skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not a subject where anecdotal information reveals much, because the USA is diverse and few of us understand what all of the different population segments face, in terms of information access, or Internet access. According to Wikipedia the digital divide still exists, and income plays a role:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide

While it admits to several definitions of the divide, it mentions broadband access as one aspect of the problem.

My original point remains: Obama had disproportionate support from those population segments that were likely to have limited broadband access, therefore video would be a poor choice for him.

The larger point is that you can not generalize from this one example, mentioned in the originally linked article. Video was a poor choice for Obama, but might be a good choice for a new web startup that is pitched to a demographic where broadband access can be assumed.
I'm not sure that's at all the argument jws was making. From the customer's point of view, why should they be able to download 100 gigabytes (through Comcast's infrastructure) from an endpoint also within Comcast's network with no problem, but now they can't get any data at all from a level3 endpoint? They're taking up 100 gigs of bandwidth on Comcast's network regardless. Why does level3 have to pay extra to send that customer the bits they've requested?
If all the trains at Clapham Junction were suddenly to cease to function, would the people at the station ever reach their destination?
no, they cannot withdraw from a linked account without your permission from an initiated transfer. any funds you leave in your temporary paypal holding are theirs for the taking, of course.
I've seen plenty of very informative posts which were essentially slapping down a troll.
lazymake: make for the rest of us - GitHub
People do what they know witness books about authors/publishing, movies about making movies, and yes geeks writing bigger, better programming tools.

Its not wrong, its just not a very big market. Especially when Microsoft et al are nearly giving such things away.
I'm very excited to see how this pans out. Even though i'm not a country they're going to support, if they do well it will set a good precedent and maybe we can finally see banking stirred up a bit. Banks are my most hated companies as a whole.
If they decide to reverse a payment to your paypal account and you do not have enough funds, it will start to transfer from your bank account tied to the paypal account, without warning or consultation.

There are stories about this all over the web. You essentially agree to it in their TOS.
I'm not sure I see the distinction. You and I could have a discussion for an hour and I can walk away not sure of what transpired. It feels like something has happened but the outcome is unbounded, sort of like comment threads.

By contrast, I could ask you a series of questions, even open-ended ones, and it will be pretty clear what the takeaways are. I'll know clearly what you think. And if not, I can always ask another question.

Are questions though really a part of any discussion? How often do we see the "?" in threads here. It doesn't feel all that often and this is one of the best places online for discussions.

Two helpful concepts here are "debate" and "interview". They're two very different forms of communication, right?
It isn't an experiment without a control. There aren't any mentioned in the article - are they in the book?
I still find the fact that level 3 decided to pay comcast the most disturbing. I do not understand the long-term financial benefit of that decision in any way.
I guess my point is that it is sortof self-validating.

If you need somebody to tell you not to build this stuff, then you probably aren't yet at a point where building one of them wouldn't be a learning experience for you, even if that learning experience is just "stop building twitter clones".
I disgree.

If someone replied to a post with, "You're wrong and an idiot," but the original poster replies with a reasoned defense, then I would certainly vote down the first reply and vote up the second.

If someone is trolling with a dumb comment like, "Capitalism never works," but then receives well-thought out replies as to why capitalism does in fact work in this situation, then I would leave the original comment alone and vote up the replies.
I'm not saying anyone who is able to drive a lot of traffic is one of those [negative things]. I'm saying anyone interested in a job post to do that task for a startup with an unmentioned level - implied to be very low - of influence on strategy (not to mention compensation or equity) probably is.

I would be skeptical of anyone, "user acquisition hacker" or otherwise, who is confident in their ability to drive traffic of "folks who want cars" in a profitable way. That's too broad for anyone without a fortune 500 budget to remotely consider; the first task of this marketing hire should be to redefine and narrow the audience this product targets, and consider whether or not that user actually wants the thing CarWoo is delivering.

Smart marketers don't want traffic, they want profits. In hiring a marketer to deliver traffic, they're missing the forrest for the trees.
Twitter's Great Big Problem is Its Massive Opportunity
Interpol wanted poster: Assange, Julian Paul
Sorry, I don't mean it as a slight toward Ecuador. My point is that it's easy to espouse objectivity when it's someone else's dirty laundry being aired. I question whether any nations' leadership (not just Ecuador) would remain friendly to Assange if it were their own diplomats' private communications being exposed.
That's an online phenomenon, right? How does that work in real life?
You see how your cheerleading has actually become toxic for the people you want to be helping? "If they need someone to tell them this"... then they should be penalized by being led to waste up to a year of their life? How about you lead them somewhere productive instead of into the tar pits?
Anyone else having issues signing up for the beta?
I realize that my point is unpopular, however, it remains true: if you do not have children, then you will have more time for your startup.

