skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find your lack of courtesy to be the embarrassment to HN.

I was simply try to the make the point that by pushing an open source OS (as in manufacturers could alter the OS to include anything the carriers insisted) Google blindsided itself. They expected to create something that would change the handset/carrier/customer relationship, instead they just enabled the next generation of the same thing. The Nexus One is evidence of this.
Yeah, I am sure I am not alone in despising tailgating. It is the exact opposite of what we are talking about in this thread, a product of impatience and bad assumptions. You simply cannot stop some people from hitting the brakes repeatedly. You can just work to reduce it by not causing the reflex response in most situations.

I also refuse to be pushed by people who ride my tail; I maintain my speed and ignore them (which is oodles better than slowing down to teach them a lesson, which actually does the other thing I was warning against here, causing a ripple in the traffic). It is my rebellious nature against their several ton weapon.
Good point, I didn't see that. I have to believe, though, that this suggests Google views Rapportive favorably in general.
If you want to retire at 30 you're not the kind of person that can execute a startup and retire at 30.
Exactly. This is why HP can have so much more of the laptop market, yet Apple's laptops are much better engineered. Apple sells so many units of each SKU that they can afford to spend more designing each one.
Reality?
> There are too many mechanics out there to make sure that the folks taking the real risks (investors and founders) make the real money.

I resent this attitude, that somebody investing a fraction of their (somebody else's) money is taking the "real risk".
I'll be first to admit that I was experimenting with more catchy titles. My apologies to those who were mislead.
> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article:

> The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution for papers originating out of publicly funded research.
I really don't get this point, no idea why people are so hung up on x company hiding content/adverts on the web.

WebMynd (also YC, incidentally) replaced Google.com adverts with content and Google never minded - WebMynd has lots more users and funding than Rapportive, and has been around for many many more years.

Also, when Google released their GMail gadgets marketplace, Rapportive was officially recommended on their blog, and I think it was one of the first on the scene.

Also, didn't that Paul guy who created GMail invest in them? I think he would have prodded the GMail team in his due diligence.

Given that GMail has millions of users, it's highly unlikely Rapportive will ever cause damage to whatever revenue GMail creates from adverts (its highly unlikely - sadly - that Rapportive will ever get, say, 5% of gmail users using Rapportive - the number is simply too big) - I imagine most of GMails revenue is from users paying for larger inboxes. Because they spend all their time in their mail client. Making them the dream Rapportive customer.

"Google shuts down service hundreds of thousands of GMail users love so they can make more money" doesn't sound like a very nice PR campaign. I suspect GMail is all about keeping users loving the Google, rather than monetizing.

I doubt Google will ever blog "hey guys, replace our adverts" because i think shareholders might raise eye brows, but turning a blind eye towards revenue in favour of delighted users sounds like a fair trade off.

Also if Google did make a move, it would cause so much press to flood towards Rapportive they'd be rather happy. (jinx)

I'd like to see people remarking how much users love Rapportive (search twitter) or how brilliant their customer service is, rather than what might cause Rapportive to fail.
Why did you know she was good after 3 days? Do you remember any specifics? What were those "right questions"?
The good thing about losing sight of HN for a few months is, when you get back, it doesn't take long until someone questions the quality of comments and/or submissions and you recognize nothing really changed. Think about quality like tides at a beach.
Yeah I agree on the low-end aversion thing. I just don't think it's a matter of 'low-end' versus 'high-end'; I think it's more about brand awareness and pricing accordingly.

If Apple has a comparable product at a similar price (read: slightly more than everyone else), they are going to clean up. Most people are going to pick a brand they know well and is publicly very highly regarded over a similarly priced, 'cheaper knock-off'. And sure Apple didn't invent the 'tablet' but as far as mainstream buyers are concerned they did.
I think eTacts (god that uppercase T looks hideous) always had some CRM stuff. Etacts also has tons of analytics and such, which Rapportive does not. I'm biased towards the Rapportive guys cus I know them, but I don't think its fair to say Etacts copied Rapportive much (if thats what you were saying)
Just out of curiousity, I compared myself to the most notable HNN names I could think of.

My highest is 83.79. Compare that to patio11 at 77.89 or Chromatic at 80.90, or pg at 81.91. RiderOfGiraffes manages to top us all, though, with a comment saying "This is a thin veneer on the slide-show already discussed here. [link]" which scores 91.44. The next one after that falls clear down to 76.97, which is itself rather typical (it seems that many of us have a steep drop after one "geekiest" comment).

