skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I said in original post, price is not the problem. Although laziness and not so high ethics is :)

Thanks for the links.

Offtopic: we had the same situation in 90s. Getting better now, but most people still pirate software. Photoshop costs more than average monthly salary. Before taxes. Do I need to say more? :)
Respected Newspaper Man on the Death of Print – “La La La, I Can’t Hear You”
Well, here's how it looks from each of the stakeholder's perspective, as near as I can tell:

Artists: You invest a ton of hard work into making something you're proud of. Then you make $0.87 because everyone is pirating it (or at least, that's what your distributor tells you).

Distributors: Their primary value these days is in marketing. So far it's just the web cartoonists who seem to be making a living off their work, but the distributors being supplanted over time. They're hiring lobbyists and trying to keep their leverage by fighting stuff like Net Neutrality.

Users: I bought a game the other week. It wouldn't install and gave me some vague nonsense error message like "Install failed: try again." My best guess is that Starforce DRM was the reason. I'm out $20. I'm guessing it twigged on some remnant of a CD drive emulator I used to convert some ISO a long time ago and later uninstalled, but it won't tell me. I never got to play it. I could get a crack for it, but all the crap I took from trying to make it work made me hate the game. Long story short, I returned it. The non-techie store clerk elected to mark it as "defective." I didn't really feel like contradicting her.

Pirates: You can get anything you want for free. Unlike the users, your version won't have DRM. Worries about viruses and such are real, but overrated for people who are reasonably computer savvy. There's a reason more people transition from user to pirate.

Librarians: They're sitting on some wax cylinders from 1890 that won't go out of copyright until 2067 thanks to a 1972 law that simplified (and extended) audio copyrights. The Library of Congress report said that they generally have to ignore the law to preserve a lot of historic audio files.

Did I miss anyone?
I've bought additional IPs for our main server that we are hosting multiple SSL sites on. Extra IP is $1/month, I think you can get up to 5 extra IPs on one machine.
Totally agree with this.

Simplicity is the reason that higher-level languages and lightweight process for project/task management, design/development should win.

So what's the problem in general? Well, let's take it a step further and find out.

It could easily be argued that the same technique of simplification can and should be applied to other areas of our lives. Federal and state laws, rules, and regulations in the U.S. are extremely complex when looked at as a whole, so let's start there. But that is a huge chunk, so let's focus even more: Since tax laws are especially burdensome, and it would seem simple enough to try to simplify them. There have been efforts by many to push for the "Fair Tax", "Flat Tax", etc. Why hasn't everyone jumped aboard this train?

These efforts fail because:

1. The people pushing to re-engineer the system would end up causing so much change that many people would lose their jobs (accountants, lawyers, the IRS, etc.) and there would be mass turmoil on top of that prolonged unemployment.

2. The same large accounting industry, lawyers, etc. have a good bit of lobbying power. Threatening these people's livelihoods will produce even more serious action if they ever thought it would really happen. Right now they are just on-guard. Imagine what it would look like if they were cornered.

How all of this applies to tech:

Along with complexity comes process and resources to deal with that complexity. If you let things get complex and they stay that way long enough, you are going to have trouble simplifying. Simplification will almost certainly have detractors come out of the woodwork pushing for the old way of doing things, and if you still follow through, it may end up with a number of people getting let go.

Whole industries have sprung up around ISO, CMM, etc. certifications, UML tools, etc. Banks are afraid of giving up the waterfall design/development teams, even if they have other teams doing "agile". Even "agile" has their folks pushing scrum certification, etc.

The way out of this I think is to start over.

Start your own company and make your own way. This is the only way to break the cycle.

By the same token, government needs to be reinvented if it is to ever be simplified. But, neither revolt nor destruction is the answer. People make fun of people that try to start their own governments within the geographical bounds of other governments, but they are on the right track at least, even if they are a little (or a lot) crazy. But really, there is almost no place on Earth to start anew.

So, we need to colonize space. Earth is just going to continue to get more and more screwed up, and the human race needs some chances to start over and simplify.
are any of these completed?
Is the circuit available?

[edit]

Oh, "they". I read "we" :)
It might have been marked dead because both developers posted a submission for the site. The other post is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800422 and contains some constructive comments.
That's not quite what you wrote in the original post, you were trying to suggest that you had no legitimate option and piracy was "the only way to access information".

Whereas the truth is simply that the legitimate options took more effort to find & execute than piracy did. Which is universally true, even often for those who live in the US (the gap is just narrower there.)
In other words, get your 10,000 hours of practice in in half the calendar time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29
Personally, I think he's being backed up against a wall enough that he should just download it.

