skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, they didn't fold per se, but they likely could have held their own against MySpace and Facebook. They just got bought out a few months ago for $40 million, when they could have had a billion dollar valuation like Facebook or a half-billion dollar buyout like MySpace.

Maybe if they had thought about scaling from the very beginning (like so many startups supposedly waste time doing), they would have had a plan in place to address it without having to bring it up at board meetings.
Slate script grabs comments Sarah Palin's staff deletes from her FB page
Red light accidents are tricky and each one is assessed on its particulars. Usually, regardless of the other vehicle's actions, if you are judged to be able to avoid an accident, and you don't, you are being careless, hence at fault.

A lot of jurisdictions have "no-fault" legislation however that gets in the way with regards to insurance.
No. There are lots of startups with non technical founders who can bring in (or outsource) the technical development. There is a larger risk in the quality of the code when you do this. If there is no tech founder, then most of the time you will have a harder time judging the developers you will be using (hiring/outsourcing to.) It also means that you will have to pay for the development vs a co-founder putting in sweat equity to get the product done.

Based on your brief description, it sounds like there will not be a lot of heavy lifting to get the application up and running. From personal experience, getting the MVP version of the app done is really the easy part. It doesn't always feel like it, but in the overall picture it is easier to do development than it is to sell the app once finished. The sales/marketing after the fact is where the real work starts. Many hackers have trouble moving from development to marketing.
Centralized, and closed. I want an OpenAuth or similar solution. Diaspora could be it.
Fair enough. I'm glad to hear that you have it in your mind to correct the issue. Good luck!
When I was interviewing at GS we talked about Python vs Slang and several of the interviewers mentioned the biggest problem with slang was the lack of toolkit (good debuggers, IDE, etc.).
I know this is straight from Wikipedia, but it is incorrect because the Caspian Sea is the largest lake. If you measure by volume, lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake. If you measure by area, lakes Michigan and Huron are technically one lake, and that lake is larger than Superior.

So there are a lot of reasons to dispute that Superior is the largest lake in the world.

All the rest is true though. :-)
Dissection of an Active Malware Campaign
It is a good move. I didn't pirate it, but I'll buy it to support them (plus it's just three quid). I only wish it were on Steam...
Thanks for reminding me of that! Definitely my favourite moment.
Disclosure: Debian lover here.

Do you think the world runs on Debian? What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? And what about other major pieces of software? Since you got 15 upvotes so far, I guess that would be really appreciated.
It's not an appeal to anything: it's an observation of my years on the internet: politics discussions on the internet go downhill quickly. Where do you think "Godwin's Law" came from?

After all, this whole discussion is attached to a story about how a group of people took the time, because of their political motivations, to attempt to "attack" another group of people on a web site. Seems like pretty lame behavior to me.
What seems to be missing, as usual from these piracy posts is that the 90% who pirated the game most likely wouldn't have bought it. Sure, pirating games is a bad thing. But, it doesn't hurt to have a little perspective on it. There was a post on HN a few months ago doing some analysis on this subject.
Any software program or system that can net an expert more than $250k/year in consulting fees so he can call himself a real professional, just like his buddies who went to law school or medical school (or the finance industry).
This is the most succinct summary of the healthcare debate I've seen.
Specifically regarding Wave, all the information from Google states that they loved it, and will most likely continue using it internally, which they did for months before it was announced. The technology they developed to build the product is also being slowly integrated into their existing products (GIS's redesign seems like it took some of the ideas of wave) as well as being available for integration in new products.

Regarding this article, this was 6 to 8 years ago, and Google didn't have its 'persona' it has now. It was still a company struggling to gain market share and I would imagine they wanted developers that strived to push the boundaries of what the web could do. Reid very well could have not had that same goal, being an older generation who already had an ingrained idea of what the internet was and was unwilling to work towards a more dynamic internet. This is all my personal speculation based on personal assumptions, however.
I know that somewhere in this wide world there must be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius remixing corporate logos, edgy speech, and full-motion video into a mindblowing coming of age story about tolerance and true love that could only possibly be shown in the Starcraft engine, but you know how I read this headline? Starcraft 2: More Zergs, Less Penis.

That is a tradeoff I can live with.
They're with NickB on a website that you can't talk about or you'll be banned.
I don't mind this. I like controlled systems because they tend to keep the garbage out of my sight (steam, itunes). If they allow the masses to create really obscene things, it only hurts the developers that spend countless hours creating quality mods and maps because the consumer has to wade through trash 98% of the time.

Another point is that the game is still new. That 25 MB limit is probably not a hard limit. It 'could' go up if they start seeing a show of hands with people needing more space.
Xtracycle add-on model isn't that expensive. Last I knew - like $169.

