skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. . . . But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person which never cost me any money in the first case.

I hate this argument.

People who want to pirate games or music frequently say that by pirating, they are actually providing a benefit to the author by giving him exposure. That's true sometimes, but I don't think it's always true.

In general, with any creative product, you want to try to turn some portion of it into exposure and some portion into money. You might divide things up 10/90 or 50/50 or 70/30 or even 100/0-but-I-charge-for-support, depending on what you think is optimum for your goals.

But pirates presume to make that decision for you.

(Though I agree that smart authors will embrace the fact that copying is free and easy rather than trying to fight it. The piece of your product you want to use for exposure can be copyable, but the piece you want to sell shouldn't be. Or if it is, you should be honest about your income being from donations or exceptionally honest people.)
It was nice to see that someone could test these with real-world usage, but I was disappointed by the quality of the results. I didn't see mention of the number of runs performed on each instance or the standard deviation of the results.

The article made it sound like they only ran it once on each instance, which means there are many factors that could have affected the results such as disk caching, other processes, or high load.

As one of my physics professors uses to say (paraphrased): A measurement is meaningless without an estimate of the error (+/- 0 meaning).
Evil stuff, but I do think this whole thing turned out for the best for Arrington. The Crunchpad (or JooJoo) was an absolute flop whose only hope of success was arriving well in advance of the iPad.

There's really very little that his continued involvement would have changed, but now not only is he disassociated with it, he stands to benefit from any legal remedies.
Completely agree with you. I was expecting to be able to throw it up on a random shared host, now this won't be possible.

Oh well hopefully it will work on Heroku.
I think they are supposed to represent 'aspects' of your life.
It looks like someone created an account named "Mark Suckerberg" and automated a posting flood repeating the text "I accidentally.. the whole economy".

Also, said account's avatar looks like some kinda of three-way orgy. Not investigating that image farther...
...And that just happened to be the account you log in as. Changed the name and image. I'm sure someone will change it back.
I'm dealing with this right now, as I'm pretty interested in Diaspora's architecture. Since Fedora (13) ships with Ruby 1.8.6, it looks like I'll be building a standalone version of ruby just for this (requires Rails 3, released a couple of weeks ago, which in turn requires ruby >= 1.8.7).

Rails is a perfectly good target for this, IMHO; I'm a Python guy and would have preferred Django, but that's a bikeshed as far as I'm concerned. And, for a dev release, depending on a just-released version of a major framework isn't a huge deal, as long as they understand that it's going to be a barrier to entry for quite a few people until distributions have caught up.
>If you constantly lose track of the time, buy a watch. Set an alarm. Use a smartphone with a calendar that will remind you of things.

I'm a chronic late-comer. As a result I get extremely anxious about arriving late for things. Sometimes this results in turning up very early (also considered rude) or having so much time that I have to do something else first, which again often results in lateness.

Personally I put it down to a poor ability to keep track of time dyschronia I guess one could call it.

If I wear a watch I don't look at it, if I set an alaram I'll override it. I've tried putting clocks forward. I get google alerts texted to me, 3 seconds later I've forgotten; I have an extremely poor memory.

I'm very one tracked, struggle with multitasking (NMIs causing a context switch at least).

Not an excuse? Then I must be lazy and unreliable - I'm running 1½ businesses (13-14 hour days the last couple), bringing up 2 kids, meet most of my deadlines, etc..

Inexcusable? Perhaps I'm just built differently.
If you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.
EDIT: Upon further investigation, I've found that one dyno is not enough to run Diaspora on Heroku. You'll quickly start filling up your request queue and it will slow down to a crawl.

It works.

heroku addons:add mongohq:free

Then apply this patch to make Diaspora use the correct Mongo server and database: http://gist.github.com/581833
I'm not sure what the end product will look like or what the functionality will be, but when I think of "distributed social network" I'd like to see something like a HN node, a reddit node, a Digg node, a Slashdot node, etc., where they all communicate with each other and aggregate updates from all those platforms, so that if I make a comment or submit a story on one site, it shows up on the "social network" part of my profile across every other site. A bit like FriendFeed, I suppose. If large sites adopted it in that way, it could certainly become a "very real social network."
Yeah colour lovers is my first stop on the inspiration trail when I start a new design. Browsing colour pallets gives me a starting point from which to build from without borrowing too heavily from others work directly.
For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution. To me, this is so awkward as to rule out the name for use in serious software.
How to Create an Interactive YouTube Video
This video acccompanies the How to Create an Interactive YouTube Video
article on www.VitaminCM.com. You will learn how to Create an Interactive Video using YouTube's Annotation links.
Many of the exciting[1] new open source projects seem to have a huge focus on UX. I love this. Open source has always seemed to have a stigma of 'unusable' and these initiatives are really going against that notion. Diaspora, jQueryUI, SproutCore, Cappuccino..

