skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lack of sharing (or even giving) is the biggest barrier to my total plunge into ebooks. As Tim notes, the fact that ebooks are barely cheaper than paperbacks, regardless of zero printing costs and no opportunity for resale, doesn't help. I can't help but feel I'm getting a raw deal.

As it stands If i know a book is just for me and/or my wife, I'll pick it up on the Kindle, otherwise it's the dead tree route.

I really hope that one of the major ebook makers will at least add the ability to 'gift' books to others, but I think it's unlikely. They have little to gain and I'm sure publishers would put up a hell of a fight. The best we're likely to get is the nook's crippled lending function, or something similar that publishers have the option of disabling, and thus do so for every title (much the same way as most books now have the Kindle's text to speech feature disabled).
LP?
This is dated-- they aren't profitable[1]. As far as the ethical parts of this article, it's not different than gambling sites. And I bet just like Vegas, it will become profitable when people feel comfortable wasting money again

[1]http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_34/b41920406...
> whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost.

You mean like an Altavista killer, MySpace killer, or Blockbuster killer? Companies fail. Just because Apple is hot right now does not mean that it is immune to this fact. It probably won't happen six months after the ipad's release, but like everything else, something new will take its place.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.3804:
Top 8 Threadless Design Secrets
Reddit? But at least they tried charging their users, and it worked.
I have to admit that if I were re-writing my blog post today, I'd add the "cultishness" to the list of reasons why Node disappoints me. It's really too bad, too, since at its core it's genuinely good technology!
Radial Ripple Masking Effect in Flash
Here is another simple and interesting Masking technique in Flash. You can make Ripples by using this technique. So you will also learn how to create Mask Effect in Flash. As usual I’ve also uploaded Source FLA for your convenience, so must try it.
"How could you not type fast if you've been writing your school papers in a word processor since sixth grade or earlier?"

Carpal tunnel?
The whole sharing issue is major in my opinion. If a new technology brings new benefits but takes away some key benefits of the paper medium, I would bet that the users community will quickly question the future of e-books with some serious hacks and p2p challenges to the publishers and distributors.
The rise of cash prizes for innovation
I think he's suggesting clicking on the Search button, because there's no difference in mouse clicks between Google Instant and old Google if you press Enter upon entering your query.
Who needs Dropbox when you can just run rsync?
> my ideas aren't really that interesting

That's what you think now. Look at how much mileage Gladwell gets out of his core ideas, which wouldn't have a leg to stand on without all that embroidery.

For my product I look for a story to tell in every bug-fix and feature I work on. If nothing else, I want to see if it doesn't add credibility when readers are at least informed how much work goes into a quality product day-to-day.
AOL Tried To Buy TechCrunch Twice Before
David Simon's work has won Edgars, Peabodys, and more, and has been nominated for Emmys, WGAs and many other awards I'm not able to look up right now. Has MG even won a Webby? I'd love to see MG produce better content. I read TC just like everyone else, and having less but better content would be a huge step forward to my mind.

Edit: a journo friend of mine happened to mention to me that Simon is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, fwiw.
Ask HN: Should I apply for YC fall batch?
Hi,

I have a business background and I am non-technical. I started 2 small ventures as a teenager (both were profitable), and after that I have been in the regular corporate job for about a decade. Most of the places I interviewed for a job, they often suggested that I consider doing my own business as that's what lights me up during the discussions. I too wanted to, but never really got to it until recently. Though I have been involved with a lot of startup and related activities over the years.

I often faced a problem while at work, and started looking for available tools to solve that problem - couldn't find anything that directly solved this problem, though there are some round-about solutions available and off late, a few startups are trying to solve similar/related problem.

I thought that there might be others like me facing the same problem, so I went out asking my business associates and friends if they too faced the same problem - many said yes. Then I started thinking about a solution for this problem. The next step for me was to validate the business idea and the problem further. I met with a couple of senior executives from the silicon valley startup community - most of them said that the problem is worth solving, and encouraged me to go build a prototype solution. Since I am non-technical and the tool would require hackers to build it, so I thought of getting further validation from potential users - again, I got encouraging feedback. By then, I knew I had to do something about it.

So, I asked few engineer friends to help build the prototype. Though we didn't really get any far - as they had other commitments and couldn't spend the time required. Then, I started looking outside for potential technical co-founder - a Stanford student agreed to help out. Plus, I also roped in another solid technical guy as my advisor. We have built a very basic version of our app, and we are planning to go for a private alpha next month - and work with real users in shaping our application/tool.

I was also thinking of applying for the YC fall batch. But then suddenly, my Stanford co-founder decided to scale back his involvement as he has too many things going on in his life, and he feels he wouldn't be able to commit time required by our startup. Since our app is almost ready (some bugs need to be fixed), I hired a freelancer to help me finish the remaining work, so we can go ahead with our private alpha next month. Meanwhile, I am also looking for another technical co-founder.

