skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's the factor at all in that case. If buzz and twitter were launched at the same time, twitter would win. Buzz did too many things wrong - privacy, being integrated into gmail, not as open API etc, no arbitrary restriction on length to get hype, etc

Plus, being launched by Google, may actually be a curse. I doubt the xbox would be as successful if more people actually knew microsoft was behind it.

Startups have a great advantage in that they're assumed by users to be new/fresh/good guys/underdogs/etc etc
Earlier power-saving technologies were pretty proprietary from what I recall; there was "pre-ACPI" and also a fairly substantial period of "ACPI that still only worked through Windows because Windows could tolerate a lot of errors in the ACPI tables where Linux actually believed the tables". Now most of them are through standardized interfaces and work in Linux just fine.
First look at Zotero Everywhere
Where's the horse race stock photo?
Some "features" of iTunes:

When I import my music folder, iTunes copies all the files to it's own private directories, using the filesystem as an index. Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

iTunes doesn't play flac or ogg. And when I rip a CD, it wants to save it in some proprietary flac-like format (which, as far as I know, does not work on non-macs).

I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer. Shameless plug: http://github.com/stucchio/DJ-Pirate
http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot1.... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot3....

iTunes + iPod also has some extremely unpleasant anti-features: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1202

(Note: this may not all still be true, haven't used iTunes since 2007. )
A civony/evony clone* with Ultima branding was released in the last year - maybe that? Don't get too excited, the game had no RPG gameplay that I could see; it looked like a city/kingdom sim.

* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.
You don't have pathological customers, what you have is a large number of people who instead of paying hard currency for a service will trade time as their currency.

This is the exact opposite of my experience. Pathological customers use the service less, spend less time reading the words on the screen, spend less time exploring or reading the documentation and more time asking me questions (in, often, the rudest possible fashions), ask me questions like (I kid you not) "It says that every card will be different. Does that mean every card will be the same? Cuz that would suck.", etc etc.
I actually did A to Z testing from 2x2 pixels all the way to fullscreen button. This button was the size that got the most clicks and also the most girls giving me their phone numbers via IM.
Point taken - but are we talking about "common wisdom" in general, or "common wisdom of what's possible"?
I feel like hardware TCP/IP stacks would probably massively improve performance by removing all details of the communications from the OS and processor. In saber OSes, this would just mean that one of the higher levels of abstraction would essentially deal directly with the hardware instead of a few more layers of abstraction.

Does this make sense? These communications seem so central to modern computing that they deserve specialized hardware support.
Clickables:

http://www.oddsanywhere.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/241026/
Signups? I cannot disclose actual numbers but after the website redesign we saw an increase in signups by 40%.
reddit uses something like 250-300 EC2 nodes.
I'll get right on to the designer and ask him what he thinks he's doing ;)

edit: also we're planning to expand out to other sports, so we didn't want to make it too horsey!
You should also consider the timing of the announcement. This pricing change was made on a Monday morning - people are already grumpy from returning to their regular work week but it also was a "special" Monday as it was a holiday for some. Thanksgiving for all Canadians and Columbus Day I believe for some (all?) Americans. You potentially affected numerous holiday brunches with the timing of your pricing changes.

NOTE: I haven't used your company before but it seems like it would be useful so I'll certainly consider it if I'm in need of this type of service in the future.
I think the reason suspend didn't work for me was that I had the new version of Intel graphics whereas with a 510 you probably had NVidia graphics. Still, given that the new Intel graphics system had only been out for a few months when 10.04 came out I'm not really complaining too much.
Nominees of the 2010 Worst European Union Lobbying Awards
I believe part of the issue is what was not possible previously is now possible due to better tech, faster processors, more available memory, cheaper development than in the past. So, yes, a younger generation may give it a go anyway not fully understanding that 10 years ago writing a larger query like that was probably a bad idea.
Well, for one thing its format support is conservative. Like most people who haven't lived in the Mac ecosystem their whole computing lives, I have my music collection in a variety of formats- mp3, ogg, flac, etc. I would like very much to have a media player which didn't ask me to bend to its will. This of course is not an issue for most people, but its a sore sticking point for people who try to switch from Linux. In Linux, if you find a file in an obscure format, you can always find a gstreamer plugin for it and totem(or anything else) will play it without losing a step.