[1] I use exciting not as personal excitement here but by the community excitement around these projects. Whether its press coverage, developer buy in or user elation.
While the graph is nice, error bounds would be extremely useful. Comparing two groups based on a sample size of 5 (per group) is an extremely tricky thing to do.

It's even trickier when you try to rule out systematic errors by reducing your sample size further. For instance, the blog mentions one systematic error caused by D->R transitions. He then claims this is ruled out by analyzing two R->R and one D->D transition, ignoring the fact that 2 of those three transitions were based on fluke circumstances themselves (specifically Kennedy->Johnson and Nixon->Ford).
Apparently documents IE saves locally are not bit-for-bit faithful to the original. Any chance you downloaded your document and uploaded it again later, maybe after editing locally?

Also, dear Microsoft: PLEASE STOP SMUGGLING METADATA IN COMMENTS! Markup is extensible for a reason. Jeez.
No, and that's my point.
http://vimeo.com/11099292
If you like this, check out the RedR project:

http://www.red-r.org/
In my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better.

Money and more help can solve some problems.
Because it raised $200,000 from random web benefactors. It has quite a bit more pull and expectation than those unwashed hundreds.
I must be seeing a different site to you two - going to them both now they seem quite different to me. Similarly colour schemes but very far from identical.

http://imgur.com/zxoED.jpg - image of twitter vs scribd on my desktop.

I do website design part-time, incidentally.
Playstation Move 101
Internet Marketing for Dummies - by a Dummy
how is this any worse than

... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say.

This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to think through the security implications of running it than the developers did. [Edit: And the developers apparently have a publicly accessible instance running. That decision is curious.]

This will be running in production today. If very bad things happen, the TechCrunch article about it will have Diaspora in the headline.

That is enough of an incentive to have a security page.
There are a bunch of open source social networking projects out there. One is Appleseed, which has been in active development since 2004, open source since 2005, and has had four releases in the past 3 months.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

For all the attention Diaspora is getting, the other projects will be usable by average users way before they will.
For a more near-and-dear example, look at IBM: they pursued SCO to an extent that I'm sure was unjustified if you analyzed only that particular case. Hell, I suspect the amount of lawyer time IBM burned while running SCO into the ground was probably more than SCO's market cap at some points -- they could have bought them and ended it at just about any time, and there was a lot of speculation that SCO's goal was (if not a cash settlement) exactly that. But that would have rewarded the people behind the whole debacle, while slowly ripping them apart in court didn't.

It's important, if you are a significant enough business or even a private individual, to realize that knuckling under on one case might invite others. IBM's stance, and I'd imagine it's also the stance of many other major companies and wealthy individuals, is analogous to governments that have a blanket policy against negotiating with terrorists or meeting ransom demands. In the short run, it might not be the easier or cheaper route out, but in the long run the alternative might be opening yourself up to death by a thousand cuts.
This is complete rubbish and shouldn't have made HN.
Is it even for real?

I mean, yes, IF your employees cost 100k/year on average, then you need (100k * number_employees) to break even.
(Thats what 'average' means!)

So IF you break even, your revenue must be at least that. (thats what 'break even' means.)

But theres no information here! That's not a bound, or estimate of your revenue, its just the amount you need to pay your staff, if your staff have average salary.

This 'formula' makes no allowance for some companies having a higher average salary than others. It makes no allowance for some companies having a higher profit margin than others.

Nothing to see here; move along.
The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter
BTW, from just grabbing the code, it looks like: use Ruby 1.8.7, not 1.9.2, have a local mongod running, bundle install, bundle exec thin start. Looks nice.
Cool, but it seems that I can use them for only 2 weeks ("Expires October 1, 2010") or 90 days ("Expires 90 days after first run.").
It's not actually illegal everywhere in the US, for example, prostitution is legal in some counties in Nevada. The main reason though is that there are too many religious pundits.

Don't try to find logic in this. Some things are even stranger: in Washington state it's legal to go to casino, but it's illegal to gamble online.
Had a 5 minute glance at the code. I don't think they realise that `self` is the default receiver in Ruby, judging by how many times I saw it used superfluously.

