skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a donation, not a fee, and this isn't a business model, it's a perk for making a donation. If you look at similar projects on sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, that's how crowd-sourced funding works, with perks provided to people who donate (like t-shirts and servers for the Diaspora funders).

As for "software should be free", the idealists have been qualifying that with "Free as in Speech, Not as in Beer" for as long as I can remember, so we're all fully aware of the material concerns required.
If after a year and a half the best you can contribute is a snarky comment that shows that you didn't read the article in question and have the audacity to blatantly insult the author, a long time outstanding member, you are doing this hackernews thing wrong.

Perhaps another year and a half of keeping your mouth shut is in order?
Mark Suster on Getting Funded & Integrity
I use Opera mostly because I feel like it (yes, I know, poor reason), but generally Opera users like it because it's friendly to power users out of the box. It has a ton of UI features that don't appeal to many people, but that are loved by the people that do use them (e.g. search engine shortcuts, gestures, tab previews, etc).
Two quick points (I work at Mozilla, but not on the browser - I'm also the creator of the Dromaeo performance benchmark): All browsers implement things to get faster at these benchmarks. They implement caching in bizarre places just to make an, otherwise, useless loop faster. They optimize methods that are rarely used in modern JavaScript applications. This frustrates me immensely. Most modern browser performance benchmarks focus exclusively on JavaScript and completely ignore the DOM, rendering, painting, or any of the other operations that are critical to the performance of a web site.

As to the faster claim - I've been using Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari 5, and Firefox 4 interchangeably and I've noticed a dramatic improvement in quality from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 - they've really done a great job with the upcoming release.
I don't think there is any mention of marketing at the cost of technical execution in the article.

If your market does not know your product exists, it won't matter how good it is anyway. I'm reminded of Hugh MacLeod's brilliant cartoon "Welcome to Nobody Cares": http://www.gapingvoid.com/11444661477.jpg

edit: I stand corrected. "technical execution is mostly trivial"? No thank you. I did not become an engineer to write wedding planner software.
The only reason I'm not using Opera is because it doesn't support 1password... I really liked that browser, I've used it long before Firefox came out but after switching to Mac, at first Opera on Mac wasn't great and now, well it's missing 1password...

So having extensions is great news for me...
The Case for America's Future
We no longer have community like in the old days, we have a series of fad driven social ponzi schemes where 10% of the people hope to make money and the other 90% are dupes thinking they are.

I think that's a fantastic insight. This is related to the phenomenon of markets that are mostly-all bubble and reputation based, like fashion models. (There was an article posted here awhile ago, but I don't have time to search for it right this second.) The old-school music industry was much the same.
> Known you since ooooooh 1.5 years so I've seen your development. Impressive.

Thanks Appreciate. Disclaimer to YCombinator - fdebong is squating our office today ;)

> How's your network with fashion events and conferences, magazines and newschannels - would be a strong driver of fresh talent.

Its hard work but we try to build it up. If anybody has contacts that might help please send me (or them) a short info. Thanks upfront!

> What other sales channels than own webshop have you thought about?
We are in talks with other webshops. Currently its crazy future talk but we are very sure we can adapt to their cost structures (2011) and even go retail (2012).
I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages.

There's a difference between privacy and trust. Software can't predict when your best friend is going to turn against you for emotional or social reasons.

If you share something with ten friends, and one of them betrays your trust, technology can't predict or prevent that.

However, if you share something with ten friends, and they all act properly and trustworthy, you have a reasonable expectation that your data won't be available to anybody but those ten friends.
As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.
I was going to rename it to Bananaseed, but I think someone with that name killed a bunch of nurses in Portland. /30rock
Man, Opera fans sure are aggressive.

I don’t really know what Opera has to offer and I don’t really know why I should. If Opera is unable to get the message across to someone like me then good luck reaching the rest of humanity.

I obviously have Opera on my system but I haven’t opened it for weeks or months. All I see when I open it are non-native controls and features I don’t need and use (those icons in the status bar for example). I prefer something lean and minimal like Chrome or Safari.

Maybe you really need that feature that only Opera has – use Opera and be happy! Just don’t expect that the rest of humanity is exactly like you.
As someone who has spent a lot of time staring at big hairball biological networks, I've always been frustrated by them. I've been looking for a better solution for some time now. I'm not sure this is it though.

My main beef is that I feel strongly that a visualization succeeds when you don't have to explain how it works. Just looking at the main page, without reading any of the slide deck, I had a hard time understanding what was going on. In fact, for the first simple example in the slide deck, I found the original network to be easier to grok than the new version. Things certainly appear more organized than when in a big hairball, but I still have trouble extracting any meaningful information.
it would be marketed to developers and bloggers as an improved and easy to add replacement for OpenID, 50% of the work would be on rigorously defining QuickSocial specification, the other 50% on developing plugins for all platforms and languages.