I myself tried to switch, but gave up after about a week. One of the main reasons was the iMac's boot time. After having used Fedora and Ubuntu, I found it unbearably slow. Was my experience just an anomaly or is this the general case?
I used to have a Thinkpad, but the battery/power connector kept crapping out on me. I'm not convinced Lenovo has maintained the commitment to quality. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I currently use a (copy/paste from newegg) Gateway NV59C57U Intel Core i5 450M(2.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 NoteBook

Was only $650 and runs Mint (Ubuntu derivative) just fine. Only problem with it is that the trackpad sucks, but why would you be using the trackpad when you spend all your time in vim? In short, it's plenty fast and since it's a third the price of an MBP there's no guilt in buying a new laptop every year.
Microsoft exec says Zune software coming to the Mac
Totally agree that accepting the conventional wisdom that something is impossible, or getting trapped in looking at how everybody else has failed to accomplish it, is a boat anchor on creativity.

On the other hand, realizing that a problem is trickier than it seems on the surface, and leaning from others’ attempts to solve it (including what worked as well as what didn’t) is hugely valuable.

It’s a choice everybody makes for themselves, independent of age.
more searching and tickets
Schneier = infosec blogspammer. And very slow at that.
I am an autodidact and try to work on open ended paths studying maths and so on, but discovered I need to have some specific end point to work toward or I tend to flake around doing easy reading and stuff rather than staying focused.
Brooklyn has a space program?
I must say that while I am not a huge fan of OSX, Macs have amazingly well designed hardware. I remembering staring and marvelling at the magsafe power cord the first time I saw it, and every piece of the hardware is well made too.
So, do you get free coffee in the cantina at Microsoft?
That reminds me of another thing I disliked about macs. An open question: who is in charge? Macports? Fink? I couldn't pick one, because neither one had what I wanted.

I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.

The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.
They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them.
Please ignore case when comparing submissions, as well as trailing slashes.

A dupe made it through today with identical URLs; but a special character was URL encoded using 2 different capitalizations:

http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%E2%80%99t-be-done/
http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%e2%80%99t-be-done/

(There is an "E" that was capitalized in the first submission.)

I tested this by submitting the story a third time, and capitalizing a "T" that wasn't capitalized in either submission and it made it through the dupe check.
Unless they are using the really big instances though, I find that EC2 nodes are generally lower in power compared to what most people are using for their servers.

I remember not too long ago before they moved to EC2 everything fit in just a few racks. Of course, their traffic has expanded significantly recently.
OKCupid statistics posts are often pretty damn awesome. But I'm not wild about this one:

First of all, it attempts to argue that gay people aren't promiscuous on the basis of statistics derived from a dating site. It is perfectly possible that gay OKCupid users aren't more promiscuous than straight OKCupid users, but gay OKCupid users aren't representative of gay people overall. The article doesn't actually mention sample size. It may be possible that they have a very small gay userbase, for instance. It certainly is interesting to know the differences between gay and straight OKCupid users, but it tells us less than they seem to suggest.

First off, it's a dating site, not a hookup site. If you want to find out whether people are promiscuous, you can't work that out simply on the basis of a dating site because dating sites (as opposed to hookup sites) find people who are interested in romance rather than casual sex. You wanna know whether gay people are more promiscuous? Take OKCupid statistics and compare them to statistics from a sites like AdultFriendFinder (or some of the Craigslist sections)...

Secondly, Jim DeMint is not saying gay people shouldn't be teaching in schools because straight people are better teachers. No, he's saying it because he thinks gay people will - I dunno - somehow transmit gayness rays to students. DeMint is bigoted and his suggestion is idiotic, but OKCupid's response is irrelevant because DeMint isn't saying that gay people are less intelligent - he's saying they shouldn't be teachers because they are gay and, you know, they like to recruit people and indoctrinate them into the secret gay liberal agenda (or something equally barmy).
The dupe in this case is kind of interesting - this submission is in fact the second submission, and the URLs look identical. It appears that the dupe detection is case sensitive. I have more details here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787590
It's not about "cheap option" at all.

You get fanatical customers everywhere, and they can be good and bad. They've mainly been good in my experience though.
Yep. I'm pretty sure it works too - they ran (and probably still do) massive ad campaigns at a scale where they would have to have tested a whole stack of variations.
Maybe Digg uses small servers whereas StackOverflow uses big servers?
It sounded like it was written by a slightly more ambitious Randal Graves: This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers.

I'm not surprised that his freemium experiment failed. I've often advocated Cheapium to avoid some of the problems he's mentioned, but the way he switched models was JV at best.
It took me over two years to find that checkbox, as I didn't know to look for it.

Not being able to dismiss a dialog box with the keyboard was driving me mad.

System Prefs>Keyboard>Keyboard Shortcuts>"All Controls"
Can't you just run Linux on your Macbook?
Show HN: Review my startup: Simponent Web Service Studio
Link to signup: http://www.simponent.com/downloads/index.html

The big idea is using JSON based application description language(ADL, similar to WSDL) to define and model restful web service API. It is platform and language independent.