Anyway, kudos to them for actually releasing some code. I would like to contribute, does anyone know if they are accepting patches?
At the risk of stealing someone's flawed analogy (ctrl+f dyslexia) - just because millions of people are capable of something doesn't mean that everyone is capable of it.

I'm wondering now if there are any studies of time keeping abilities in the self confessed "dyschronic". Some people have (actually) no concept of temporal relationships and can't judge time passing, is it too far a leap to imagine there is a sliding scale of this condition?
Looking for a Job? Throw Away Your Resume
How to retrieve a Gmail contact list?
I also recommend intel, had one of the very early ones fail after a year, but got quick no-questions replacement.
They're part of the discovery process and were unsealed; thus they're part of the public record.

It makes sense for TC to reveal them: this deprives FG and its PR-firm cronies the opportunity of spinning them the way they'd prefer, and is probably just good business in terms of TechCrunch's core business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. (It got me to visit their site, which I rarely do, FWIW.)
This isn't really interesting to me any more because in the interim since this all started along came the iPad filling the role the CrunchPad was supposed to fill.
Uh, we were talking about ditching the custom domain and pulling everything into a regular @gmail account.
man, i guess you aren't Russian yourself. So, just believe me, no sane Russian brain is able to produce the real intention to "motivate the Russian innovation scene and create a valuable knowledge transfer". Such phrase is hardly translatable into Russian language and isn't mappable into the ontology of the Russian mentality.
In my limited experience with the site, Groupon appears to use fake images of discounts coupled with the region's name in their web ads and web site in order to entice new users, not letting the users know that no discounts for the advertised area actually exist until after they sign up. If this is an old practice, this may factor into their "secret of success", as well.
Appleseed and Elgg are both in PHP, if you're looking to help out with an open source social networking project.
Also, need to: rake db:seed:tom
Then login: tom passwd: evankorth

App really looks nice so far.
I've been following this project for a while - these guys are from my school :)

Very awesome to see a bunch of undergrad guys come up with this project. I'm still amazed at the PR they got at the time.

I'm also kind of working on my own thing ... http://myownstream.com

If you set out to make a private social network, though, it's not that easy. Now, instead of trusting facebook, you'll have to trust ALL of your friends' hosting providers. For example, with diaspora, someone at mediatemple can in principle peek at the contact details you have synced with any of your friends. How is that any more secure?

What this is, is decentralized. Which is still really cool!
You probably meant Steve Jobs for this diatribe.
Thanks! New release was supposed to hit before the Xconomy article came out but should be up later today/tonight/late tonight...

very simple for now but lots of stuff cooking...
With the distributed instances, the focus on data portability, and open source nature of Diaspora one real use case that comes to mind is:

- Diaspora would make a "social" add on to other sites, ie, just one component of larger specialized sites.

Rather than creating "plug ins" for Diaspora, Diaspora becomes a plugin itself.

It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
I don't know about why so many, but my own comments are based on a some sort of a cognitive dissonance between what I read in the related mailing lists and in classic CS books like SCIP or what I've learnt from a Berkeley's courses.
I use a rough binary search from time to time.
For example, if I'm looking for something in a collection of named documents I know are filed, but don't what the starting and ending documents are. This comes up from time to time.

I also use heuristics I've learned debugging - just about when to challenge assumptions, and detecting when part of my mind is trying to stick to assumptions it shouldn't. Difficult to explain precisely - sort of a 'self delusion alarm bell'.

I've also learned something about structuring debate and discussion, from programming - I sometimes keep a mental model of the discussion under progress as a stack - tangents result in a push, and I've sort of learned to 'pop' afterwards to go back to the part of discussion I'd otherwise forget.

Not sure this is so much programming tricks as a set of heuristics and mental faculties that have been trained or enhanced by programming...
There's the HDDBOOST, from SilverStone, though it almost sounds like you were just begging someone to link to it ;)

Some benchmarks:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=silve...
The things you cited were real life "tricks" before they were programming tricks. (Military strategy, general problem I suppose, Ronald Reagan and any book on manners, respectively.)
those are your group setting options. in the group itself you can post, upload photos, parse youtube/vimeo video urls, post flash embeds, and more to a very specific group of people. create multiple of these side by side to have personal conversations with different people and events...

definitely rough around the edges. a bit more polished site coming imminently...
It only took me 10 or 12 minutes to get it set up and running, but I already had a mongod running on my laptop and all 5 popular rubies installed with rvm (with most gems already installed). Still, follow the readme file, and it is fairly easy.
My take on it is that there weren't any written agreements because each side was angling to get the best deal possible in the eventual joint venture.