I have friends that use trailers from http://bikesatwork.com/

Very inexpensive. Easily attached, and you can use your bike regularly whenever you want.
Agreed--smart email users are getting increasingly targeted with pared down lists and more personal.
Chrome OS Early Adoption Debate is More About the Experience Than You Think
The Volcano Lake at Taal is a pretty interesting place -- it is a volcano, with the smallish crater lake, all inside the crater of a bigger volcano. Went there last year, a beautiful place.
"That language plays a vital role in Goldman's prop trading, including it's computer driven high-frequency trading."

John Carney, Senior Editor, CNBC.com, needs to get himself an editor. :-)
Yeah, but did they break backwards compatibility? If so, that isn't something I would expect in a .1 update when al language is at version 2.
I have never considered pirate software to be "risk free".

I'm not concerned about getting caught. I'm concerned about running arbitrary binaries downloaded from god-knows-where which were prepared by hackers with less-than-honorable intentions.

After you've reformatted your hard drive for the 3rd or 4th time, you give up on pirate software.
This should be interesting without libraries!
> The trend even seems to be to make Autobahnen out of concrete.

It's not exactly a trend, I've seen concrete autobahnen more than 15 years ago, and the early ones were concrete as well.
But this presume all of Google's revenue are from search ads, this might have been more accurate in 2007 when the article was written but now with youtube, android and gmail this is not that correct.

Also, note google market cap has remained static or dropped during this period. The stock market loves growth and Google was one of the wonder kids on the block, Apple is new one and Google is becoming an laggard in terms of growth and the stock price and market cap growth reflects that.
Cool! It looks like youve put in a lot of thought about the privacy and social issues - which is always a good sign for someone doing a privacy related startup.
Really? So you can divulge anything you want about any country and you won't be committing a crime in that country? Are you saying that, no matter what Assange does, he can just go in and out of the US freely?
They didn't fold, but they suffered a massive drop in usership. They rolled out a performance overhaul in June 2004 after the majority of users had already given up on the site.

http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-ph...

Incidently, the blogger above was fired for posting about the release, so it would seem they had some other serious corporate issues beyond performance.
I think adobe connect is the way to go, as far as corporate collaboration tools.
Quite probably he meant S-expressions, but said 'things' to avoid scaring away those unfamiliar.
Slang is a proprietory language developed by GS, it's been around for ~15 years I think. If I remember correctly they have a development/analysis environment called SecDB in which all coding is done with Slang. All their modelling, pricing and risking is done in SecDB across all asset classes so it's pretty widely embedded.
A nasty side effect of consumer-inherent complacency. As long as you keep consumers' appetites satiated just enough for them to want more, this sort of thing by and large will go condoned. People who don't develop Apps on the iPhone didn't care about the crappy developer agreement. People who just log onto Facebook to gossip about Johnny and Chachi didn't care about openGraph. People who only bought Starcraft to build pylons wont care about this.

The casual gamers and casual consumers outnumber power users at least 5:1, and that's what allows these sort of things to perpetuate and continue on the rate that they are.
Especially after the GTA "Hot Coffee" debacle. That was a different issue of course, but the general public doesn't seem to understand what a mod is, and assume the game publisher is responsible for any and all content, regardless of source.
I don't think the big issues is what they allow on their servers. I think the bigger issues is that a lot of new games don't allow you to host your own content outside their system. I can see reasons for this (and I am sympathetic), but I do miss the old days of getting a WarCraft map from a friend.
10 Startup Commandments
The game is on steam. Not sure about the sale.
THE DINOSAURS ARE COMING [nsfw]
Was it the hippi or big business building tools for small business that generally offended you. Resulting in the downing voting of the analysis. For it is definitely sound.
I think the oo-like call chain is nicer when you don't have any arguments and stuff doesn't nest. The difference of static vs. instance methods also makes it slighly more complicated to comprehend. I think overall the simplicity of Lisp-style nesting wins when the expressions get more complicated.
Ask has something like 2.5% share of the search market, and they're worth about £4bn.
i'm not really trying to make an argument about privacy and your rights online type of stuff.

i'm just trying to make note of the fact that if you do have something that phones home, can you really say that your product is totally free and clear of that drm/registration/etc type of software practices? more similar to false advertising. "our product will NEVER do this. except, it does, but just a little"
This isn't always true - they do invest cash if they buy their stock (as I did when I joined justin.tv, and many of my friends have done when joining early-stage startups).
Google confirms Slide acquisition
Care to back that up? What parts of the FQA do you dispute?
Google’s Dremel – Or, Can MapReduce Itself Handle Fast, Interactive Querying?
1) The idea is good.

2) The preview really needs to work. I tried a few sites (yahoo.com, reddit.com, drpepper.com, google.com) and only Google worked. Your product right now is that preview.

