skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook must be crapping themselves a little - games, music, video and all the social aspects tied into a piece of software that's deeply integrated into a ton of people's lives.
I'm planning to bootstrap everything, but exit strategy will involve some VC's for sure.
This is how Apple rolls and I must say I am impressed although it was expected.

They have long been sitting on one of the strongest and certainly most profitable "social" networks.

Now they have used it to do one of the most classical goals in business. Profit maximization.

I don't even think this is something other companies can learn much from as most seem to be walking around like lemmings trying to incorporate features to grow their (non-paying) following.

Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen says.
> I really enjoyed that "open standards" event, which was broadcast via HTML5

HTML5 is a markup language, not a streaming transport. Apple used HTTP Live Streaming, which is tech they're trying to push as a new standard. It has certain technical benefits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

I believe the VLC nightly build has support for it, but Apple's not going to go out and tell people "Hey, go use this weird beta client to access the stream."
Very cool news for YCombinator ... met Alexis at a DC Drankkit and he's a ridiculously down-to-earth dude.
I haven't been able to figure it out if you can. In order to see the music and actually play it (where it's not grayed out and unclickable) I have to set my music to be manually managed on my PC at home, then I need to get the iTunes library key from the file at home and inject it into the right spot in the same file on any other PC I want to listen to the music on.

I actually just stopped putting music on my iPhone because it was too much of a hassle to do every time that key changed. I just use Pandora or GrooveShark now instead.
Maybe they don't want to step on the toes of Netflix... yet.
Interesting and inflammatory, but I want to see some Wagg-Ed refugee admit that they've had a special office full of people baiting slashdot, groklaw and other sites.
> Wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.

Why's that?
Thanks for the advice. Did you have all 5 companies at the same time or one after another?
Realtime checkouts from all of the Harvard University libraries
That would be a killer feature; I've got 8+ years of listening history in Last.fm, starting with an old Linux jukebox that played music 24/7 (between X11 crashes), and then with iPod and iTunes.

On the other hand, you'd have all these geeks accusing Apple of collecting data for nefarious purposes, just like many of the comments here.

Regardless, Ping looks great and I can't wait to try it out.
I hadn't thought about it. The main reason we did this now was that we wanted to hire Alexis, and he wanted to live in NYC.
I consider emacs more of OS/environment rather than an application... but I've started to become an emacs addict over the past year.
Try to avoid negativity that doesn't contribute to the on-going conversation. (Etiquette here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Instead you could've said something to the effect of, "I'm excited about the C/C++ development kit as I've wanted to work on a project that does X and needed C/C++ because of Y."

Cheers!
Oh no, get as far away as you can!

Check out Linode or SoftLayer.
Unfortunately, Compilers is no longer a required class to get a CS degree.

As with all degrees, that depends entirely on the school.
In fairness, it's a lot easier to implement than OfficeXML - it's basically HTML + dynamic M3U playlists + MPEG. OfficeXML is more or less a core dump of Word/Excel/Whatever serialised as XML.
That was actually the most powerful moment in the event for me. I think that people really connect with being able to come home and show their pictures from the day to their girlfriend or family.
StartupDigest: 3 Takeaways From "Geeks on a Boat"
You say it was expected, yet I heard no one predict it.
All the advice that I've seen, from lawyers to VCs, suggests periodic vesting. You want to have shares vest in equal increments every day, week, or month. Any longer than that and you're asking for trouble, like pre-vesting firings and the resulting bad-faith lawsuit.

The whole idea is to make vesting proportionate to work. So you don't want full vesting on day one. Your co-founder could quit on day two and leech the next few years of your hard work. (Plus any VC is going to make you revise that.) But you also don't want someone putting in three years of work and never vesting.

I would probably go with monthly to make it fair and easy.
Getting that on a shirt

"And yes, I'm a big fan of moms."
-- Alexis Ohanian
Thank you for these links, I had no idea these even existed here.
People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap.

The problem is they often do unavoidably, at least for certain specific professions.

Imagine a Preacher/priest/etc involved in a major moral scandal regarding his major. He would lose moral authority in his congregation. Even just being known to get wildly drunk and play Mario Kart on Saturday is likely to affect his ability to provide the leadership he must. The same applies, in slightly different ways, to senior military officers.

On the other hand, if I find out that one of my programmers is doing substantial hobby programming, I would certainly see that as a positive. Not because it directly affects what he does at work now, but because it will almost certainly make him a superior programmer in the long run.

