skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Facebook is, like MySpace, always at risk of being overwhelmed by the next social go-to website.

I think Facebook has passed that hurdle. Its users are invested enough by now, with their friends lists/groups/games/etc, that they won't be moving en-masse somewhere else for the foreseeable future.

Even if some new upstart creates a compelling feature that threatens to steal users, Facebook can buy it or copy it, as they're doing with location-based services.

I think people are more likely to switch search engines, from Google to DDG/Blekko/whatever, than from Facebook to some other social network.
I'd love to read an in depth a/b test analysis on a dating site, tbh it sounds like something okcupid would happily do.
Anyone looking for a part-time worker? I'm a 9-5 guy, but would love to work with a startup in my off-hours.

Front-end web dev (HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery/WordPress/Joomla/PHP/MySQL guy).
GM: Without Software Chevy Volt is Stuck in Neutral
Patrick, congratulations. I'll check out the book soon. I wonder if you'd get any traffic looking at nation-specific holidays. November 5th (Bonfire Night) is pretty big here in the UK. I'd be surprised if there's much competition, but don't know about the search volume.
I started reading this thinking that it was going to be one of his more outlandish style posts. But this strikes me as being not that far removed from what Kickstarter is trying to do in the domain of small creative projects.
Great comment. The false divide between arts and sciences has been with us an unpleasantly long time; if you haven't read C.P. Snow's _The Two Cultures_, find a copy. It was published in the 1950s, IIRC, yet it still resonates.
That monetization strategy makes sense, though I'd find out what such institutions are looking for in writing software before going too far.

I'd suggest refining who your target audience is. Writers and readers is far too broad. Having a better sense of who would use this will help you develop and position the product much better. As it stands, when I hit the site I can't tell if it's for adults or children. The answer is probably both but when you go to start marketing this you'll have to choose one.
OK, the domain registration is live. Thoughts on structure/content?
And I greatly appreciate it, but you're an edge case at best.
Built an MVP over the weekend, thought it might be of use to the group - http://ratemymvp.com

So many great MVP's get posted on HN but disappear within a day or two - I wanted to offer an additional place for people to post their projects for review and discussion by the startup community. Please let me know what you think - and if you've got an MVP, send me what you have and I'll put it up.
Improvements to the site since the beta a few weeks ago.

- Added JQuery UI

- Each book now has its own detail page

- On the book detail page, you can see where other hackers all over the web are talking about the book. Good for those who want to research books more before buying

- There's an "Ask Question" where you can ask a question. I tried to include the standard questions we get over on HN, but if I missed one, here's the place to add it

- There's an "Answer Question" page. Don't like my list of books? Make your own using drag and drop. Site creates an url with your lists of books to answer a particular startup question. You can reuse the url in other places (like HN)

- Added a bunch of noscript text so folks without Javascript can still browse the books

- Spent way too long on load and response times (Always seems that way, eh?) First hit on an empty cache still sucks, but return hits aren't so bad.

Also added several books based on HNers suggestions.
It sounds like you're running with the assumption that there is a consistency in the dosage. I admit there would be for cigarettes. Despite different brands offering different amounts of tar and nicotine most people stick to a particular brand and smoke a particular amount in a day.
However for ecstasy the dosages may well fluctuate wildly. Obviously to start with it isn't habitual so frequency isn't usually consistent. Even with a consistent "every Saturday night" (probably the most common dosage) due to the struggles of supply and demand in a black market you will take different quantities of different stock.

I.E. One day you'll have rubbish "Roles Royces" and you'll have 6 of em, another you'll have some nice "Mitsis" and just take 3 and on other days you'll have an insane "Red Tulip" that was incredibly more potent than all the others so you only needed one.
Of course the name never really means anything as you can have both good "mitsis" and bad "mitsis".

Then there is also the case where the pill is actually cut with something else (pretty common I believe), perhaps a bit of ketamine or god knows. The issue perhaps is that an "ecstasy" in its black market form may be very different from its medical definition making it very difficult to compare like for like.
That's actually not true.

There are two ways to look at economic production in SC2. You can spend your time and money producing items that will do damage (e.g. units), or you can spend money on things that will increase your production rate (e.g. more barracks, hatcheries, etc).

Then there is a tech tree to factor in, how far up the tech tree should you go. It's all about understanding how far up the tech tree you need to go.

Say you are facing an opponent that is going to rush with level 1 units, if you know this, you can build defenses at choke points that will cost you much less than his units will cost to break through. At the same time you are rapidly climbing the tech tree to get more powerful units and spending less on the lower tier units.

On the other hand, if he has just enough units to bust through your defenses, it's game over.

That's how strategy comes into play in SC2. Often part of your early game strategy is figuring out how to disrupt the opponents supply chain (particularly along their critical path) while continuing to increase your own production capacity.