But for now, I am a single, non-technical, female founder of a software startup, debating whether it is worth it to apply for YC right now and what are my chances. Having some traction for my app will make my case a bit stronger, but it will take some time to build that traction and YC application deadline is October 19th.

I thought of turning to the HN community for advice. What would you recommend?

Thanks.
This was a good bit of wit that seems, alas, to have gone largely unappreciated.
This is definitely a downside but the major upside of a digital library is that I have it with me wherever I go. If I'm somewhere where I only have my Droid or my laptop I have all my books. If my Kindle falls in the sink or is lost I lose nothing. Most importantly, I don't have to lug around 20 heavy boxes of books every time I move.

On the whole the tradeoffs lean to ebooks for me, and this will be even more the case if the price of the digital versions come down a bit more.
One reason I particularly avoid logging in with Facebook or Twitter is the large proportion of sites that will abuse the authority to post whatever you post on your FB/Twitter profile as well. Sorry, if I'm just signing in to comment on a Twitter-shared picture or a news article, that does NOT mean I want it posted on my message stream! I've learned the hard way to always use Google/Yahoo OpenID auth instead.
In your essay about the application process you discuss figuring out what the combination of founders are (e.g. two hackers, one business one hacker, two hackers one business...different stages of their careers) and you have seen about 20 or 30 different founder combinations.

Have you noticed any particular combination that seems to work better than the others across the board, or does it depend on the startup?
Agreed with everything you say here, except I'd add one thing: It's not just for "average folks" either. From what I understand, there used to be a YC Wiki that was used actively among founders in each batch to share information with each other. This previous batch, nobody touched the Wiki after the first week. Everyone just used the YC Opzi. This was not out of loyalty: I've grit my teeth and used some raw, unpolished products of other YC companies, and this wasn't that. The Opzi was just much, much more convenient. No time was wasted formatting the page or organizing sub-topic pages. It was much easier to discover interesting content and get notified when interesting questions were answered, which was more often because the Q&A format does a better job of encouraging people to answer unanswered questions than a Wiki.
For Me, College Is Not Worth The Time Or Money
Polynomially, not exponentially:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Power
Processes (or threads) are not the problem, it is shared state / memory / side effects. Erlang has solved this pretty well, and I love the way it works, but do not find myself looking forward to the syntax.

Either choice means that the code is harder to read, but erlang is easier to read than node code, I suspect. (Will have to investigate.)
I hope that student got a great grade. While I think some of his conclusions are not correct. It's obvious the work that was put in is way above what I have ever seen as the average for coursework.
Raajneeti screenplay goes to Oscar archives
Though these guys have an outsize influence on Web 2.0 apps there are still enough angels out there to minimize the effect of any possibility of collusion among a few angels. If that was what the meeting was about, which I doubt. I think this is a storm in a teacup.The government has enough things to worry about in an economy going south to do anything here.
An Open Letter to the USPTO
Flexible compared to what? Given the circumstances, that's definitely damning with faint praise.
> Software is no more "mathematics" than are circuit diagrams, chemistry nor books.

Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_isomorphism
What is C?
Like you have discovered, a class needs to go at the pace of the average learner. If you are a person who can learn at an above average pace, classes will only slow you down.
BlackBerry Playbook Tablet PC Launched
I really hate to see Xmarks shutdown. Been a happy user.

For not going the charging user route, could it be that they took some rounds of funding and expanded their company structure and infrastructure greatly to the point that it couldn't be sustained without a huge success? They expanded into the search and other stuff besides bookmark sync'ing. Those are the ones that don't pan out and dragging down the whole company.

Instead of shutting down everything, it would be better to keep the bookmark sync part and dump the rest, and start charging users. Not sure whether the investors would go for the low return route.
On an opportunistic note, I do wish they'd everyone access to their "1 billion bookmark corpus", in anonymized form of course.
Well said. Seems like most people replying are speaking as users who guard their privacy everywhere. Most consumer products are aimed at people that are looking for the bacon immediately. Facebook gives developers a lot of useful information fast so they can get on to deliver the content or service the user thinks they are getting.

When the plumbing works, it's a lot easier to enjoy the architecture where developers and designers deliver real services.
Have you ever had any successful single founder company came out of the other end of the YC process?
There's a big difference between creating a product with the purpose of killing another product, and creating a product with the purpose of being better than another product.

Google wasn't an attempt to cash in on any kind of "search engine market", it was an attempt to remedy one of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary search engines: how to usefully rank a now-sufficient number of results.