You can, and should, separate them to a degree, but especially for public facting positions you cannot and should not try to create an absolute separation.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

Are people using Dropbox on servers, though? A lot of the benefits of Dropbox don't strike me as helping for servers, for the most part. I don't have too much experience, but it seems to me servers are one place you have to actively manage your backups, and can't rely on the "it just works" philosophy of Dropbox.
I very rarely do this, I just use Windows photo preview. I must be the exception. Being downvoted is a great way to force you to rethink something.
Human beings are incapable of deliberately solving coordination problems larger than 50-person hunter-gatherer tribes. Anything that happens on a larger scale is driven by mob physics and the decisions of individuals and small groups who aggregate power under those mob physics.
"I'll add books to your list"

I bet 'gifting' people in your Ping friends network with music (and apps, books later on) will be a profitable feature for Ping, when Apple implements it.
Ahh, good ol' SoundJam. Those were the days.

I really didn't like iTunes at first -- I stuck with SoundJam for a good long time. Until I moved to OS X, actually.
>I would argue that the people who take the most physical and mental risks for the benefit of society should get the most pay. That seems perfectly reasonable and moral to me.

It shouldn't. Society should reward benefits, not costs.
23 Tweetable Startup Insights From Seth Godin
One possible reason to restrict would be that they used the event as sort of a beta test for streaming/live broadcasting infrastructure/process.

Sort of like Gmail with the invites. Artificially restrict access, so you don't need huge scale from the get go.
Introducing the Open State Project API
No, submit tweets just like Hacker News. Retweets vote up, comments are @replied to the person.
New iTunes 10 ready to download
It's funny to see them positioning it as "like Facebook and Twitter for music", as if MySpace never existed.
It's not just that. The transactions costs of a truly popular movement are massive and difficult both to initiate and to sustain. That's why so many popular movements turn out, on further investigation, to be the false populism of a charismatic would-be dictator.
I think this will be the most monetarily successful social network yet. While Facebook has a huge mindshare I don't think they are very good at turning that mindshare into money in their own coffers.

Apple is really good at daring to ask for money for their services. While other companies often rely on ads or even more nebulous ways of making money, Apple just asks their users to pay money.

I really like this model of paying for what I get. I means that I am the customer, and not the product.
this is a pretty hand wavy introduction to zippers.

A Zipper is many cool things, but most importantly it can be thought of as a really nice way of supporting arbitrary traversals of tree-like data structures. On the theory side there are cool papers such as www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ctm/diff.pdf which talk about some of the interesting relationships between zippers and certain types of recursive data structures.

Also, earlier this summer someone released a really wonderful generic zipper library for haskell https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~adamsmd/papers/scrap_your_zipper... that is quite nice.

I've actually spent a few weeks this summer thinking very hard about how to add some cool functionality to the zipper abstraction layered on top of the scrap your zipper library.

Either way, if you're doing anything algorithmic on a tree that is more complicated than a left or right fold, if you're not using a zipper, you're probably making things overly difficult for you self. Save a programmer (week), use a zipper! :)
Funny because I meant that in the sense that simonsquiff didn't mention the books in his comment, but you're right.

When gifting right now, I don't think you have any way to know if the recipient has or not the song/app. I haven't gifted songs too much, so I'm not sure what happens in that case. Ping might be able to avoid this situation.
Audacity (cool program though it is) is to Logic as Notepad is to Office. Which is to say, a tiny, tiny subset of the other's functionality.

Edit: I just checked up on Wikipedia. Audacity has made a good deal of progress since I last used it. It's still not Logic caliber, but my analogy is definitely an exaggeration.
I would be interested as well!
Manufacturing is bad for the environment, and I think US environmental regulation is partly to blame for the decline of manufacturing in the US. I, for one, am happy with this tradeoff, but I think any discussion about manufacturing should acknowledge this.
Blockbuster will be thrilled to learn that they're not competing with Netflix. You should hurry up and tell them before they go out of business.
Yeah, its been tough getting the word out about these programs. You should definitely come out to Launch Up tomorrow!

http://www.launchup.org/2010/08/18/launchup-10-%E2%80%93-thu...
How long is a piece of string?

Choose your vesting period based on the incentives you wish to give the recipient.

Put another way-- first, figure out exactly what it is you are trying to encourage/discourage, and once you have that in mind, pick a vesting system that fits.

If, for example, your goal is to keep a key employee on board for a long time, you might designate a chunk of shares to them, and vest them in 20% increments on an annual basis. If the person leaves after 3 years, they get 60% of the shares. Etc.

Note that depending on your jurisdiction, there may be tax implications of any kind of stock option plan-- be sure to check with your lawyer/financial advisor before finalizing any arrangements.
I've never known anybody that actually likes iTunes. They use it begrudgingly. I don't see why anyone would want to spend more time in it.
You don't have permission to access /programs/twonz.html on this server.

That's actually a passphrase.
Given how poorly iTunes 9 runs on my quad-core Win7 machine with gigs and gigs of ram, I'm not particularly excited by this news. Wake me up when they've completely rebuilt iTunes. The only reason I keep it around is for my iPhone - I've switched to Zune (of all things) as my music manager, and actually quite like most of how it organizes things.