I'm not convinced that this is a useful metric. It's an interesting experiment, perhaps, but one problem is that "geekiness" isn't necessarily what we want in comments (or perhaps it is necessary, but not sufficient).

I can't believe that short link was RoG's best comment this month, for example. And the top few comments from pg are certainly not his best (the more interesting ones seem to start a bit below the 50s). YMMV.
I am actually talking about 4 different buildings in 3 different bay area towns. If there is a secret to picking buildings, obviously I'm not in on it.

But - I looked at apartment ranking website, and on every single building there will be some very negative comments about noise levels. So I still suspect a more systematic problem.
You think Google would make it so Chrome would not handle their extension? That would cause such a shitstorm for Google - and isn't Adblock a far more likely target if they wanted to go down that road?
I didn't try to predict the future - I explicitly qualified that everything I wrote applied only under certain circumstances: "If the past 40 years are a guide to the future..." You even quoted my qualification.

As for dodging your main point, let me address it more carefully now. You seem to believe that incomes (by which I assume you mean income adjusted for CPI) is decreasing. And yet, over a period in which CPI adjusted incomes remained flat, quality of life dramatically increased. So why do you believe that decreasing CPI-adjusted incomes are worth worrying about?
Accessing U.S. State-Level Economic Data
Ten Most Dangerous Celebrities in Cyberspace
Ah yes, does anybody else remember the glory days of shareware and freeware dominating, sold on magazine CDs and various collections? The good software always had an excellent, beautifully crafted readme, detailing features, install how-to, changelog, and other wonderful details! No need for google! Sometimes we forget there are people that operate without internet for documentation...
Starting A Consulting Company and Productizing A Service
Are your friends calling you the Mayor of Doucheville behind your back?
I have been using http://www.bing.com/travel/ (was Farecast before MS acquired it) for a while now and it has easily saved me a couple thousand dollars on airline tickets. Highly recommend it although yapta does look interesting.
Federated Media buys semantic search startup
That's a surprise. They should have called it "Mind Trick" to ride the coattails without (probably) using the trademark.
Kotka: Static and Dynamic Typing in Clojure
Kinda feels like Kayak. I do like the "previous searches" tabs.
There's still a scarcity of validation via reputation that is hard to get rid of.
I was under the impression that limbo was a separate level entered into when you "die" in a dream but your body is not ready to receive you back. Saito goes there when he dies in Level 3, and Cobb when he drowns in Level 2 because he's trapped "below". Level 4 was simply a deeper level filled by Cobb's dream world that he had created with his wife.

I might have misunderstood though.
Well, i think 37Signals, YardEngine and GitHub uses BrainTree instead of Paypal, and IMO BrainTree is the best solution. I was helping the guys of http://rega.la to build the online payment part and i noted that for Credit Card payment is so cool.
Other way you can use is BOKU(http://www.boku.com/) which uses mobile carriers to make the money transaction in 3 simple steps.
Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.

A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld.

If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from.

There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.
It was the post-war political atmosphere of egalitarianism and the fact that Europe and Asia were in ruins that made factory jobs well-paying in 50s America. Once other countries reverted to the mean and neoliberals captured government, so ended the conditions for strong wage growth.
New PeepCode Screencast: Meet Node.js Part I
The 3D Craze Is In Full Effect; Still Can't Find A Way In People's Homes
Been to the movie theaters lately? Well then you probably have heard about Avatar, Piranha 3-D, Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D, Despicable Me, Saw 3D, Titanic 3D (yeah, they are bringing back Titanic in 3D), and so on. It’s pretty clear that 3D is the movie industry’s selling point right now, and people are actually buying into it. But are these people buying into the 3D experience at home? Not so much.
I'm curious - do you live in a way smaller space than your parents did when you grew up, or when they were your age?

When I compare my current living space with the house I grew up in, it's significantly smaller. However, my parents were over 40 years old by the time I have my first memories. They'd been saving for close to 20 years to afford that place, while I've been saving for maybe 5 years.

When my mom was my age, she lived in a 4th floor walk-up with one of her friends from college. And yes, it was smaller than my current apartment. If you compare my mom's childhood with my childhood, she lived in a small apartment almost her whole life, until about 3 years before I was born, while I grew up in a house in the suburbs.