That's part of the plan. QuickSocial is being developed as an abstracted PHP class library that's quite easy to implement.
A quick review of my thoughts on some of the ideas which stood out to me:

ajaxbricks - nice, kinda like the way you program the lego NXT (labview). Anyone with enough patience and desire to learn this, might as well just learn JS and PHP though. Potential though.

ArticleBody - good. I'm stealing this one.

AutoTagger - ditto. Care to share your code?

Dead Mans Knob.... just sounds wrong. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=knob

Also I'm pretty sure it's been done, just can't find the site.

E404 - http://archive.org/

fwitter - http://tweetbeep.com/

HackerContests - Great, want to start it? My resume: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/php-cv/

OptInSpam - Clever, you should be able to get some press coverage on that concept. Not sure if anyone would sign up, but it's innovative.

vm4rent - nice idea! legal?

wwspeech - chatroulette could have been this. Good idea, potentially huge.

edit:

ProofItWasThere - I had this idea too! Was thinking along the lines of 'verified screenshot', eg for people wanting to prove things about their server stats, ad revenue etc, or for when sites screw things up, etc.
Verizon Stores, Not To Be Outdone, Will Have The iPad On October 28
The Impact Of Priority Inbox
You're right that it is a problem, but defining objective criteria before knowing exactly what it is that you're looking for is potentially just as bad. This is part of the reason folks like Tukey defended statistical graphics early on: exploratory data analysis is tremendously important, and it's rare that you would know exactly what you're looking for.

Also, this problem of making sure what you're seeing is actually in the data is one that researchers are actively working on! There's a paper due to come out at a top visualization conference on the relation between formal hypothesis testing and visualizations which goes to the heart of your "easily tricked visual cues" comment. It's not currently available (and I'm not a co-author), but if you're interested, be on the lookout for "Graphical Inference for InfoVis"
You don't really see this in the films, but in a still it's amazing how detailed the X-wing is.
I have seen the advantage you point out in action in my former life in computation quantum field theory.

When I started, code was jealously guarded as a "secret weapon" in the global competition for publishable results. Then the MILC group (http://physics.indiana.edu/~sg/milc.html) started releasing both their data and their code. The result was that they were widely cited and gained much respect in the scientific community, becoming a de facto standard, and facilitated research at institutions without the resources necessary for such computational preliminaries.

I'm pleased to say that this approach has become more the norm in this field at least, encouraged by SciDAC ( http://www.scidac.gov/) for example, with raw data (e.g. http://qcd.nersc.gov/, http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/qcdgrid/) and code (e.g. http://usqcd.jlab.org/usqcd-docs/chroma/, http://fermiqcd.net) being routinely made available.

The result is more science all round, which can only be a good thing. The "scooping" thing we all worried about turns out not be such an issue after all.
40 Most Beautifully Designed Restaurant Menu’s Cards
There are many ways to design restaurant, Cafe, Clubs menus; we have collected a few sample restaurant, Cafe, Clubs menu’s that you can take inspiration from. Feast your eyes on these designs and enjoy.
I didn't intend any slight against Perl (nor an endorsement of Ruby, for that matter), and I know I shouldn't speak on a language I don't know so well. I've always understood the general trend in Perl to be towards economy rather than expressiveness, but I'm totally willing to admit that may no longer be the case.
One could get the same effect through a killer commercial library/app that's only available on a particular platform. I don't know of any real-life examples.
Microsoft Enterprise Agreements often give users the right to have a copy of Office at home.
>> Specifically, what is the need for such a platform?

>> Has Twitter become yet another tool to satisfy our very basic narcissistic desires?

I think you just answered your own question there.

Seriously though, just getting a 140-char blurb out there is a good way to get a conversation going with whoever happens to be interested. My co-worker has this set of food-themed icebreaker cards that pretty much look like a bunch of tweets in flashcards and there's definitely some value there.
I don't see how I'm going to pay anyone $79 just so I can get quotes from 5 Car dealerships, without any guarantee that the quotes will be lower than anything I would have gotten myself.

But hey, there are people paying for far apps...
The drink attribute
It's 3 for lions. That's how lion taming works, the lion attempts to process each of the chair legs as a seperate object and has no mental capacity left to eat you.
I might be wrong, although I have a feeling that recent slowdown of opensource contribution is caused (at least sometimes) by the maintainers/commiters and "core teams" behind projects. You can check HN/Stackoverflow/Proggit/Forums for "how to start contributing to opensource". Answers are similar: find yourself a project, and be active there. But that's not that easy, most of time, due to time and knowledge boundaries.