But I appreciate your creative and thoughtful solution. If this were an interview question, your answer would tell me a lot about you.
--This idea that someone owns unique configuration of words and sounds is old and dying.--

That software you're working on is just a unique configuration of words and symbols. I think there's value in protecting that, and I don't see any difference in regards to written publications.
We do have a custom database. What makes it hard to export data is that we have no representation of what info is public. The database knows only that e.g. startup x has raised a series A round, or has been acquired, but it doesn't know whether those things have been announced yet.
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Depends on the format.

PDF on the desktop. Keeps formatting, and on Mac Preview is solid document viewer.

ePub on iPad/iPhone. Why not PDF on those devices? You can't annotate/highlight PDF's but you can to ePub.

That's what works for me. YMMV.
Practical Tips to Lift Your Conversion Rate
If you don't mind, what's your startup's annual revenue?
> stealing Debian's work

That's a completely unfair statement. I wasn't aware following the license of an open source statement constituted stealing.
One a related note -- if you are a contractor, don't try to lock in your customer, no undocumented magic code, secret processes, hidden ways doing things. Make it so they can get rid of you quickly and efficiently. They will love you for it, as everyone else will not do that, and you will be regarded much, much better because of it.
why does this comment get hammered??

with the implosion of Digg, there has been an influx of users from digg to reddit and here, and surely from reddit to here.

trolls roll downhill, so to speak.

so why when a user asks what's going on with HN, the comment gets hammered? or is it the trolls doing the hammering.

I made a similar comment recently and it got just as quickly crushed.

something is awry at HN and some of us care. surely, the growth is good and there will be all types but shooting the messenger only proves the negative point.
The normal page is here: http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/stay-up-late
Ask HN: Need feedback from my startup
Hello HN, I would be very grateful if you could provide some feedback for my startup (skanr.com)! This is an iphone client that allows you to collect data and share it with web services, a video demo is available on the home screen. I'm hoping this can assist someone trying to make some cool mashups, thanks again for your feedback!
He should have linked to his website instead of putting the link in the text area. It's not OK to put the URL in the text field where it's intentionally not clickable, without a good reason. If you want to do commentary, either post a comment or make a blog post and submit that url.
42.txt
The Wash Post article listed below only states that the vendor has discontinued the card - so it's still a vendor lock-in problem. The bankruptcy mention must have been a red herring.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09...
Actually he uses it, I imagine, so that he will be able to read it next year.

I haven't even tried to use any todo apps, (the text file has always served me well) but what experience I have with proprietary formats is that they're a poor choice for storing data, since either they're poorly designed or the designer is constantly redesigning them and invalidating your data.
it's not that weird like "zomg micro$oft contributes GPL code zomg zomg" ... Microsoft Research is, at its core, an academic research lab that publishes in academia. it's no more surprising than if a university contributes GPL code back to some open source project. (of course, people at MSR do often hack on proprietary projects that they can't open source, though)
http://cloudflare.com includes a real anycasted DNS service for free (there also a bunch of other niceties which you can turn off, if you really want). All the other anycast providers cost $$-$$$ (let me know if you know otherwise, guys).

They don't have an API for users yet, so you'll need to do a bit of scraping/coding if you want to automate things for a dynamic DNS setup. Otherwise, I'm really happy with their service and recommend it wholeheartedly for any kind of VS or simple cloud setup.

Having said that, my previous choices for free DNS were NearlyFreeSpeech.net (which isn't free anymore), and the built-in (free) DNS service offered by Answerable.com for registered domains.
Yes its over, many are 'done', but they're not all web apps, so some were just in person demos and performances.

Mine is online here: http://labs.brianstoner.com/paintsamples

It only works in new Firefox 4 beta cause it uses the new audio API.
I had trouble reading past his suggestion for a "bill of rights" for Internet users. Real, important rights are being trampled on all the time in this country. A "bill of rights" that guarantees the right to watch football on your computer insults and minimizes our actual rights.
That's the thing... I'm pretty sure we can open source all of our code, and it will be business as usual.

We already open source a lot of stuff, because that stuff alone isn't nearly enough to beat us.
ahem, not the best measuring device, regardless

my account is less than a year old yet I attended Startup School 2006.

passwords get lost, hard drives fail
I'm with Linode, but I have to give kudos to Slicehost for their documentation. This is my first time running a VPS and I have gone to Slicehost's tutorials just as often as I have to Linode's. I've also found the videos through vpsbible.com to be a big help as well.
Util.pm?
That was more a hypothetical.
It sounds like they feel like they got burned on the one feature. One thing I try to do is if something starts to run late is let them asap. When did u tell them it was running late?
I suggest you resubmit it as a link and post your description as a comment. You will get a lot more people to look at your app and give feedback.
Not a really useful guideline. Just because my account is new doesn't mean I haven't been reading HN for awhile. I just never felt like commenting here.
HN is turning into reddit.
Ask HN: What information do you consider before investing in a stock?
My startup is in the finance space and we're wondering what information is important to individual investors.