5) As a potential customer, I would rather have the first month free than a money back guarantee.
I like this article, because it's really about noncomformity. Hackers aren't afraid of social and cultural norms. To be truly excellent, you can't follow the crowd.

98% of zoning laws in the US are about maintaining the status quo. The status quo is sort of meh.

Hackers, bikers, entrepreneurs, and other daring souls mix it up. And the world is a better place for it.

Mix it up.
We use vimeo, mainly because I like it's interface better than youtube's. But yes there's a small delay.
No, sorry, if I knew of such I most certainly would have told you! ADDED: Rational was trying this, don't know how far they got ($$$, note they're now part of IBM).

Aside from Literate Programming, which is just another form of (verbose) commenting and even further violates DRY.
Rocket-powered single-seat helicopter emits only water
The Untold History of Toontown's SpeedChat (2007)
You're seriously comparing a movie review and a well articulated op-ed piece about where our debt comes from to sites like this (the ones listed in the article about Google censoring 'conservative e-zines')?

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/ "Jesse Norton aka Younes Abdullah, How Did Your Conference Go At RM? You Know, The One With Convicted Terrorist Omar The Goat Humping Bakri Muhammed?"

http://www.michnews.com/Alan_Caruba/ac080410.shtml "This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, to ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz."

Seriously?
> What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice?

My unscientific impression is that the distributions of choice among active HN users who follow up the development and progress of their distribution closely are largely limited to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS. News of pretty much every milestone release of these distributions is submitted, usually upvoted, and seems to be appreciated, before falling off the front page in less than a day in the most extreme case (final releases). The disaster scenario of this being the case for 43985 different distributions seems outside the realm of possibility, thus there's not much cause for concern.
Your time is of course the major expense involved in supporting a new platform.

That is especially true of supporting Android, because Android development is free, and you don't need to buy any hardware to test your application. For simple apps like yours the Android SDK's emulator is very accurate and runs on Windows/Mac/Linux. (See http://developer.android.com/sdk/ )

The only money you would need to pay is when you want to publish your application on the Android market. It costs around US $25 to become a registered developer.

For other people considering cross-platform mobile development, for simple apps, one way to keep costs down is to use one of the approved-by-Apple cross-platform development environments.

The one I've used is called PhoneGap, but I think there are others.

You write your program in JavaScript/HTML5, and it is run in WebKit on all mobile OS's that support WebKit. (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, WebOS).

PhoneGap isn't exactly polished, and it's not quite write-once run-anywhere, but it is still probably the fastest route to getting a simple app up on multiple mobile platforms.
I've always thought these "email is dead or shortly will be" articles to be wildly presumptuous. The argument is generally that the tween/teen demographic hardly ever uses e-mail, and instead use facetwitsquarespace, hence as they grow up email will die out.

This argument is missing one huge point: what happens when these people go to work? How many businesses will want internal communications delivered over social networks?

Email, although far from perfect, is a wonderful work tool. It's private, it's asynchronous, it's distributed, it's cheap. I don't see this being replaced by social messaging.
If you got a huge return from an early investment would you decline to raise another round and continue with your own funds?
I thought the employer pays that fee?
It is off topic and my (irrelevant) personal preference, but please, pretty pretty please, find something more beneficial to humanity than convincing people to purchase things that they don't need. Innovation is exciting when it is about ending a war, or reducing pollution, or creating cheaper energy, or making it easier to find information. Every time people talk about "mining the clickstream to increase ad revenue" I have the temporary urge to abandon computing become a farmer.

kthxbye
In Common Lisp you can embed arbitrary data structures in to your code because the reader can build them at read-time, and it can also evaluate arbitrary code at read time (you can turn this feature off for safety). So "embedding a graph" means something totally different in CL. The CL reader can also basically read both persistent pointers (symbols) and ephemeral pointers (the #N= #N# notation with which you can even read self-recursive structures).

Contrast this to Java, where there are no literal datastructures, no reader, and all your data structures must be explicitly built from constructor up.

I really wish these things would be something that people would be thaught at universities, but thanks to Java-schools, they aren't.
Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe), 1703:

[my novel] is being Printed again and again, by Pyrates

But the term was in use as early as 1600:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
Completely agree. But I'm sure we have our equivalents -- I was writing a blog post about SQL the other day and realized I couldn't remember if it stood for Standard Query Language or Structured Query Language (it's the latter, but doesn't it feel like the former makes more sense?).
I would not exactly call us whitebeards, I was 17 when the web was invented and was already on the net. I am 35 now, not exactly over the hill, I may be an old dude to some of you young guys, but to me the whitebeards are the COBOL guys form the 60-70s.