Only, one of two things happened:

1) FusionGarage never intended for their to be any true JV, and was just playing TC along from the very beginning, day one. That'd be amazingly cold if it's true.

2) It started out as a bona fide attempt at a JV, but it became clear to FG at some point that they weren't going to get as sweet a deal as they wanted... but rather than either back out graciously or take what they could get, they decided to play along and then screw TC at the last minute.

I haven't seen anything that really gives weight to either theory. If it's #1, Chandrasekhar Rathakrisnan isn't just channeling the usual Sun Tzu business-as-war crap, he's got a full-blown Josef Stalin "loyalty is for dogs" thing going on. Just on personal experience I find that a bit hard to believe; most people are just not that good at deception. I'd put my money on #2 if I were a betting man: FG and TC spent a while trying to feel each other out and get the best deal possible for their respective sides, but FG decided they could do better by selling TC out than by negotiating in good faith.
It's like at my work when I proposed that we could get some benefit from an "interim solution" until we could finish up what we were planning. Of course people started (innocently, ignorantly) calling the original plan the "final solution". Always made me cringe.
Some free advice (from someone qualified but unavailable):

Give a bit more of an idea as to how senior a person you want (i.e. willing to pay for).

Indicate if use of MySQL is inflexible, or if the ops person would have significant input into choice of tools. One could infer it from "as assigned," but clarity helps.

Be less stealthy. At least a hint as to what the company is doing, or, barring that, who the early founders are, is more likely to garner the "right" kind of attention.

Oh, and kudos on thinking about ops this early!
yes! but for now we are focusing on personal and private relationships. user and interest based discovery is something we are definitely going to add in...
I think I found it at greatdomains.com

Sunny
My guess: Chandra saw dollar signs, didn't want to share the dollar signs with Arrington and decided that he just wouldn't.
You can actually buy bluing agent for your laundry, it's pretty old school, but actually adds a bit of blue dye for the same effect.

http://www.mrsstewart.com/
>That said, Angel claimed that he was drunk when he wrote the e-mail, so he might not be a long-term threat — but maybe you can never be too careful.

"I was drunk when I shot the guy Your Honour, so it doesn't count"
Why Diaspora will succeed (even if they fail early and often)
The man is the greatest philanthropist of our time. He's doing more for the world than everyone commenting here combined, to some outrageous exponent. Decry the man's business practices, but at the end of the day it was a means to an end. He's taking his wealth and spending it wisely on charity. Further, he's convincing other billionaires to do the same. I say we leave his tenure at Microsoft in the past and focus on the stuff that will truly be his legacy: helping mankind. And for that, I say, good for you Mr. Gates.
You are right about having to trust too many different hosting companies or people who install it and make it public, but there should be a way to tunnel directly through to another user with everything in the middle just seeing an encrypted data stream.

However, how about a simpler scenario: you set up on one of your servers and only invite your family to join. Another instance for a club, etc. Have a very easy export/import mechanism to push material in your account in one group to another, under your control.
Mongodb is an interesting choice. I haven't used Mongodb, so I might be misunderstanding a design decision made by the Mongodb developers, but isn't it possible to get into a situation with Mongodb where the writes are delayed and, as a result, new records (documents) added to a database might not show-up on the following reads (so a user might post a status update, but then he/she might not see it added to his/her status updates page when the pages reloads). Or perhaps the Diaspora developers decided to commit writes to the disk immediately at the cost of performance? Just curious.
What space restrictions (banner sizes) are you looking at? I run FeaturedUsers.com and this sounds like something that would be interesting to look at. Not sure how the insertion would work since we do JS insertion based on domains ourselves, but definitely worth looking at.

My contact info is on the site.
I've found multiple instances of text in more or less official places containing general English problems (spelling, grammar). I'm assuming for the time being it isn't due to outright lack of fluency in English, and so that leads me to think that they just aren't putting in the [little] extra effort to proofread before publishing. It's not that big a deal, but I think it would help for them to look more polished as far as official text goes.
>PS:

>Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.

That seems to cover it, doesn't it?
Welding consumables
The difference between a programmer and a coder.

For example, programmers are talking about ideas, algorithms and abstraction layers, while coders talking about tools - which one is the right tool (Java, of course) which one is the best for so-called web-development (PHP, of course), and about cool features of C# if they're using that system.

The difference is the same as between, say, GM engineer and a taxi driver.

There are also sysadmins, who know that everything sucks, but some things when fine-tuned suck less. ^_^
Don't understand the down voting - for the crowd's investment its arguably all they've done. They did just start however. Releasing at all is more than most expected on their blogs.