We have identified the first three aspects our tool will analyze: the quality of a stock's balance sheet, its history of generating cash and the amount of cash it generates compared to the amount it invests. We use proven value investing standards to grade each aspect.

What other information do you consider before investing in a stock?
IPhone fragmentation
I'm the (proud) owner of a first generation iPhone and I'm also pretty addicted to buying apps on the App Store, it's such an amazing experience.

Since iPhone 4 was released, this experience started to show some problems. I like to check what's being released, I check it daily, and when I find something interesting I just try it. The problem is that sometimes the app is not available for my iOS version, the latest for the first generation of the iPhone (3.1.3).

This problem is getting more frequent so I was wondering: is it worth to choose not to develop for the 3.1.3 version leaving all those 6 millions[1] of first generation iPhones out? What's really unique about iOS 4 SDK to make someone develop only with it in mind?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg - I have no idea how many iPhones were sold to this day but it seems like the original iPhone is 10% of the total units sold.
And, just in case you're interested, sign up to be notified when we launch into private beta (http://www.vuru.co).
The anti-music startup sentiment has been picking up steam lately. Its hard to argue against it being a difficult space to be in, but are we really ready to just turn our backs on innovation all together? Music needs startups--more now than ever before. 1000s may fail (and probably already have!) but just one needs to hit it big in this space for us all to be better off.

When everyone else is saying "run away", its the brave(/stupid) who keep pushing forward that win in the end.
clickable http://skanr.com/
Skate Where the Puck is Going
Who's to say that will still be an illusion in three years?
I'll do that, thanks :)
As a contrived example, use getpwent, don't parse /etc/passwd by yourself.

Absolutely not a contrived example. I still remember some $XXX,XXX-per-installation enterprise software which wouldn't integrate with our LDAP database because it was parsing /etc/passwd on the server it ran on. It introduced a huge headache in operations because we had to start maintaining in parallel login permissions in /etc/passwd which had previously been just a stub.
Change what you can change, and stop worrying about what other people do. Trolls will always exist. Maybe we all need some small change in the algorithm to make things slow down...
Some piracy is welfare-maximizing for society. If there was zero chance that you would buy a costless-to-reproduce good at the effective price -- and the effective price includes all the hoops you have to jump through to get it, including search costs -- then obtaining a copy results in no real loss to the rightsholder, but a real gain for you.

Societies become rich by encouraging people to take as many such gains-without-loss actions as possible! (And quite a few actions where the gain of some outweighs the loss of others, too.)

Of course, having this utilitarian rationalization handy may mean you pretend you wouldn't have paid the higher cost, when in fact, you would have. And, someday the rightsholder may find a way to offer their product at a price you'd take -- perhaps through some form of price discrimination -- in which case, piracy causes a small loss to the rightsholder.

But piracy may still be net-welfare-enhancing, because their eventual-loss-at-some-future-price-point may be much smaller than your gain-in-the-meantime.

I wouldn't agonize over your situation, as long as you're trying to get legitimate copies. Perhaps you could pick up a legitimate copy when it does become available, or figure out a generalized way to pretend to be a US consumer of digital goods -- VPN, PO Box, CC card? -- whose cost can be amortized over many purchases. (Is that circumvention ethical? Well, that's another interesting question...)
NASA and Gowalla Team Up to Explore the Moon
Funny, I had nearly an identical experience and this was before learning about the vibrams or this 'issue'.
Need feedback for my startup skanr.com please
> it is technical breach of contract with Amazon

What contract did you sign with Amazon?
I could certainly get on board with a better filter system, but I think a 200 point minimum might be setting the bar a little high. I've been moderately active on HN for about 2 years now and just barely have 200 karma. If I would have been unable to post anything during that time, the utility of HN would be greatly reduced.

Then again, perhaps it would just encourage me to be more active in discussions.
It is not the internet unless it's open. More accurate, imho, to call it Chinanet.
I agree on the value of art and that games can be art; however, I think the majority of time spent on games is entirely divorced from any kind of artistic appreciation or experience. Farmville and grinding for levels in WoW come to mind. A good parallel is television: some is art, much is garbage.
Hello HN, I would be super happy if you share some feedback on my project! I'm hoping my tool can help some folks make some cool mashups, thanks again for your time :)
Mindfulness application that would ring a gong at random times, at a user selectable frequency. e.g. seven times in an eight hour span.
Anyone here doing startups in China? From inside or outside the country?
Agreed, it's not a useful guideline. It's creating a truth out of thin air: "HN is not turning into Reddit."