The fact that this idea is unpopular does not make it untrue.

You can downvote it as much as you want, but it still remains true.

This is Hacker News. This is forum for bluntness and truthfulness when it comes to the entrepreneurial life. We should not shy away from a truth just because it makes us uncomfortable. This is a forum where we all expect frank conversations about the trade-offs that we face when we pursue the opportunities presented by a startup.

If you have children, then you will have less time for your startup. It's as simple as that.
That's kind of Zen.

Next step would be for us to calculate the actual utilization of them.

T
"Finally, we’d like to give many things to the GHC and Xen communities, without which this work would not be possible."

Just an fyi, slight typo there. Probably mean 'thanks' instead of 'things'?
"... He told me that I had to just go ride the thing in circles until it felt natural, and that if he saw me sitting on the bench again, I wasn't invited to the skatepark anymore. I rode my skateboard around all afternoon, probably fell on my face a few times, but didn't get laughed at even once. A stupid story, probably. ..."

Great analogy & why I keep reading the comments before the story.
Looks like you are missing some sort of rewrite rule. I was given this link: http://memela.com/12/ - which gives me a 404 - but this works: http://memela.com/index.php?id=12

(pardon my immature drawing ;)
It's a good strategy, as long as the US doesn't become as autocratic as the Nazis or Viet Cong (correct?). Then, plugging leaks becomes hanging their corpses as a warning.

Peaceful protests only work against peaceful regimes.
It's the "demonstrable years of experience" that gets me. Anyone with years of experience with front end shouldn't need to be taking an intern job. Isn't the point of an intern job to be for people fresh out of school and trying to build up experience?
Notation is a solved problem. Math got it wrong, Lisp got it right.
The discussion of this article over on reddit has uncovered some interesting past articles by the same author, and it seems he has a strong bias on this topic

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/edxjp/level_3_ou...
Thanks for all the great feedback. Let me comment on why I posted this.

First, we've (the founders) have been doing all of the customer acquisition work since day one... but the realities of the demands that are splitting up our focus are that none of us have the time that this role requires to focus on this properly. We know and understand where our customers are, how to reach them, etc... but customer acquisition isn't a set it and forget it problem. It requires constant attention, tweaking, optimizing and experimenting. We certainly won't be just handing this off to someone, but we're at a point where someone has to dedicate their full time and attention to the job.

100% agree that comments being disabled on job posts is limiting. That's why I decided to do the blog post... to get some feedback from the HN community on this type of role. Hopefully this is something we can talk pg into changing :)

The original job post I put up was actually intended to be presumptuous, I wanted to see if anyone would self select into responding with the vague details I put up there. Honestly I didn't know how to build this job post because it's not a traditional role, although from the community of founders I spend time with, it's an increasingly in-demand type of position. It's not 100% marketing and not 100% technical... The Airbnb job post focuses a lot more on the technical side of things and knowing that HN is a more technical crowd I wasn't sure how to position the marketing side of things.

I'm going to re-do the job post after hearing all the great feedback both on our blog and on HN. The typical stuff about why someone should apply will be included...

Thanks everyone.
I am deeply skeptical that anything in this book will be even remotely healthy, but it should at least be good for entertainment value.
But that is a model in which the advertises is "subsidizing" the effective cost to the end user. (Whether or not it's an actual subsidy or just a nice bit of profit for the cable network/provider is anyone's guess.)

Obviously, without legislation, the internet will end up being no different, with Comcast, AT&T, and ultimately high-traffic sites like espn.com nickel-and-diming each other and end users. Sticking to the principles on which the web was (allegedly?) founded doesn't hold much water in a shareholders meeting.

I hate to sound so cynical and resigned to this fate, but left to their own devices this seems like exactly what the big ISP's and sites will do.
Exactly, that was the second half of my post. It doesn't seem like a normal SSH situation when angering governments.
Is this new? It doesn't seem to say on the page when this was issued.
Thank you for your reply. I have to say I still understand nothing more about the problem space than I did before, though :)
Any stories or examples you can share to illustrate exactly what's involved?
The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat organization to "leak" their own agenda.

