHub pages. Etc.

Everyone's always comparing GitHub's prices to inferior products. GitHub saves you time and effort, and since most developers are highly-paid, it doesn't need to save very much time to be well worth it.

And if you do see it as too expensive, maybe you're not their target customer. If your time is only worth $10/hour, and GitHub only saves you 15 minutes per month, it's not worth it to you pay them $7/month. The solution isn't to complain about their prices though--it's to accept that it's not worth it and switch to one of those cheaper substitutes.
Ask HN: Benchmark survey for lean startups
GoGrid Launches 3.0 Version of Cloud Platform
I know Gary, the person who presented this, and I was there when it happened. He fully intended this to ignite the argument it has.

Firstly, as presented it is clearly ambiguous. It is intended to be ambiguous, but in such a way that people who are familiar with the original version will get suckered into believing that it's well formed.

Secondly, if presented precisely, the answer usually given is either 13/27 or 1/2, depending on which version.

Finally, this is like the Monty Hall problem all over again. There are people arguing vehemently and without listening at all, demonstrating clearly that they are excellent at missing the point.

In case you're wondering, here's one statement and answer.

Suppose on knock on people's doors and ask - Do you have exactly two children? If they answer no, I move on. If they answer yes I then ask - Is at least one of them a boy born on a Tuesday? If they say no, I move on.

If they look surprised and say "Yes," what is the probability that they have two boys?

Answer: 13/27.

Yes, it really is.

If you replace the second question with "Is at least one of them a boy with red hair, left-handed, plays piano, was born on Tuesday, and has a cracked left upper incisor" then if the answer is "Yes" then the probability of both children being boys is almost exactly 50%.

If, instead, you replace the second question with "Is at least one a boy" then the probability of two boys is 1/3.

Finally, suppose you see a parent that you know has two children in the park with a boy. Now the probability of two boys is 50%, because, assuming uniform probabilities, having two boys makes it more likely you see them with a boy.

tl;dr: It's hard, and depends precisely on the assumptions you make.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furnace#Household_furnaces
Music is most definitely a man's game. The vast, vast majority of professional musicians are men.

And I don't have any stats, but I would guess that the vast majority of pros have a decent bit of class privilege to go along with their male privilege.
No, it wasn't a FTP-based attack because we analyzed the FTP logs and on all the cases, there was no connections during the time of the attack.

In our first assessment, we checked around 1.5k sites and found 140 infected. We also found their CEO blog hacked and some other big sites hosted in there with the same malware.
As we published the post and started to hear from people, the number of affected sites grew to the hundreds (close to 1k). Google says they have 240k sites, which means that we identified =~0.4% of their sites with malware.

Those are only the ones WE identified, which is probably much less than the actual number.

Also, we contacted them about this issue before posting (via their forms) and also reached out to the CEO. However, since sites were already infected, we posted explaining the issue and how to fix it. We didn't posted about any vulnerability that could help the attackers, only information to help the affected users.
I expected more in experience sharing than general advice; good points anyway.
And this is why I am considering it, in addition to netflix, since I cancelled cable and dvr at that rate.
I still think the offering of: we handle technology+monetization for journalists/online publishers is a very valuable proposition.
Fundamental flaw: If you can't predict a Black Swan how can you attract one?
I did some reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_...

It states: "To support themselves, some cable channels charge "subscriber fees" in addition to airing commercials. These fees are collected directly from the cable service provider, who passes the cost onto the customer."

So you are correct, at least about some portion of the stations.
Generally speaking, your parents need money for you to become a prodigy in music.

Edit: I should add, the music establishment doesn't acknowledge the music of the poor as "real music". Prodigies on, for example, turntables, are not considered "real musicians" even if they are as much of a genius as the 10 year old violist.
Verizon to Start Selling iPhone in January [REPORT]
Has there been a good writeup of what HFT "Is" at any point?

http://vimeo.com/6056298

What is your impression of them as a pernicious/positive force? Are they essentially market making?

Open for debate. Depends on what you mean as a pernicious/positive force. Good for retail investors, institutional investors, stability of the market, or the sell-side? All of these are conflicting sides. It is generally SEC's mission to protect the small individual investors' fair access to the market, while trying to walk the fine line of not disrupting the big institutional investors/sell-side brokers' way of doing business (and their political lobbying groups).