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for this but I think I'm bringing up a valid point. "HN is not turning into Reddit" is taken to be true a priori and the guidelines call for us not to question this. This seems to go counter to the general spirit of HN of allowing intelligent discussion and opposing points of view. (However, if a comment merely says "HN is turning into Reddit" it's not valuable; it should go into more detail and contribute something new and useful.)
I'm sure Startup School was great, but much of this is advice I've already read through various blog posts on HN and elsewhere. Does anyone else think they're reached the point of diminishing marginal returns on startup advice?
TechZing is one of my favorites. It's semi-educational though retains an informal, discussion format in the main (that is, it's not just lectures): http://techzinglive.com/
Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

Mixergy (HN @AndrewWarner) http://www.mixergy.com/

This Week In Venture Capital (HN @msuster) http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-venture-capital/

This Week in Startups (HN @jasonmcalacanis) http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/

Some good stuff on TechCrunchTV http://techcrunch.tv/
Why Code
I understand that you're not referring to the post on HN that got killed but to the activity on their website.

What happened there is no different than what happens when someone posts a spreadsheet with useful stuff here. Within minutes it will get destroyed or defaced.

The 'griefers' have definitely discovered HN. I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have, and that some others are simply here because they can't see a good thing without being tempted to try to destroy it.

Anything - and I really mean anything - that you put out there on the internet needs to be designed with abuse in mind, because no matter how small it is the abusers will seek it out and will try to destroy it.

That's something that you need to be aware of as much as you need to be a coder or a designer when you plan on making a living online.

Better get used to it.
I'm guessing it was downvoted because the comment didn't have much substance and didn't further the discussion.
Interesting.

I posted an article a couple of weeks ago. The point of the article was that get-rich-quick-by-blogging stories are a dime a dozen, when the formula is really very simple: write for yourself, make friends, and keep doing it.

Because it was so simple, I thought it was cute to do a 1 or 2 paragraph format. Here it is

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/how-to-make-a...

Of course, it only got one vote. (Thanks mom!) But the weird thing was that somebody from HN came by my site and took the time to add a snide comment along the lines of "Why did you post this on HN?"

To which I (logically enough) replied: then don't vote it up.

Seems to me we are getting a fair share of drive-by trolls, downvoters, and flaggers. Ten guys hate you that are on HN all the time? They can zap your article no matter what it is.

Why folks from here would visit blog submission sites and berate the blog authors is beyond me.

That's not reddit, but that's definitely a change in the atmosphere.
As much as I'd like to be part of a community like that, you are wrong. The closest official definition of on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Many people come here simply because they're smart and bored.
I've seen that done hundreds of times and nobody ever made an issue of it, usually it gets reposted as a comment by someone else. That's insufficient reason for a flag or a deletion. Apparently it was a duplicate submission.
Give TechZing (http://www.techzinglive.com) a try. It's a mix of discussions and interviews with founders, investors and coders (Derek Sivers, Gabriel Weinberg, etc). Disclaimer: I'm a co-host. ;)
Very well done. This is a new model, at least to me, and an easy way to access the mobile space without creating a native app. I think this will be very effective.

The website and newsletter signup process are very polished.

Congrats
In my limited experience, you can never make the system guys love you, nobody can.

Simply put, system guys have a lot of downtime, where they do stuff that they enjoy, rather than work. So anytime anyone interrupts them from this, they are going to be annoyed, it is only natural. You are taking them away from fun, to something boring, and annoying to fix.

Regarding the article, I am not sure why hosting considerations aren't talked about at the beginning of the project. Even working with non-technical people, this has always been one of the first issues. Are we going to host it here, are you going to host it, can it use a shared platform, does it need a database. This is all thought about at the start of the project, and if need be a systems guy is bought in.
For anyone's future reference, the university professors I spoke with recommended the following for academic or research purposes.:

1) If the survey is publicly available and does not have controlled usage you can simply cite the source of the survey.

2) If you modify some part of it you will need to be explicit about that e.g. "as modified in October 2010 by (your name)" or "as modified by the author."

For commercial purposes this might be different, in which case you should contact the publisher and make a request.

My situation is for research purposes but I will contact the publisher to be sure.
Unicode's already supported and widely used, so can't be that. It seems to have something to do with UI support for finding/translating text between different Wikipedia languages.

edit: Fairly comprehensive documentation (PDF): http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/W...