I wonder if this is behind a lot of the 20-something angst. We compare our current living standards to our living standards as children, and realize (correctly) that it's not as good. However, that childhood living standard is based on parents that were already at the peak of their careers, and had scrimped for years to get there. Of course we're not going to live as well.
Neat looking product.

Bad website. Just WTF does this product do?

This should be in large print on the home page:

"Jinx makes your code 'unlucky' by forcing hard-to-find concurrency bugs to occur with more frequency while you are debugging."
Lock/Unlock your door using your iPhone
How to Hire from the Bottom of the Barrel
Touche. In order to get an accurate comparison, you'd have to compare to someone your age living in a city as large and dense as LA at the time they were your age. That probably means NYC, London, or Tokyo for your parents or grandparents since there weren't many megacities 30 or 60 years ago.
I have a Unix book from 1984, in which vi is described as "this new editor which has more features than a normal user would ever want to know about, and as a consequence is a huge memory hog".
The article's author probably mistook "gigabit" as "gigabytes". Nevertheless, 40Gbps is impressive.
Sounds great. I really wish you guys the best.

I just listened to the DODOcase Mixergy interview, and the PayPal and Google Checkout horror stories made it clear how important it is go get another "trusted" payment service for customers.

At the moment, not choosing to use PayPal on a site seems like something destined to doom a product.
> Your residence. A decent 2 bedroom place in a desirable part of San Francisco will run $3,000 per month in rent, a mortgage will be much higher. We're not talking anything extravagant here, just 600-900 sq ft.

As I said, "I'm also assuming that the first thing I would do is to pay off my mortgage, so what remains is basically entirely discretionary spending." Now, I've chosen not to live in one of those 3 or 4 ridiculously expensive cities. You might not consider spending $3K for < 1000sqft extravagant, but let me assure you that most people do. (Also, FWIW, I have friends with a 2 bdrm apartment, across the street from golden gate park, surrounded by good restaurants, which they only pay $1600 for.)

> Kids. It doesn't even have to be private school we're talking about, but I imagine that clothing/feeding/entertaining more than one person adds up quickly.

You imagine, but I actually live it. Kids don't actually eat that much, and amuse themselves much more easily than people seem to give them credit for. Their clothing is fairly cheap, and since they usually grow out of things faster than they wear them out, you can pick up a lot of stuff even cheaper at second-hand shops.

I certainly enjoy travel, and it's a non-trivial portion of my discretionary spending. My point is not that you need to live live a pauper, just that you don't need as much money as you think to have an enjoyable life. There was a time in my life when I blew through twice what I spend today. And I use that phrase because I literally couldn't tell you how I did it. An attitude of "we've got money; might as well spend it" caused money to seemingly evaporate with nothing to show for it. I don't feel any less well off today. Honestly I feel better and richer knowing that I'm not spending every cent I make.
"what items did the middle class of 1970 have that the poor of 2001 lack?"

They're not items, but I'd say hope, stability, confidence, status, etc.
I guess some entrepreneur can find some other use to commercialize this bot.
:)

There might need to be some variations on these infographics to fit the multiple theories out there.
It sounds like you guys make really useful software!

As you say, MDs who have the skills and are inclined to do this sort of stuff are few and far between. My grad program in medical informatics has a master's track whose graduates are mostly MDs, and they would be quite well qualified for this sort of thing... except that most of them go on to either be CIOs or implementation consultants, and typically make far more than analysts do.

I think it's something that they're going to have to start teaching in medical schools, however. As more and more places start taking quality improvement seriously, being able to think systematically about clinical data is going to become a very important skill for doctors to possess. Of course, our experience thus far with trying to get it into the curriculum has not been very encouraging. It's amazing- doctors love trying out new gadgets or drugs, so they're clearly not inherently afraid of technology or of change... but try and get them to modify their curricula, and they look at you like you're crazy.
How to use Python Client and Thrift with Hbase
Rollover Tweets
So I guess we now have empirical evidence of how long the average person's masturbation session is.
Adblock is not site specific, google could make it their policy that any extension targeted to mess with advertising on a specific site would be against their TOS.

This would catch a whole pile of potential malware and, unfortunately, stuff like this would be caught in the dragnet.
Google Editions Launching In?
Hmm,

Biking through Oakland the other night, I saw a guy pushing a shopping cart with one hand and talking on his cellphone with the other.

A good deal of your lifestyles of the no-longer-needed description might true except ... the 4000 sq ft house.