Long post - but in general your economic curves are not necessarily the same. Early expand, versus more units and pushing, etc.
It's a shame that Fireworks gets mentioned only in the context of the "Dragnet Website Wireframes Kit for Adobe Fireworks". It's a great application in CS4 and even better in CS5 version. Highly recommended!
Why do people keep trying to reinvent the keyboard? It can't be done. Get over it. Most people have to use one for work, leverage that knowledge. Inventing a new input system is the opposite of "easy to use". This CAN NOT catch on publicly.
Totally agree that this needs re-doing. One way we were thinking of doing this is by putting the active games closer to the top, and letting people look at some of the tasks being accomplished.
I've had that happen more times than I can count. It's hard, because all the terran has to do is hit stim on his MMM ball and A-move. As zerg you have to pull off some Robert E. Lee shit to have a chance.
Our entire induction process takes less than half an hour. Is it rare to try and have everything set up for the new hire before they start?
This reminds me of Palm's Graffiti system used on the Palm Pilot range of PDAs [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) ]. That system too used simple gestures that mimicked hand-writing.

Rather than training the system to learn how to decipher the user's input, it required the user to learn some basic gestures. The input speed may not have been as fast as the predictive touchscreen keyboards on iphone/android phones, but it was a pleasure to use and accuracy was second to none.
Thanks everyone for the solid feedback! The feature requests and critiques are invaluable. This was an alpha version we put together to see what type of response we got before we started to develop additional features.

@Adrianwaj - I dig your favorites video idea. I'm going play with some interface designs and see what I can come up with. You have a lot of great suggestions here. I think we can incorporate most of them over time, but I want to avoid having too many features and making the app too complicated for the user. I do appreciate all the great ideas. Thanks!

@iwr - I was debating between wrapping the YouTube chromeless player in Flash or JavaScript. To achieve a full screen button, I would need to wrap the player in Flash, but overall I much prefer working in JS, especially with the push towards HTML5 and CSS3. You bring up a great point about dual screens. I think as HTML5 develops, so will a solution. As browsers continue to trend towards being more minimalistic maybe a they will soon offer a JS full screen mode.

@makuro - We have not developed the seek scrubber or volume control quite yet. I wanted to see the overall response to the core application before I started working on those additional features. I have designs for them though, so keep an eye on us. ;-)

@iworkforthem - Thanks for the positive feedback! I would love to use this interface to build out content channels for others. You bring up a really good utility here. Using the Data API we could easily grab all the videos from a certain user, and booya you have a custom channel. Ping me if you know anyone who could use this. vidi@vici.tv

@Vantra - Someone else mention that thumbs up \ thumbs down idea too. We are essentially doing that with the next button. We figured if you hit the next button the video was not engaging enough for you to watch all the way through. We capture that data and consider it when choosing videos for everyone. Our back end crowdsources what videos are the most entertaining using the next button and a few other pieces of critical data pumped through a some cool ratio analysis and comparison algorithms. With this AI, VICI.tv will filter though YouTube and deliver better and better content over time.

Again, thanks for all the comments and keep them coming. We will put in more features based on what people suggest the most. Any questions, feel free to find us on twitter (@VICItv) or drop us a line: vidi@vici.tv.

Lastly, what channels are everyone's favorites? I saw so many awesome ones pop up yesterday. A couple of my new favorites are Parkour and Chris Farley.

Alexander
Personally I'd attribute that to less people getting married. But that's just a guess.
It's showing a little bit :-)

There are plenty of things that would make their computers/products easier to use, but they don't do them. For example, their rental policy for video is horrible. I have just stopped renting because I never finish anything. How is it that Amazon can have a strictly superior policy, but Apple's sucks? I think this is actually an example where Steve plays the role of Apple CEO and Disney shareholder at the same time.

When Apple lets me run iOS/OSX in a VM on my Windows box then I'll believe their main mission is to make computers easier to use. Until then the bottomline seems to be the thing the thing that cuts across most items at Apple, like most other companies.
I'll admit, the path to a GC is equally broken. And I genuinely feel bad for most immigrants here in the US. Sure, they might have it better here than they do elsewhere. Why else would bright folks leave the comfort and familiarity of their home to work here? But still, it seems like indentured servitude most of the time. Believe me, my sentiments were not superficial.
Does Google actually have a claim under the Tucker Act? Some quick searching limits claimants to those who have an actual contract.

http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/tucker_act

EDIT: Note that in general sovereign immunity would preclude a contract suit against the government. The Tucker Act permits several types of claims against the US Gov't.
I've known several heroin users and not one ever committed a crime to support their habit. As others have pointed out, penalize people for the crimes actually committed, not for what some people think they might do.
I am planning on getting BeerLedge.com up and running. It is going to be a mix between Foursquare for beer drinkers and RateBeer. For some reason I have been infatuated with beer and finally have set a goal to tie in this infatuation with a website. We shall see where I go with it though since I am currently trying to complete nanowrimo[1] as well.