Sometimes it's not like that. There's a lot of friendly people, who encourage newcomers, and realize that if they opensourced something, it's not theirs anymore, it belongs to community. I just wish there were more people who're that friendly and involve more and more team players to get stuff done in their projects.

For instance, i have some feature for my product, that requires extension of the framework I'm working with. My actions are following:
check whether it's already done -> ok, not done -> build a simple prototype, proof of concept -> go create an issue / start discussion / show your prototype to maintainers or community.

So, after the last step most of time i was getting stuck. Either I'm doing stuff in a wrong way, but most of commits that were followed by the same path, weren't getting through. First maintainer sees it, says that we won't do it since that's not in our primary field of interest, and closes the issue. Reopening and trying to involve more people into discussion doesn't lead to the success, since dominated opinion was already stated out, and people tend to agree with people they know and trust.

Second approach. Fixing the issues you're facing. You're using some stable version of software (not cutting-edge), and notice that something went wrong. First google request gives you a link to a patch. So, your work is not required anymore. If it didn't, you still should write a unit-test and prove that that stuff was caused by framework, not your software bundle. Having not much or no open source contribution makes that process long. If not - you succeed and provide a patch or wait until someone fixes it in a better way.

Third approach. You don't have any features that you lack, and you didn't face any unfixed issues during development. But you want to pay back to the community, since you're thankful. You go to the bug tracker, and try to find a suitable bug for yourself. Often by the time you come up with a prototype, gurus already get it fixed. So, you're out of process again. You should really dive into that and spend long hours to get to know source code very well first, get acquainted with active people there. It's never been easy.
For the newer/younger readers, I believe that "commons" refers to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
That's too bad. Schools are the one place that definitely should switch. The basic skills of writing, revising, presentation, and spreadsheet usage can all be taught just fine with OO. I switched to it (nearly) full time about a year ago and haven't had any problem. The idea that teachers make students pay for MS Office, simply because they can't be bothered to change, angers me.

I don't know too many teachers who can actually use the finer functionality of MS office. A reluctance to switch must have another origin.

The one place where I've had trouble with OO occurs when I sometimes teach using prepared presentations. I can modify them in OO, but if they have a bunch of A/V goodies baked in I'll use ppt player to present so that everything works easily. I usually run a show like that out of Windows, too.
WSJ is getting worse on its political spins.
Ah yeah, I know that argument ;-)

Look, this is not to say that it is invalid, far from it. It’s just that I think you have to be a lot more careful. It could be that Japanese vs Japanese Americans is one of those Apples vs Oranges comparisons. Are Japanese Americans really like Japanese?
I love my Air. At the time I bought it I was consulting and travelling. I wanted a personal laptop that I could take with me everywhere to work on my side projects that didn't weigh down my laptop bag. My work laptop was a beast, so the second laptop needed to be light as hell. Then the Air came out and fit the bill perfectly.

There are other reasons I love this machine but they are largely personal preferences. I for one hate really huge, heavy laptops with wide screens. I like that the Air is very comfortable on my lap. But I also own a desktop, so my laptop can be used as just a laptop and doesn't need to be a desktop replacement.
Once the American manager and sales team eats up $150 of that then you have $50 for at least 3 days work. Unless you are planning on having no US sales presence.
Progress/loading animation GIF generator
You know what the greatest common divisor of Firefox, Chrome and Safari is? Internet Explorer 6.

That's right Jack, all the functionality you're using in a browser is the one Internet Explorer 6 has. Sadly, most of the people using the browsers you mentioned do the same.

The world you live in is the cave mentioned by Plato. You have never went outside and see there's so much things a browser can do, you're content in your small little world thinking "meh, my browser already has anything I would ever need".

Wrong. You could use a better interaction with the browser, you could use some extra features to make your life easier and stop checking your webmail when you have pop3 and smtp. You could have a lot of things if you would just come out of the cave.

Sure thing, Firefox has the extensions, but Chrome does not. You're missing out on a lot of functionality that you never knew existed.

How are you supposed to know that there is such a thing since you usually search for an extension when you KNOW you need (such as ad-block) but it never occurs to you that you might use a neat clever feature? You're stuck in the dark because you don't know light exists.
re. autotagger code, yes, I might, mail me and I'll explain one of the potential hangups there

re. dead mans knob: that's a literal translation of a dutch word, not sure what the english translation is, it stems from a button that train drivers have to keep pressed or the train will coast to a stop (in case they have a heart attack).

nice you like hackercontests :) Yes, I'd like to see that one happening very much. HackerBacker too, but that one is much more involved.

re. proofitwasthere: I was expecting such a response for pretty much all of them :)
I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does (virtually everything to kill it).
Brad Feld - startup lessons from a VC
"No, these days even technical execution is mostly trivial (with a few exceptions for apps built around unique algorithms). Far more important is marketing execution."