- Define request and response types in both XML and JSON formats

- Authentication standards such as OAuth 1.0a, OAuth 2.0 and HTTP basic authentication

- Web Service Error and HTTP status codes

Simponent web service studio is a software tool to help publish web service API more effectively, accelerate API development and deployment process. Once ADL file is defined for your web service, with the help of web service studio

- Instantly give your web service an interactive console.

- Access your web service from command line.

- API reference and documentation in HTML and PDF format

- More features like web service testing/monitoring, client languages binding will come

We have made some demos for facebook/twitter/github api.
demo link: http://www.simponent.com

We're still in beta and are making a lot of changes but wanted to get some feedback as early as possible.

Thanks
He's probably advocating that for the same reason that EA and Amazon prefer junior developers: they're more willing to tolerate being treated like slaves than seniors.
Taleb & Douady: Statistical Undecidability
These mistakes are so obvious that I'm starting to believe that some of these companies do it on purpose so they can get a tonne of PR, make things right, then look like the "hey, we fucked up because we're human but we fixed it quickly because we love our customers" companies that we hear about all the time these days.
After a year in stealth, CarWoo (YC S09) launches today
After a year in stealth, we finally launched our company today. CarWoo! is an online new car buying market place, where buyers can come and say what they want and get dealers to compete for their business. Essentially this is a reverse auction for car buying. We waited over a year to launch so we could build our dealer network to over 3000 dealers nationwide.

Let us know what you think... lots of posts coming about our YC experience and how we stayed under the radar for over a year, how we raised money, all the good stuff.
I'm not a J.D., but I think you're going down a legal path that can't be taken. It seems very weak from a legal standpoint that anything not approved but a judge or JP in a courtroom setting would be binding. Since your users already have the courts or lawsuits on the mind, you could become the next target for promising something that won't have legs in court.

If it were positioned as a mediation/negotiation service (not a judging service) to reach congenial resolution before the need for a court appearance, you may have something. But make sure you get every lawyer you can find to look at this to find the potential legal repercussions.
You can turn the copying files "feature" off. Still annoying. I also hate iTunes.
Facebook has a lot more than 100 times digg's registered users, though.
URL Shortener Bit.ly Now Generates QR Codes, Too
You can set up shortcuts for those things with a combination of BetterTouchTool (free) and Divvy (not so free).

BetterTouchTool might even do everything you need, but I'm not completely sure about that.
Working at Joinwire [youtube]
To me the Macbook's boot time feels the same as my Ubuntu (or even Windows) machines' boot times. But I never compared them on equal hardware, or even did any proper timings.
While it's debatable whether viruses count as a form of life, RNA viruses do exist. It's also generally believed that there were RNA-based forms of life before the advent of DNA.

You are spot on about #4. The more we learn about our world, the more creative ways we come up with to destroy it.
Have you tried to make money on your free users in a different way?
Same here, homebrew rocks Fink and Macports way out of the water. If you need any type of packet management and you are on a Mac, it should be your go to option.
Is that even the right shade of blue? Sorry to nitpick.
$2.4 trillion what? Government debt. T-bills. This is not wealth, but obligations to be paid by future generations of workers.

Heck, they could have $25 TRILLION in the SS trust fund, and it would be the exact same thing, the number is meaningless.
Why does it take 20 feet of land to grow a gallon of orange juice and 200 feet of land to grow a gallon of apple juice?
I don't think emoticons are a bad idea. I quite like the attidunal indicators (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less...) in lojban (http://www.lojban.org) also.
Pathological customers are, by definition, bad. I'm not using the term to mean "a synonym of non-paying customers, poor people, or people enthusiastic about the software."

I have heard from many other software developers, and seen in my own life, that charging more money disproportionately chases them away. I had a major decrease in the number I dealt with just when I went from $25 to $30, while sales went up. It is amazing: charge $5 more, see people suddenly have less hard drive failures, virus infestations, and "bad days". (I called you a dishonest SOB thieving from poor defenseless women when I mistyped my password... because I'm having a bad day, you see.) And it wasn't 20% less, it was closer to 80% less.
Ask HN: Improving the mobile reading experience (using NLP)
Do you read a lot on your phone? We have a few ideas to improve discovery and navigation on mobile devices and would love to run them by you. Before I explain the actual solution, this is the pain that we are trying to address:

It's painful to do the copy/paste + google workflow to find related content on a mobile device. (Do you even think it's a real pain?)