Facebook wasn't intended to kill MySpace - it was intended to be better for a certain category of potential MySpace users: students. Initially, it was only marketed and available to them, and it was only after it had completely taken over that market that it was able to start seriously taking on MySpace.

Netflix could be said to have been aimed squarely at Blockbuster, but it's major tradeoffs of long wait times and a subscription model versus Blockbuster's same-day service and pay-as-you-go model made Netflix risky enough that nobody could have reasonably stated at the beginning that it stood a good chance of completely killing blockbuster so quickly.

Besides, none of the x-killers we see coming out these days are ever as drastically different as netflix was from Blockbuster; they're usually cheap knockoffs or more expensive versions afflicted by feature creep.
Typographer receives “genius” fellowship (created Georgia and Verdana)
Apparently they researched it, probably by asking some sample of the users: http://blog.xmarks.com/?page_id=1883#premium
FWIW, Mozilla has an app for syncing your bookmarks to your iPhone:

https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/
xMarks has an amazing set of data. A set of tagged bookmarks on a large enough scale is essentially like running mechanical turk (with 2,000,000 users) on the entire internet (better yet, only bookmark-worthy parts of the internet), and asking it to "describe this page in 10 words or less". The results, I think, are the most accurate description of URLs you could get on such a large scale. Essentially every site that has over a certain amount of bookmarks is guaranteed to be of high quality and very relevant to what it's been tagged as. (The only problem is when sites change, domains expire, etc).

When I was making MoreOf.It, I scouted the competition in depth. The only one that stood out was xMarks, and similarity search wasn't even their main gig. They understand the richness of bookmarking data. They've separated URLs into categories, and have the highest ranking sites in those categories. They also nailed similarity pretty well. I might even say their results are better than mine, because they have a much larger index of sites.

Two and a half years ago, when I first built a prototype of similarity search, there were hardly any meta-websites. Besides Quantcast and their ilk, and bookmarking websites, and maybe a couple of bullshit "site worth calculators" (which just multiply site traffic by an estimated CPM), there was hardly anything happening in the meta-site space. Now, there are tons more services that cater to people Gooling an actual url or site name. To name a few, CrunchBase, AboutUs.org, BackType, UberVU, SimilarSites, SitesLike, and sites that aggregate results from these (QuarkBase). "Meta" is blossoming, and it seems like xMarks could take advantage of this with their rich dataset.

For example, as someone told me I should do, they could sell analytics information to websites about their competitors. If you're ZipCar.com, for example, you would pay to know the following: How have people described zipcar.com in the last (x amount of time), and what are the trends of those tags? How is my popularity vs. an automatically generated list of my competitors [ala: similar sites]. Which competitors are trending, and with which tags? Any new competitors that are breaking through the ranks? Some information could give cues to alter your business: What types of tags are related to my business are trending right now (i.e.: perhaps "bike share" is becoming more and more popular. I think that's valuable information. And, like an arms dealer, you can deal to both sides of competition. With 2,000,000 users organizing this set of data (for their own benefit of course), it's pretty confident sample size and it's win-win for everyone.

Frankly, I don't understand what benefits "synchronizing" offers. Why not just store your bookmarks on any number of bookmarking websites (Delicious, Google, etc), and then log-in to that website from whatever browser/computer/device you want? I do, however, see value in the analytics of what people bookmark, and how they bookmark it.
This is a throwaway account. I'm a full-time developer for a huge company that uses Facebook as it's platform.

There still is a preferred developer program for the bigger companies out there but it doesn't really offer much of anything. Go back a year though and it was a big benefit.
Since we care most about the people, it's hard to say without knowing more about you as an individual. But I get the impression you're rushing to make a deadline. You may want to consider simply waiting till the next cycle, which is only another 6 months more.
Also look at Paul Haahr's letter: http://paulhaahr.com/blog/2010-09-26-my-letter-to-the-us-pat...
Landing Page quality score.
The second option, and the one the gov. appears to be attempting, is to keep home prices steady and eventually let inflation catch up. This stinks for people who want to buy because they have to wait, but looks good for the gov. in charge.

I'm with you and think they should just let prices fall. I can't find the video right now, but at one point President Bush was asked why he wasn't doing anything to prop up home prices. He responded that it's giving people who were priced out the opportunity to buy so he didn't see the need to do anything. His statement was early on in the recession and eventually he was pressed to do something though.
After first picking up a v1 iPad you knew there were a lot of trade offs to get it out the door. Pretty impressive to build billion dollar beta products, but they are beta products none the less.
Is Apple currently making more profit on its phones than RIM? (altogether, not per-unit; I know the answer there)
I 2nd talking to your users about it.

sorry to plug my app, but I just added the free plan back to my survey app - use it for free to gather some feedback :)

http://goodgecko.com
This may be too direct question to ask, but I will anyway to have some points of reference...