On a less grumpy note, the $99 Apple TV they just launched is pretty smooth looking, the only thing I feel grumbly about regarding that is the absence of Hulu. But that's a topic for a different thread...
If things get bad, many productive young people will be finding a country with less debt and moving there. If you stay behind to pay it off, you're a sucker. If you buy government bonds from a government in lots of debt, you're a sucker if you lose and a cheater if you win. If you accept pension promises you're acting in bad faith (letting present officials make promises to you using future generations' money, which is more convenient for them) and hoping that no one notices, and I don't feel an obligation to pay you off. There was a time when pension promises were honorable, but that time is not now. It's sad - you should have noticed that small little feeling of something being wrong, but realistically, most people have no sense of morality apart from what their friends think is wrong. But it's not any happier if the victims get screwed instead of the cheaters.
Ask HN: Apple Battery Technology?
I just saw a live blog on the Apple keynote and one of the things that struck me was the battery lives of new Apple products.

It's like they are continuously packing something better in a smaller space while using Li-ion technology. What I don't understand is how the hell are they sustaining this? What technology are they using?
But Facebook has a client accessible in every platform out there and it is even accessible by a common browser, whereas with Ping I will need iTunes or an Apple device/software to use, also it probably will not have an API.

I think Apple is just making things to profit more as a content distributor that it is becoming, Ping and the new AppleTV is just pointing in this direction, at least for me.
403'd. Also, venge.net is apache test page.

6 points, 1 hour ago? Let's hope that's because those are legit upvotes before the site went down.
thanks for your answer Markstansbury, let say the co founder owns 35% of the company...in a typical start up, when do you allow them to vest the last portion? after a year, 2 years or when the company gets profitable?
I think this is a major opportunity for YCombinator.
This is awesome to see. I'm an SF'er now, but I had previously launched some startups in Utah. I hope you guys have a killer time.
People use their TVs for watching TV shows and films. I can't imagine many people being excited about a photo slideshow capability.
Actually, Cyanogen brings Froyo to several devices that would otherwise have never seen an official update. The MyTouch, G1, and Hero were never slated to receive an update. Also, Cyanogen is a modified but mostly vanilla AOSP ROM, where most of these HTC phones would receive some variant of either the Sense UI or the MT3G UI.

The Cyanogen devs have accomplished a major feat by moding AOSP 2.2 to run on phones with no documentation or other support from the hardware vendors.
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly did.

It was also known that apple where buying into this space. Will see if I can find the reference.

And I will make another prediction. Apple will have to take on Spotify once they reach momentum in the US (and I think they will with time)

In other words iTunes music is going to turn into a streaming music service at some point.
What's Enough Traction for VCs?
I think that my case is unusual, but I did a comp sci PhD, writing a dissertation on relational databases, and it's been extremely useful. I pursued the PhD because I liked writing software and wanted to study it more. No plans about academe or industry. Just seemed like a good idea at the time.

The PhD has helped in a few ways:

- I've been doing database-related startups for 20+ years, and my deep understanding of database technology has proven very useful. I could have gained some of this insight by working, but I think this path has led to a broader and stronger foundation.

- On a couple of projects, my actual dissertation subject has been relevant.

- While a PhD was off-putting to employers at my first startup (understandable, since it was also my first actual software job, and they had no evidence that I actually wanted to write software and was capable of doing so); once I got past that, the title was occasionally a useful thing to put out there. (On one occasion, I was asked to write a paper for an industry group with "lots of symbols".)

- Contacts with the academic world of databases that have come in handy over the years.
Mod-wsgi: Processes vs. Threads
Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook
99USD for an Apple TV. I bet the people launching the Boxee Box in November are currently very nervous.
It's not obvious now, but when I came across the parent comment, it was at -2. Don't understand the hate.
Smaller, Revamped $99 Apple TV Announced
Apple reveals new cloud-centric Apple TV for $99
I really wish Apple would split iTunes into various programs rather than the do-all music player/store/iDevice manager/an excuse to bundle a bunch of other Apple software and now it also provides a social network too. Or at least into modules that can be added to the vanilla player.

There's a problem when it runs worse than playing 720p video, Microsoft Office, or Firefox with quite a few tabs on an N450 netbook.
Also, Spotify.
It really does look a lot more like Facebook than MySpace. You basically have a Facebook wall of all the people you follow, not some kind of customized site you can design from scratch, like the mess that was MySpace.
Gifting will do away with those Apple vouchers you can buy to the vale of 10 bucks or whatever for your friend. Instead, you can get them the song directly.