And our solution:

(As a quick background, we have a technology that extracts concepts, people, locations and organizations from text. Our solution is currently based on that tech, but we are open to everything. Feel free to check out the demo: http://www.factyle.com/speedread)

So, the solution :)

1) Tapping on the text would automatically select the person (Barack Obama), location (New York city), phrase (atomic reactor).
-- A small menu would appear with options: "Related articles", "Google search", "Images", "Wikipedia

2) An optional meaning bar at the bottom of the screen with people (matched with their twitter+linkedin account) and the most important concepts. Tapping on a person or concept would yield the same options as above: "Related articles", "Google search", "Images", "Wikipedia. (the bar could also be used as a navigation tool)

(Another note: given textual context, we are able to match people to their twitter accounts with a very high confidence rate. This is not magic :) We also hope to extend the algorithm to linkedin & facebook, but it's harder)

Thank you so much for your feedback. We are struggling right now to find our customers and validate our assumptions. Any help is greatly appreciated

Thanks,
Marc & Temo
That's a tremendous waste of whatever it cost to register two domain names and host them.
And Michael Schumacher with a compact can beat you on a sports car.
Congrats guys. First Yahoo Sports, now WSJ.. these partnerships are huge.
Lenovo Thinkpad FTW
Apple and Oranges comparison really.

- What do the sites do?

- How optimised are they?

- How much static/cachable content is there?

Really there is too little data for this comparison.
Ask HN: Upcoming API Days/ Hack-a-thons?
Between now and say January 1, what are the best hackethons coming up?

- In the Bay Area? #sf

- In the world? #world

like 2-3day ones.
Only if you have epic levels of credibility.
2004: Who the hell is ever going to need 1 GB of email?

2010: 7 GB of email is not enough anymore!!
This is a fantastic idea. Considering how hard dealers are fighting for business at the moment, why not let them do all the work? I love it. I'd love to see something like this hit the UK.
This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow.

[1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.
This has been a long time coming. Feel free to ask us anything if you've got questions about CarWoo!
This post looks like posturing to me. It's saturated with thinly-veiled animosity toward the free users. I'm sure he's sorry it all happened, but it's not clear he actually feels bad about any free users left in the lurch. The internet is a social place, and good will may as well be a form of currency. There have been lots of times that liking a company has pushed me into paying customer mode, when I would have otherwise been a "freeloader".
My understanding (which is, to say, belief built up over watching the companies from outside) is that Reddit is currently running what could best be described as a skeleton crew: Conde Nast won't fund them, so they're just trying to keep the ship afloat and don't have time for anything else.

Digg has scaled to the size of a company that, for a couple of years now, has considered itself just on the tipping point of "something big happening." As in there being a sea change in the way everyone consumes their news, and Digg is at the center. You'll need lots of employees when that happens, right? I think Digg has partly grown fat due to non-existent leadership; the struggle between Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose was been well-documented, and having your two lead guys check out for at least a year is not a good way to run a business. A lot of the people there are "sales", which I guess helps Digg stay profitable, but I don't really think you need as many as they have. Five community managers on a community that is supposed to manage itself is also excessive.

I expect the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the middle of Reddit and Digg. More than Reddit so you're not stagnant, less than Digg so you're not fat.
Buying a new domain name, buy variations of that domain also?
Because I'm cynical, I always buy up any and all variations of the target domain name, ie. misspellings, phonetics, etc. However, there's also a lingering doubt that it's not really worth it, after all, I could use that money for more Ramen noodles :). What's your recommendation/experience?
I don't know if you should tell a VC this, but when someone asks me that question I usually laugh. Google launches about 3 products a day, then shuts them all down a year later. 99 out of 100 things they do suck and end up insignificant.

That's fine for them too, the other 1% more than recoup it, so it's a brilliant model. But I don't worry about them.
Not to mention a basically non-existent cachability profile, and an order of magnitude more functionality.
Absolutely, I'm doing it for games and with quite some success.

But I think there's more to it than just that analytics is a particularly versatile industry, most of the stuff Google does could be retooled to solve x (or a variation of x) for a different y - and has: redtube, 5mins etc - let alone the also viable same y but better solution.

If it's not one of their handful of monolithic and to date unbeatable successes then their presence in a market really doesn't do anything more than validate it.
Why do you care for unmoving glyphs, do you also attempt to block Unicode smileys?
Yes, it blows my mind that digg needs so many employees. Reddit actually is larger than digg (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reddit_to_mainstream_me...), and until recently had even less than 7 employees. If I'm not mistaken they have 3 programmers and a systems admin. Kind of makes you wonder what all the digg employees do all day.
AFAICT, wrong shade of blue. Wrong font, and useless too. Will be dead soon.