Not sure why November is such a great month of challenges like this (aren't we all growing mustaches too?) Good luck to everyone!

[1] http://nanowrimo.org
Riak performance benchmarking on Joyent
I think Flash-on-iOS is a great example of something that geeks love to discuss, but doesn't matter in the least to normal folks. Every non-technical person I know wants an iPad; 75% of them probably don't even know what Flash is.
Tethering is possible because it doesn't require accessing any other app's data. SMSes are walled off. That does not appear to be the case with Android, which allows apps to send/read SMSes.
It hold its power for 3 months. You should be ok.
We wrestled with the structure issue - giving people the freedom to build takes away the ease of conveying what it is. As far as gaming the system, we envision 3 levels of proof: honor system if it's a game between you and your friends, photos and video as the next layer up, and ultimately assigning "superplayers" to referee and approve certain tasks. Revenue model one of: let people charge to play the games they create, let people resell virtual items or currency, or allow commercially sponsored games.
I am not in any way an edge case. 50% of founders in Silicon Valley are immigrants:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/09/economic...
Partly! We see it as extracting some of the mechanics of 4square, some of the mechanics of WOW, etc, and then letting people build their own games.
Any non-US studies?
@niyazpk: I resent this comment:

"I am not sure that more serious* companies...I mean with actual paying customers and such."

Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash flows. Our revenues and profits are in the millions.

Very, very few startups can make that claim.

We operate three different lines of business: we sell advertising, we sell merchandise (at http://lolmart.com) and we publish printed materials such as books and greeting cards (http://amzn.to/buztLM).

I assure you that having fun and LOL is a serious business.

Scott
Patrick: so you got $370 from the promotions, but $6024.45 in sum? That seems off. Where'd all the other money come from? Were people just searching for "Bingo Cards" and bought through your normal site, or something?
I'll look forward to finding out if this is better than Swype, which also has swiping from place to place, but over a normally laid out keyboard.

Lots of space for innovation here.
I work remotely for Mozilla. We have both offices and remote workers all over the world. I work from home in Seattle, and I have teammates in Mountain View, Toronto, Paris, Vancouver, San Diego, and Pennsylvania. Even my manager is a remote worker.

See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/careers for job listings, and check my profile for contact info if you have any questions.
Rails seems to be popular for people that do C++, Java and PHP in terms of jobs. Python is something that you can get to about 3/10 in an afternoon, but there are less jobs (except in domain-specific areas where python has an advantage).

Personally I'd recommend python to anyone to pick up and run with, see if they like it and carry on if they do. Having said that, if it's coin you're after with your current skillset I imagine that C sharp or a .NET-based language may well be more appropriate for you.
Did anyone see the maximum age in the search?
You're right. I lost it there, and it was uncalled for. Edited to remove it. I still believe the points I made hold merit, though. Immigrants aren't "stealing" our jobs, but corporations who choose to employ them in large numbers are not "creating more jobs" by doing so.
Thanks for pointing that out.

It's wonderful that their codebases can be enhanced by adding another case to a switch-statement, but that's far from what you'll encounter with complex projects. It works for web 2.0 PHP/Rails stuff. It doesn't translate to much else.

[EDIT: My tone struck me as a bit too condescending, sorry about that. Still: Rushing new developers into their first commit doesn't work for many projects!]
Six Things You Need To Learn To Build Your Own Prototype
Regenerative braking in subways almost seems like a no-brainer. maybe this will drive some movement in the price of li-ion batteries.
It would seem they designed their site to look like something Google would make. The colors used in the lines that separate the quadrants on the 8pen are also reminiscent of Google's logo. Really hoping for that acquisition?
I am launching http://getbizen.com

Bizen provides better intelligence for franchises. A web-based application that is integrated with the store point of sale to provide comparative analytics, trend analysis, key performance indicators, goal setting, and notifications.

I received seed funding from Jumpstart Foundry in September and am hoping to have my first paying customer in November.

These are a set of tools I have been using for my own franchise stores and am now converting into a product that I can take to market.

I haven't written much about it yet and haven't posted it to the Facebook group. I have been so damn busy creating the product and getting my investor pitch ready for a "demo day" on November 3rd.
The article says there were 20 million Android devices sold in the US in Q3.

This article:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-iPad-T...
says that in Q3 Apple sold 2 million computers in the US which was 10.6% of the total. So that means there were about 16 million Windows computers sold.

However, that PC number is just "consumer" sales and businesses buy more computers than consumers. Still though, Android is getting close already.
I got the impression that something was going to be proposed, but it seemed vague . . . is there something being proposed?