It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.
Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog (relevant to online media)
That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.
I am involved at this level of operations, and your description is 100% accurate.
Twitter's Great Big Problem Is Its Massive Opportunity
I only get on hacker news once every couple of days and usually read only a couple of articles. I thought it a huge coincidence that I read two articles by the same person.
Ask HN: Microkernel vs Monolithic Kernel in a Mobile Context?
The business press is writing that QNX and its microkernel architecture is a huge win for RIMM's mobile strategy, allowing RIMM to supply a cut-down OS for low-powered devices and a fully-featured one for tablets: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/86934/20101130/research-in-motion-jefferies-rim-blackberry-qnx-os-harman-kardon-unix-linux-android-playbook-3g-veri.htm

I know the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate on micro vs monolithic kernels has been going for some time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate). Will QNX be the commercial evidence that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels (considering the constraints in current mobile hardware), or is the business press overplaying the kernel architecture when there are other reasons for QNX's potential success in this space?
Best of luck, beating craigslist is akin to proving P!=NP
Spacelog - Explore original NASA mission transcripts, made in a week
I'm still trying to nail the business model here.

"BankSimple account plus BankSimple debit card replaces your existing personal bank account. Make deposits, withdraw cash, pay bills, earn interest, and more.

However, BankSimple is not a "bank." We partner with chartered banks who provide FDIC-insured products, leaving us free to concentrate on designing the complete consumer banking experience, via the web and your smartphone."

From the looks of it, it appears as if Bank Simple is going to be gathering deposits for the actual banks they partner with. In exchange, those deposits will be fenced in and administered by Bank Simple via the online and mobile presence.

The mention of debit cards at first made me think that maybe they would be able to split fees, so Bank Simple would get a cut of the interchange fees that occur whenever a debit card is used... but those fees will go away because of the Durbin Amendment (this is putting the squeeze on every major bank in the US and will result in an increase in fees for customers -- see Jamie Dimon's comments at the recent Barclays Conference).

Maybe the partner banks will split some of the interest they make off of the deposits? Presumably, Bank Simple's value proposition to them would be that they are providing something that is slightly more than zero cost funding but less than a CD rate. So they could earn a little bit in that area.

The only thing that is left then, that I could think of, is that Bank Simple will mainly try to make money by cross-selling products. Bank Simple Brokerage Accounts. Bank Simple Mutual Funds. Bank Simple Pre-Paid Debit Cards. That sort of thing, where they'd be able to gain market share. This would work out pretty well I think.

For reference, the average American uses 16 different financial products, with about 2 products per bank. A good bank like Wells Fargo boasts a ratio of 5.5-6 products per customer. Your typical bank earns its money on an 80/20 split, where 80% comes from the interest spread (borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, net 3%) and 20% comes from fees (overdraft, interchange, fees for other products). But a trust bank will have a 60/40 split, where they earn extra fees by offering wealth management services to the majority of their wealthy customers.
This is something on my list to add to my site, so I think the idea is viable, but I thought this already existed. Perhaps I am wrong about that. I'm not sure how much I would pay for this, but I don't think it would be a lot.
They want top talent but don't want to pay for it, all the while dangling the 'could easily turn into a full-time job' carrot in front of them.

Problem is, top talent is not this stupid.
haha I may be onto something now I just need to follow my own advice
I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it.

But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables?

If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody)

The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will.

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract.

I just can't see how this plays out very well.
As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on Hacker News?

Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.
What issue are you having?
I'm sorry, but no. Absolutely not. This is not "toxic" for anybody. "Waste up to a year of their life?"

When I was 16, my friends and I thought we were going to take over the world by starting a "tech company". We knew we were all nerds, and we knew we wanted to own a "tech company". We got together, thought up a cool name, made a cool website, and got some cool business cards.

Was this a stupid idea? Yes.

Did I learn a lot from it? Yes.

Do you consider 4 years spent in business school a waste of time? Toxic? Do you consider time spent going to school for computer science, learning to program a "waste"?

How many times have computer science students written "cash register" programs in java? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Was this time all wasted?

I would say no.
Thanks for your feedback!