On another note, an interesting bit of trivia is that the web was invented on a NeXT box and the first group of developers to jump on to web development (me included) generally opted for NeXT boxes as their development platform of choice. If you where to have looked at that snap shot in time, you would have though NeXT was going to rule the web development world. I think it is a strange twist of fate that it did not and now some how through a twisted chain of events, NeXT (OSX) is again a lot of web developers system of choice.
That's what's bothered me about the article, too. "In industry" can mean different thigns, especially if you're going outside of standalone knowledge applications and enter the weird world of the web or enterprise interop. All of a sudden you can't be totally isolated, but you have to talk to other systems. And this is where libraries are actually quite nice.

So if they're easier to build in Lisp, great! Then it shouldn't be a problem making them public -- which some Lispers actually do. But don't tell me that everything so utterly trivial in Lisp that every programm has to reimplement it every time.
I disagree with the author. He seems completely enamored with the "harmonious" aesthetics and almost totally ignores the breakdown of usability.

The map is now varying shades of blue. Water is blue. Land is blue. Highways are blue. Even the parks/green spaces look blue. I wouldn't be surprised if the black text is actually a really dark shade of blue. In short, you can't quickly identify land/water boundaries or distinguish river versus highway. BAD!

The author calls the new highway coloring a "net positive". I disagree. Not only are highways and roads now all blue, they are all the same shade of blue. (Toll roads are greenish) With the exception of size, there is no visual difference between large highways and small roads. They're all colored the same. When driving in a new area, I rely on the color scheme to ensure I stay on the main road instead of getting lost in side roads. Google and the old Bing Maps had it right. It's called information hierarchy.

Text is also difficult to read in this new design. The contrast between the background and the text are uncomfortably low. The problem is even worse with state and country labels. Who decided semi-transparent text was a good idea? In addition to the blue roads, blue rivers, blue waters and blue lands, we now have nearly invisible blue text! What are they thinking? As if it wasn't bad enough, sometimes the text is sideways to make it fit. Even worse, the country/state labels sometimes cover city labels.

Another problem with text, because there is no information hierarchy or color system, it really easy to confuse street labels with city labels.

The new design also went too minimal with labels. The old design had too many labels, while the new one almost has none. (Google Maps has it just right, IMO). Even at reasonable zoom levels, one doesn't get the expected amount of city and road labels.

No thanks. I'll stick with Google Maps. This is Bing's Tropicana.
For kicks, here it is in R:

PlusRandom <- function(initial, steps) {
if (initial > 1) steps
else PlusRandom(initial + urand(1), steps + 1)
}

mean(replicate(100000, PlusRandom(0,0))

[1] 2.71872
agreed; soundtrack alone is well worth the money
ideological or circumstantial pirates will pirate. they're the people who will never buy your product. you won't make money from them, ever.
I find it dubious that bad content is actually 'crowding' out good content. Which good real entry is this one higher than? The off-topic is just filling in the dead time between seriousness.
How to Write 7 Types of Catchy Headlines
This is blogspam; we saw the original article here a while ago.
I've never been so happy to not buy a game. I've also never been so sad to not buy a game.
I agree, almost all B2B communication is still via email.

Also there is the argument of how do you get your facebook/twitter DM notifications? Mostly through email. Even all of these social services ask for an email when you sign up and send emails to drive you back to the site.

Facebook is now one of the largest senders of email in the world..
I don't think pg would take that tack if "all the Hacker News old-timers" had really gone elsewhere. I like to think he would recognize a systemic problem and write about it.
In Clojure you can rewrite the second example as (-> data transform1 transform2 ... transformN). Macros are a hell of a thing.
It’s mot as simple as that. It’s also not as simple as just adding some bike lines. The city for example needs to be fairly compact to be bike friendly — which means sprawl should be avoided. And sprawl is something you can’t just remove once it’s there. You also want to make sure that there are several big supermarkets at one end of the city and nothing much elsewhere. And so on. Those are all tricky problems.
Buy 25,000 bags of flour @ $1 and sell them for $2.

(Didn't we do this in economics 101? Where you learn about overhead and loss, etc.)
This is tangential, but I drive two of my favourite web apps almost entirely through email (Tripit and Highrise) and a third (Instapaper) quite a bit. I basically live in Instapaper and Highrise, so that's saying something.

I have email literally everywhere and email reminders are still easily the most effective notification system for a bunch of things I've seen.
Generally, this is more of a client-side bandwidth issue which is out of your control. To minimize load time, decrease the size of your video.
I find Indeed.com to be a fairly objective indicator as to the job market for a particular language:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer,+clojure+d...
Yes good point. I only ever log in to fb if I get an email alert. However, I imagine that a lot of (younger?) fb users are, like I am with email, permanently logged in, so they see stuff coming in.

Yeah - the B2B point also valid. "Uh, yeah, I'm just gonna message you this contract on facebook". I don't think so.