1. What do you - at YCombinator consider to be your best example of a successful start-up? If you can name that company, that would be awesome and appreciated.

2. On the other hand, what do you consider to be a flat out failure? An example of an idea that totally did not work? If you could name this venture, it would be appreciated too.
Seriously, we're not Ruby programmers. We can read, we don't need screencasts. ;)
Job skills for geeks - Making it Big in Software
This is a throwaway account. I'm a full-time developer for a huge company that uses Facebook as it's platform.

Ww get next to nothing useful from facebook these days. Sure, we have a dedicated internal contact, but it isn't very beneficial. We hear news maybe a week before it's released to the general public, but there is no feedback from them on critical regressions that affect our business. Facebook is pretty much a black hole when it comes to communication.
If google disclosed their hardware configuration in data center, I suspect a lot of other small companies will hurry to the vendor and subscribe the same components. Looks like a good deal for these hardware vendors.

But I do no see any vendor label their product as "Google is using it".
Small world, I've contributed a fair amount of code to node-paperboy. In fact, I'm the person who forgot to check for URL encoding in paths! Thanks for finding that. I thought about the whole 404 thing, funny thing is, I didn't really think of it as a bug at the time, since I had a specific set of use cases where not specifying a 404 would have been senseless. That's the likely cause for my myopia there.

However, the deal with paperboy is it's more of a starting point for writing your own file based HTTP server, not so much a drop it in and serve static files affair. It's got some other problems as well. I'd fix them, but I don't really use node.js anymore. If I were still using node here's what I'd look at with paperboy:

1. No tests (ugh)

2. I'm not sure what would happen if you tried serving a large file to a slow client (it reads in a stream based fashion, but since writing to the socket doesn't block, that memory has to go somewhere) Reads might need to be throttled.

3. It doesn't have sensible defaults, like the 404 thing.

All that stuff would be trivial to look at, hopefully someone will. I myself am not a node.js developer anymore (doing a lot of eventmachine).

Thanks for the patch, I'm sure felix will add it in soon enough.
American here. To claim that something takes me half a day, I would usually interpret that as half a working day, so 4-5 hours. I brew beer, and I tell people that "beer brewing takes a full day" -- if I start brewing at 8:30 then I get done before 5. Yeah I could do some other stuff afterwards.

Oh, and it's "organ-eh-zation" through and through. :)
For what it's worth, it's only five lines of meta tags that are well documented.
Artsy Hacks: The Strange Worlds of M.C Escher
To reply to my own comment: I probably should have signed up to attend this - www.startupschool.org The deadline was 3 days ago. D'oh! If anyone who had signed up is reading this and has to cancel, let me know if I can take your spot. :)
That makes sense. But what will hurt them if google does not disclose any performance metrics, e.g. request/second, disk seek/second, but only the detail hardware configuration and failure model.

Google has published some data on disk failure in the past. The published another paper on failures in storage system in the coming OSDI 10[1]. Funny!

[1]http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi10/tech/techAbstracts.html#...
CS isn't the only thing you can learn at college. If you feel you can learn CS much faster on your own then major in something different like advanced Math, Business, etc. It will make you a more rounded person.

I got my BS degree in CS 8 years ago and although I learned some stuff from my CS class that I probably wouldn't have been exposed to if I learned on my own (like assembly, db query tree optimization, or 3d graphics).

Sure I might have learned those on my own; but I probably wouldn't have given that if I wasn't in college I'd probably be churning out business apps for a megacorp or something leaving little time to explore.

I think my time in college would've been better spent majoring in Business and then learning programming on my own. That would've given me a better edge in the startup world. But it is what it is.
Secondly no offense, but Michigan Tech? Maybe try for a school somewhat closer to where you live better known for their CS program like CMU, etc?
Since this is a prominent argument may I humbly ask, why would you want to take a library with you? You can only read one book at once. The only use-case for a portable library would be writing a scientific paper at the restaurant or coffee shop. I have my doubts though that this would improve the quality of the paper.
I think the publishers are probably factoring in the effects of piracy. In the past they couldn't stop people from lending/sharing printed books but they could stop mass produced counterfeit printings. Now it's the exact opposite. They can't control the digital counterfeits in the form of piracy but they can stop digital lending/sharing. Maybe they hope to break even in the end. I can see from their perspective that having both sources of lost revenue combined is a nightmare scenario. I think as readers we probably need to accept that $10 or $15 for a book that is going to bring you many hours of enjoyment isn't a bad deal. We have the Internet to research books, fairly generous samples to read, social networking to spread the word.
The argument from morality is the first that comes to mind. Few atheists are willing to really embrace the moral nihilism that a materialist philosophy seems to require.