On the 303 stuff: I don't understand the problem. RDF can talk about various things, not just web pages: RDF uses general URIs, which could be URLs, URNs, or whatever else is invented. If you don't want to make statements about a web page, you don't use an http URL. What is the need for using 303 responses?

And I don't understand the JSON comparison. Sure, RDF in XML is dismal, but RDF in Turtle is OK. The core, real, RDF is just URI triples -- subject, predicate, object -- it is already very simple, elegant, and powerful. How does JSON help?

I do like the idea of RDF/data-web/GGG uses and applications, but I can't figure out what this article is really trying to say.
When they were explaining how to form letters, the movement reminded me of dialing numbers on a rotary phone, except that the possible combinations were expanded because counterclockwise "dialing" is also allowed.
That number is an overestimation, anyway, partly because of how it is usually arrived at:

http://divorcelawyersknoxville.net/true-divorce-statistics-h...
Check the graduate recruitment job boards and go to careers fairs.

By and large most mainstream job boards are dominated by professional recruiters, and companies don't generally use recruiters for graduate level roles, hence mainstream job boards aren't the place to look.

Generally applicant:place ratio for most grad tech roles is typically 50-100/place (that's for London; I'm guessing it might be less for Glasgow), but about 90% of applicants fail at the CV review stage. So if you make your CV compelling you've got a decent chance.

There are a lot of graduate developer roles available, the financial sector in London alone takes 500-1000 CS grads/year. Most banks recruit from across Europe, because they simply can't hire enough good CS grads from the UK.
Quality Assurance Roles and Responsibilities
And didn't exist at the time the iPad came out.
I am launching Local Strange [localstrange.com]. It's a real-time replacement for the craigslist erotic section.

I got video chat working.

Ill have phone / txting done this week.

Next week im implementing a credits system.
I can't help but feel that this would work much better as a coloring book if the artist hadn't included all those grey washes.
Smalltalk, if you want to understand what the future will look like.
SOMA, no remote working: Yelp!

* http://yelp.com/careers -- hiring all engineering positions

* http://engineeringblog.yelp.com -- learn about what engineers @ Yelp do

* http://github.com/yelp -- our open-source contributions (including mrjob)
Please beta test our iPhone medical app (improved based on HN feedback)
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iphone+alarm

check out some of the tweets
As extension languages go, Lua is like a better Javascript. The whole design is cleaner, and it has a very high performance JIT compiler (LuaJIT, http://luajit.org/) for x86 platforms.

Mainly, though, I think the devs just prefer it. (I do, too.)

Also, using a separate scripting language makes the local / web barrier clearer, which probably helps with security.
Check this out:
http://www.inc.com/matt-quinn/the-rise-of-high-resolution-fu...

From Business Insider:
"Here's the deal:
A convertible debt is a type of financing that has three distinct characteristics: It doesn't give the investor any legal authority in the company, thereby reducing legal fees associated with the investment (from near $40k to just $5k), and it defers valuation to the next round. In return for the risk the investors incur, they are offered a significantly upgraded rate when investing in future rounds of financing.
A capped convertible debt essentially sets boundaries for that significantly upgraded rate, while still avoiding negotiations on an (often premature) evaluation of the seed or early-stage company. That cap helps avoid the conflicts of interests that arise between a VC and a company in the eventual valuation of a company.
Meanwhile standard equity financing sets strict parameters on the companies valuation, gives investors legal sway with the direction of the company, and has legal fees that can reach $40k.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-all-this-noise-about-co...
I think it's par for the course for the mentality in the City; what few interactions I've had were unpleasant. Makes me glad I work from home and commute to California a couple of times a year, rather than have to put up with it.
Ask HN: Rate My Startup Gigshare.co (a freelancer community)
Hey, I'm trying to get feedback for my project which allows freelancers to privately or publicly share gigs they are working on or want to offload because they are too busy.
Please review. Thanks.
It is important to note that this feature started today, and is only available to new customers.
You got me there, but I still assert that the vast majority of immigrants aren't founders hiring Americans, and what's happening in Silicon Valley simply doesn't hold true many other places here in the US. In my part of the country, I'm actually much more frustrated with undocumented illegal immigrant labor than I am with student- or work-visa immigrant labor.
The interesting part here is the linear scaling that each additional node affords you when scaling out your cluster. Basho has done a very good job at trying to maintain predictable performance at a certain set of variables.
5. Bluray is not dying, bluray players and discs are being sold in record numbers.

Record numbers compared to what? Of course when BR uptake has been as slow as it was in the beginning it's easy to set records. I think the OP was pointing out that physical media in general is dying. Of course you'll still have the technobuffs who have 5.1/6.1/7.1 surround in their house and 100" projectors (this is where BR really shines and it's amazing to experience), but for most people convenience trumps the good enough that is current streaming. Even now I believe that Netflix has recently added 5.1 sound to many of their streams and I think they have started to stream some 1080p material to the PS3.