Pro HFT argument: HFT are virtual market makers that through the use of technology and arbitraging through multiple ECNs, are decreasing the bid/ask spread of the traditional market makers and providing more liquidity to the market. They serve as stabilizing force during irrational exuberances.

Con HFT argument: HFT are bad predators who through technology, jump ahead of institutional investors' block orders and in term pass on higher priced liquidity to retail investors that no one needs. They don't serve as stabilizing force, as they stop trading as soon as they stop making money and in fact may fan the fire by employing high frequency short selling in a flash crash.
8 Startup Lessons from Constant Contact
Not sure why the down vote. I interpreted the submitter's image to imply a benefit of Adblock being a shorter page and cleaner layout, which is a problem that is better solved by both Readability and Instapaper.
"This last weekend he showed up with Cuban cigars; no one new how he got them - he just had them."
Do you guys hire people from outside of the USA ?
Once I've placed my closing braces, I'll never need to think about it again, unless and until I restructure that piece of code.

It's got nothing about saving keystrokes.

And now, back to working on pass-infested Python code.
That particular comment was as tongue-in-cheek as the rest of the article - I don't think it was meant to be taken even slightly literally.

(edit) Sorry, that can't be right. Of course the Yankees did win the World Series, so that factual portion of it needs to be taken literally :)
It's an interesting theory ...

One often looks at the materially poor in developing world and finds them to be at least superficially happy.

The problem here in the west for me is the question of stability - I'm poor and happy but when 20% VAT hits if business goes down the tube then we'll be down and outs.

Literally we're on a knife edge highly susceptible to external forces in a way that makes it hard to be completely content.
Let's toss two coins until at least one shows a head. By your reasoning the odds of them both being heads is 1/2. It's not. Try it.

Suppose I roll two dice until at least one of them shows a 6. What's the odds of both being 6's? I've said nothing about the red die versus the blue die, but the underlying truth requires that the situations are kept separate. It's only - as far as we know - in quantum mechanics where you deliberately lose the distinction.

I've done these as real world experiments as I explore them with kids, and I have a lot of direct experience. If you disagree then I'd be delighted to gamble with you.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Practical Programming in C
I would agree with you on that but I need cable for occasional news and live broadcasts/award shows/talk shows type things. Otherwise I can totally live off of Netflix and Hulu.
May I suggest you read the post you're replying to again...
Derek's a bright guy, and I respect him. He doesn't even know me. To anyone consider trying this: don't let this advice land you a restraining order. I just thought I'd share an anecdote:

I had a applicant do this, including the "in-person" bit. The poor girl in HR thought she had a stalker, and I didn't appreciate the incessant badgering. Don't call from different numbers, use fake names, and state different agendas to talk to people.
To tell you the truth, I'd feel like a nut case saying something like "You are my favorite company. It's my dream to work for you. If you have any aspect that could use a little help, let me do it, and I promise you it'll thrive. I'm that passionate about this."
IPad + Velcro
I'm not so certain that this is really good advice in the modern job market. Pestering people continually may not be a great strategy. If I was the company guy at the end of the phone taking very similar "I want a job" calls from the same person all the time I'd be inclined to dismiss them as a loony, even if their qualifications looked good on paper (or in an email).

In the modern era I'm not sure that it's necessarily a good idea to pin all your hopes and job finding efforts onto a single company. Probably it's wiser to consider a range of companies, and not appear to be suffering from OCD even if you really do love the companies you're dealing with.

Also, from the early part of my own career I know that people who are genuinely eager and somewhat naive can also get horribly exploited, so if pestering succeeds then be careful that you're not just being used like a throwaway consumable.
I have a tangential question: is there a name for the kind of diagram one sees on this wikipedia page involving rooms & doors? I've never seen it before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition_variable
Investor psychology: asset allocation
I'm wrong? I've got into this conversation - about how the business climate here is actually excellent - at MetaLab, with MetaLab members, after viennajs more than once, and they sure didn't want to hear it.

And as for preaching to the choir, no. If I were only interested in preaching to the choir, why would I bother to create a fairly controversial conference?

After all, the "accepted" startup model is building, growing huge, and hoping for an acquisition, rather than charging.

But preaching to people who really don't want to hear it - that's another story, and a total waste of time.
I totally agree. One of the big problems with that though is its nearly impossible to bootstrap an audience on the web. That's why Kevin Rose pimping Digg on Tech TV was such a coup. He had product/market fit AND could drop an audience on it.