That's the closest we found to stack-it. :)
I in turn call bs on this article. sounds like the author doesn't understand the role of telomerase in the aging process. which is pretty widely accepted and documented. yes its not the ONLY cause of aging, but it sure seems to be one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase
Usually in a transit relationship the customer pays for the whole pipe; there isn't accounting of incoming vs. outgoing.
Hey, those are great! I don't know how I haven't come across those- feels like I've explored every git resource on Google. Maybe I should've used DDG :)
Is eBay the new MySpace?
Ok, a few questions:
Everybody seems to hate eBay, is it just my impression? If everybody hates eBay, is there a lack of true alternatives, or the network effect eBay has is just too strong to be beaten? Every now and then an "eBay killer" come up, just to be forgotten few weeks later, some have success but not enough to worry the auction giant. eBay is lacking a consistent user experience, it's bloated, the only social experience is the feedback system, unexperienced users will struggle to set up a store... and yet it has the largest user base.
What does a competitor needs to succeed?

A few points comes to mind:

- Beat the network effect eBay has

- Have a huge catalog (not everything that exists, but everything that people wants)

- Be competitive on fees

- Have a consistent user experience

- Easier to use

- Be social (not the exploit-your-friends-social kind)

- Remove the lock-in ("import from eBay" feature)

- Have a name that's recognized as a valid word by Chrome spell checker (this is subtle)

Is that enough? No, that would be too easy, somebody would have already done that.
What am I missing?

(note: "ebay" on chrome is underlined, "eBay" is not)
Yes, especially when I used the companies as an example.

HN: not just news, but a lesson in communication.
WikiLeaks attack escalates
I tried the diet that he outlines here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-...

I only did it for a few weeks before I went on vacation, but it worked really well. Not sure that I lost 20 lbs of fat, but I definitely lost some weight.

Now, his ideas weren't all that earth shattering, but I wonder how the intricacies of his diet generate different results from straight up Atkins. I'll never know for sure, but it worked for me.
Isn't anyone else here skeptical of Tim Ferriss?

Sure he's rich now, but he graduated from Princeton and self-admittedly worked 7 days a week in order to get his dietary supplement company BrainQuicken up and running. All this flies in the face of his 4-hour workweek book.
Within the last hour according to Google news:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/30/interpol-wanted-...
According to Wikipedia it happened November 20th.

[edit] I had the date wrong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
How Internet Peering Works
Don't forget DuckDuckGo. HN has several !bang aliases tied into SearchYC:
!searchyc
!newsyc
!yc
!hackernews
!hn
Yes, business school is a waste.

Yes, Java cash register programs are a waste.

Yes, doomed Craigslist competitors are a waste.

People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Aspire to that, not to rationalizing very expensive learning experiences.
Leaked cable suggests American diplomats told to gather intelligence
nice to see
The hair trim, lighting changes and Photoshop on the pictures in this related blog entry will give you an idea of how scientific the content is likely to be:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to...
Jason stole my HN love here, but basically lazymake is a top-down recursive build mechanism that's (hopefully) simpler to use than writing lengthy makefiles for all the sub-components in the project.

At the heart of the system is a common makefile that defines rules for building the targets. The sub-components can then define simpler makefiles, which include just a list of directives (targets, sources, dependencies, etc.). The common makefile interprets those directives, compiles them into make targets and executes the make.

Would love to hear how everyone else deals with Makefiles for their random side-projects. Don't be shy, C++ is still cool:)
> he packed on 34 pounds of muscle while dropping 3 pounds of fat in 28 days

sure.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time studying NLP, I have to say that this post outlines a pretty naive approach when it comes to disambiguating words.

Here are some questions:

- What happens when we change the language model?
- What happens when we intersperse language models (English phrases within Chinese)?
- What if someone were to just say "i love apple"?

This post title is also very misleading. The 92% accuracy reflects only one particular use case. How about attempting to disambiguate hundreds and thousands of terms?
>People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies.

Did these people crawl out of the womb with a keyboard in one hand and an apache server in the other?

How do you suppose they learned how to program?
Thanks for the heads up, your drawing is now showing up :)
A blinking favicon? Seriously? I couldn't finish the article because my eyes jumped to the tab bar every 5 seconds.

Has anyone else seen this elsewhere? It's new to me and I was surprised by how obnoxious it was given that the web isn't exactly a stranger to obnoxious flashing content.
No. People still haven't done #3 right. Alpha five comes closest, but apparently nobody has heard of them.

It should be built on top of SQL server, or Oracle. People are using it already. It should have a subset of Crystal Reports, with an easy way to develop simple entry yet let you override the business logic if necessary.

Essentially, combine ext-js with django's administration, with a marketplace of addons for various verticals.