A ready-made social network, all the network infrastructure in place, users with credit cards at the ready, owned by a highly successful tech multinational....the recommendation on APPL is 'buy'!
Internet Archive has a working copy. http://web.archive.org/web/20080421164301/http://www.venge.n...
Our view (and yes, this may seem counterintuitive at first), is that the problem with ACID is not that its guarantees are too strong (and that therefore scaling these guarantees in a shared-nothing cluster of machines is too hard), but rather that its guarantees are too weak, and that this weakness is hindering scalability.

That is indeed counter-intuitive at first, but they make a good case. I'm impressed with the idea, and hope to follow this more closely. Anyone know any other research on the subject?
"Smart companies — including Rypple — are happily relocating their cosmetics, er, marketing budgets into product development."

I don't think that redirecting a marketing budget into product development is a great idea. A unique or revolutionary product can stand by itself. However, even products that are breaking new ground still need to get the word out that they exist and importantly what problems they're solving.

I'm Canadian and I completely agree that Canadian companies are in a unique position to kick ass. However, we still have a bit of an uphill battle to face. From financing to taxes it's important for us to clearly announce what products we're making, what problems they're solving and importantly what products we're selling.

Viva la Canada - just don't dismiss marketing - no matter how unconventional it may be.
Apple announces the new Apple TV for $99
As a patent on a process instead of on an actual product, how does this kind of patent tend to fare in the courts?
> Any fool can stick a printf statement into their code, just like any fool can run it in a debugger. You might get lucky and find the problem

That's like saying that you might get lucky if you make random changes to program code. Yes, it's true, but ....

> Understanding what you're doing will help you out whichever technique you use. Better yet, it will help you decide which technique is more appropriate to the problem.

Except that I was talking about understanding the program, not "what you're doing".

In my experience, debuggers let me find things, or, more often, think that I'm doing something useful, with less understanding than printf. YMMV.
Power Note By Diigo
Nanocrystal conductors using 'dirt-cheap material' promise massive 3-D storage
Don't shortchange the US. US is still the world's largest generator of patents.

A123, Tesla, SpaceX, Amgen, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Medtronic all these are in the US, not to mention most of the biggest companies in the world.

The problem is all those patents are definitely turning into profits, quite a lot of which does get distributed to Americans directly or indirectly, but definitely not by generating enough jobs to keep everybody employed.

May be the number of patents that are being produced has to be increased, to generate enough jobs to overcome the producctivty gains caused by new technology?

Of course, for that to happen, there should be the ability to produce still more patents, for which in turn the bottlneck is people, that is, qualified people.
I'm all for securing your privacy. I'm just not one of those people who thinks my privacy is being invaded if somebody looks at me when I'm walking down the street.
Unearthly Powers (Review of Asimov's The End of Eternity)
Apple will buy Netflix, if they can get it past the feds.
There's quite a few people who use iPhones/iPod Touches, though.
The Story of the PING Program
Is there a list of good, reasonably priced patent lawyers who specialize in software/web patent applications anywhere on the web?
Choice quote:

Part of the pleasure of reading old science fiction is precisely this: with the special powers vested in you by historical hindsight, you can compare the playfully visionary forecasts with what actually took place.
If the new Apple TV is a big success they can integrate it with Ping and we may finally have the Facebook killer we've been waiting for. Monetization would not be an issue since the whole social network is essentially an advert for the iTunes store. I've always found music and screen related discussion much more compelling than personal updates or messages, and I don't think I'm alone, or even in the minority (it's just I have the savvy to find good online communities for such discussion, unlike say my parents).
The Canadian startup scene is an interesting and enjoyable one. But let's please allow the numbers to speak for themselves. If there's one thing I dislike about the past few years of the startup scene, it has been this circle jerk echo chamber of "we're great, let's all go for a drink to celebrate".

Canada has a broken VC industry. Our telecom industry is indeed backwater. People are getting into startups because there's no other option for them, and the startup jobs offer lower pay with fewer benefits. This would be a great tradeoff if Canadian startups actually thrived to the point where early employees could make back their investment. But the track record is fairly poor there. Government grants and funds prop up a large percentage of Canadian startups for the 5 years or so that they manage to survive.

These are problems we face today with solutions that will require long term thinking to resolve. I think we have the right attitude at all levels in this country. All levels of government across the political spectrum are on the entrepreneurship bandwagon, and there is no longer a stigma to starting a business. It is actually quite trendy to the point that everybody and their brother is doing it. But let's please improve our track record by staying in business, and in fact thriving as a startup as opposed to flaming out after a year or two when the government grants and initial investment are burned through.
There are off-topics and off-topics. Yours was one of the good ones. ;-)
yawn...
Seth's Blog: Launching the ShipIt Workbook
I just use http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/
The labor theory of value has an old and distinguished pedigree:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#The_birth...

There's no socialism involved in accepting some version of this theory. Yes, most if not all socialists believe in it, but the converse is not true.