With most publishing startups, you have to survive the whole first year until Google un-sandboxes your domain and you get legit Google traffic. Until then you have to find other ways to build numbers, Reddit-baiting, cutting deals with other publications etc....notice none of these are technical problems?

So you can't really sell publishers on traffic, you've got to offer them something else. Then at that point, how are you better than Wordpress.com?
Verizon iPhone in January, claims Bloomberg
I am teenager too, and for some weird reason I have never used Facebook consistently. In fact I made an account and deactivated it after an agonizing week of operation.

The natural question is why was it agonizing for me?

Well, I am a LGBT kid in a really homophobic country so I have to protect my identity wherever I go, or I risk some very unpleasant consequences. So, Facebook became a big no-no after random people I scarcely knew started adding me. I had to censor everything about myself, and I felt that it's use as a communication medium was greatly undermined by my lack of privacy.

On the other hand this is an issue for most people. All of us have certain social images that we live up to certain people and the minute we are on a platform like Facebook we have to wear a mask to communicate, which inherently strips that act of any meaning whatsoever. I don't want to spend my time saying LOL to people, and taking dumb quizzes or replying to "friends". I definitely don't want to know that someone added xyz to their crushes list and that I should go over to their wall to comment. It's just so fake, and I have better stuff to do.

I really don't feel that need to network. Gmail and IM are better in this regard. At least, I have my privacy and I am not hounded by noise, which allows for more meaningful conversation.

The funny thing is that I am not antisocial. I, personally, love talking to people I can be myself with. It's just opening and freeing without the burden of judgement.

Anyway, that's what I would say to anyone who wants to develop another Facebook.

Of course, there's a possibility that there is something wrong with me, but I think that instead of making another Facebook they should move on to something that leverages their ability to search. You know, extend the concept of Buzz; noise free networking.
It's not about prediction, it's about odds. If you don't know the outcome it's better to have 200 possibilities than 1 "great idea."
Ask HN: How to get access to http://cr.yp.to/crypto.html
Has somebody the files from djb's crypto course?
A good chunk of the cool kids probably want to make more than $125k/year.

http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/
Here are some previous posts about NewsLabs that might be interesting reading in light of this announcement, in case anyone is unfamiliar with what they were about...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159683

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259603
> Let's toss two coins until at least one shows a head. By your reasoning the odds of them both being heads is 1/2. It's not. Try it.

You haven't read the article then ... the problem as stated in the article is that you know one coin is going to be a head, so what's the probability of the other one also being a head?

Of course ... the events aren't connected ... the second coin toss doesn't depend in any way on the first coin.

That's why I think there's something wrong about the article ... saying that the probability is 33% fails both intuition and elementary probabilistic.
Affiliating the Affiliates: Why Your Company Must Tier Your Affiliate Program
pg has said (http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html) that "Not having a cofounder is a real problem" and that finding a co-founder should be the "first priority" for any single founder and that this is "more important than anything else". This is a fairly common meme in the startup world.

Newslab looks like a great example of how that meme gets it wrong. Many other things are far more important than finding a co-founder

In this case, it looks like one co-founder goes on a honeymoon and decides to drop out. Then the other co-founder decides that he doesn't have the passion to run it on his own. So the whole company collapses. I'm assuming that a more passionate person who didn't believe in the co-founder meme would have shown more perseverance.
Older/younger doesn't exactly enter into it, but some ordering is necessary to properly describe the set of probabilities. This can be arbitrary, but birth order makes the most intuitive sense. The set of probabilities of sex distribution in two-child families is [(B, B), (B, G), (G, B), (G, G)], for any arbitrary ordering, this cannot be reduced to [(B,B), (B,G), (G,G)] as you have done without adding a variable to double the probability of (B,G).

Assuming a coin-flip probability for boy/girl distribution, you get the 1/3 answer if we select for two-child families where at least one child is a boy: [(B,B), (B,G), (G,B)]. If we don't pre-select for having at least one boy, (i.e. if we select the family because we just met the father socially), the probability rises to 1/2, because we have two cases to consider, each with a 1/2 probability: [(B,B), (B,G)], and [(B,B), (G,B)].
I'm curious to know how long they worked on the product before YC.