Can someone please smack this idiot?
Was thinking the same thing, and it also reminded me of a scene from "Seinfeld":

Jerry: So, Puddy, this is a pretty good move for you, huh? No more "grease monkey".

David Puddy: I don't much care for that term.

Jerry: Oh. Sorry, I didn't know...

David Puddy: No, I don't know too many monkeys who could take apart a fuel injector.
I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.

I use it because the document format is open (I've lost documents in the past to format extinction), and because the software is free.

I think it's not great because of tons of little bugs in the spreadsheet and presentation software. Like it doesn't remember my formatting for new cells in a column, even though I highlighted the whole column and applied it. Like I can't reliably move images around on a presentation screen.

Those kinds of frustrations really add up. If I had advice for the OO team, it would be "don't add features. Grind away at bug fixes and usability testing until everything behaves as expected."

If people said "OO doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it works great for what it does," that would be a great milestone and would drive a lot of adoption, I think.
To be fair, my understanding is that different versions of Word will display the same .doc file differently.

Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering that OO has PDF export built in.
Git was created for Linux kernel development. How in the world does Ruby have anything to do with anything?
And if the user has a script that saves all the data

There's no algorithm yet for how to deal with friends who are dedicated, untrustworthy jerks.

Someone out there, somewhere, is working on it, but Appleseed is focused on providing tools for users to determine how they group their friends based on trust, but if that trust is broken, there's not much that can be done (at this point), except to remove that person's access, and no longer trust them.
Tools->Mail and Chat accounts? rly? I thought the idea of an all in one internet behemoth died with Netscape Communicator.

Opera Unite? what? why? I just want a web browser. I don't want a web server or file sharing solution.

This is the main reason I don't run Opera apart from testing - I just want a fast small browser. Also I find the UI and rendering to look cluttered and a bit second rate.

Great to see Opera is getting websocket though: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/10/11/websockets
How many people use the features in Excel that are missing from OO? Surely it's a small percentage of the total number of Office licenses out there.
It's a mixed bag. At this time in this kind of disaster I agree it made sense for him to be right there. But in many other types of disasters, the president's presence does little but further complicate the situation.
extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research

Maybe, but they also benefitted from being there first. When organizations made the switch, they realized they were going to have to train everybody (I was with a huge organization in the '90s when all of this went down). They were only going to train on one system. In our case, we picked MS Office. Thus, good UX or bad UX, that's the UX that everybody learned. Organizations were dumping huge resources just into training, and all of that went into learning how to use MS Office.

They had a huge head start.
Sizing Up the Nightlife - A study of status distinction
This link is work-safe. At least with noscript. I don't know if there are any racy ads I'm not seeing.
It's always had great speed, performance, security and has a long history of innovation. When you consider how many features they've created that have become defaults across browsers, everyone is using Opera to one degree or another.

Chrome is a glorified data mining device and just feels overly sterile and corporate, FF grew complacent and has always been buggy, but Opera has everything I need built right into it:torrent client, note taker (very easy to use, super useful since I'l always taking notes on one tutorial or another), selective ad-blocking, the adress field doubles as a search field for any engine I want,it has the most customizable GUI and Opera Unite is awesome for file sharing- a couple friends and I use it to raid each others media collections every few months.
Stroustroup's comment on his intended audience seems common among successful software:
It was done for me and my friends and colleagues.
That could happen even if you both had Word though. Different versions of Word could do it, if you used fonts your friend didn't have would do it, and there may be other ways as well. If you want someone else to print a document for you, the only reliable way is to print it to a pdf file yourself and send over the pdf.
Why are so many people willing to pay $20 for a product, that if it already existed and was available at a checkout counter would probably cost less than $5 or $10?
I read an article about the X-Files once where the author talked about how the show flipped the usual formula for television casting on its head. In most television shows, the female lead is hired primarily for her looks while the male lead is supposed to be the one the audience can identify with. In the X-Files, Duchovny was the tall, slim model-ish one while Gillian Anderson was short and basically normal looking. It seems like X-Files fans have a better gender balance than most sci-fi shows. I wonder if having a more normal female lead helped in that regard?

Something similar seems to have happened in Star Wars. It's easy to forget since they've been around for so long, but Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams were ridiculously good looking guys. Mark Hamill was a teen idol from his time on shows like Eight is Enough and The Texas Wheelers (I had to look that name up.) By looks alone, Carrie Fisher might be the least likely of the four to get a magazine cover. (Don't tell my twelve-year-old self, though.)