For the now-permanently-unemployed, it would be a 40 sq ft "home" or perhaps a car or suped-up shopping cart. But still with lots of gadgets.

Space (at the least) isn't going to be made cheaper by mass production even if everything else will.
I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld.

I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it.

The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast.

I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.
What stopped rapportive from simply inserting their box in the dom in a way that they did not have to remove a revenue driver from the thing they are building their base on?

> "Google shuts down service hundreds of thousands of GMail users love so they can make more money" doesn't sound like a very nice PR campaign.

There's an element reminiscent of blackmail in there that I really don't like. Just because you can does not make it right.

Somehow this doesn't pass the smell test, I can't quite put my finger on it but if this wasn't sanctioned by google (which it very well may have been) then I find it an odd thing to do.

Launching an add-on service, fine, launching one to the detriment of the bottom line of the service you're launching it on, not cool.

If google would do something like this to a YC company we'd be nailing them to the highest tree.
Microsoft Reports Record Fourth-Quarter Of $16.04 billion
Online or offline dating: which works?
Snoop Dogg Promotes "Mafia Wars" by Blowing Up a Truck
I agree. As I commented in the orignal post:

"For over five years I've hired four product developers for three different startups I've co-founded. None of them has delivered satisfactory results. I am a perfectionist and that may be part of the issue. I've decided to stick to product development and, instead, hire others to take care of sales, business development, operations, etc. Also, doing product development is what I love the most. I am not that good at interacting face-to-face with others."
I already have 3D. It's called reality.

This article mentions that one thing hampering 3D in the home is the incompatibility of the viewing glasses. Well perhaps that is actually the solution. Glasses that show the wearer 3D content on their own. It could even be synchronized for a group of individuals watching the same thing.
Hrm... It says my geekiest comment was "Any examples?" Doesn't seem very geeky... Maybe I'm not a geek... *has an existential crisis
I don't think that is necessarily true. Perhaps a public key scheme could be derived that would enable everybody to verify the votes on their home PC.

The challenge is to allow for anonymous voting. I don't think it is necessarily a problem that is impossible to solve. Practical solutions are also a challenge.
"There should be some trillionaires walking around whose ancestors started saving in the Renaissance when modern banking began -- but there aren't."

Carlisle Cullen. ;-)

Anyway - this is a really good point, but I'll point out something else. Most of the wealthy would-be trillionaires whose fortunes got wiped out passed down another inheritance: their genes. Those same disasters that wipe out the savings of the rich tend to kill the poor, who simply can't afford transportation away from disaster areas, bribes for border guards and security forces, political connections to ensure safety for their children, or information savvy to know when a crisis is coming.

Most of today's middle class is descended from the kings and nobility of the high middle ages. The peasantry just mostly died out, leaving no descendants.
If you're into Tango, or more bohemian, or from the US, you probably will like Buenos Aires.

But I see it much like I expect Canadians see the US: something like my home city (Montevideo), with both the good and (especially) the bad things magnified.

There are beautiful parts of Buenos Aires (I recommend Recoleta and Palermo), and lively parts of Buenos Aires (not my speciality :) ), and they're both nice.
Heh. I also calculated it from facts I knew, and got it wrong, even accounting for approximations and uncertainties. The facts I happened to know made for a trickier calculation. (The moon makes one pretty-circular orbit per month following Newton's laws; it subtends 1 degree in the sky. But actually it subtends 1/2 degree -- I haven't checked if this was my only error, but gosh, it sure is easy to goof.)
Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.
My personal opinion (and its relevance might be dictated by the score of this comment) is that Blurry People is a good name because it sticks out more than some takeoff on an older product ("Blurryroulette", "blurrychat"). I'm burnt out on websites names that follow a trend. Chatroulette didn't call themselves VideOmegle or something. (I had to look up Chatroulette's wikipedia page to even remember the name Omegle).

On the other hand the tagline I wouldn't mind changing, since it's unrelated to the name. Then again it's more related to the purpose of the site.
It's not just the size of the Notes userbase which makes it attractive... It's the fact that every user of Notes hates it with a passion. A market ripe for picking I'd say!
This whole story sounds sensationalist IMO. They are forgetting two things.
1) Rapportive serves a purpose - showing social information
2) Perhaps Google will introduce GMail "widgets" or blocks so Rapportive and similar services could use it.

That said, I agree with you on the depriving income ethical concerns.
The point I was trying to make is pretty much this: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=5855