skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this thread and the article very interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755831

Maybe this one qualifies:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+start-up+from+hell
This is not total theory. I run a startup http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com -- I can't tell you how much money it makes, but it does support a small team full time.
If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with a "bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation hurt you at all? The article doesn't seem to answer this question.

If anything I would think that the existence of a "bullshit fantasy" valuation marks a great territory for someone to come in and innovate and steal the market, like Google did in the late 90s.
The weird capitalization made me think the company name was "Start Woven."
The London List – London startups exceeding $10m in annual revenues
Reading his blog, you get a sense that he has gone back and forth on the idea of web apps as startups. Which is perfectly alright because only close-minded people never change their mind.

He's the guy behind http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com
Artificial Life Shares Biosignature With Terrestrial Cousins
I am expecting to make money. And I am calling what I do a startup. And the my goal of the startup is to build new and interesting things.

I guess thats not OK
A few years ago I started on a new social network; the usual story, wanted to try and solve the "trust" issue and create and open source social network framework at the same time.

I got some funding and some co-founders... and then sort of floundered (too young, too inexperienced, too big a task).

The fact that this problem has not been solved still gives me a little heart :)
The same blandness obviously applies to content being read via RSS aggregators or Planets. The question then is whether content is king, or whether site design is an integral part of it.

For example, on my blog every article shows the location posted (with a map), and photos from the week the article was written. In my view this helps readers to put the contents into context, but obviously with a feed reader (or InstaPaper) this context is lost.
Also, if you haven't already seen it, JSnes (a NES emulator in JS): http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

It's not as complete or as compatible as this one appears to be, but it's still pretty cool.
I just browsed the code and pre-ordered the book. It uses the NLTK toolkit for NLP and has useful plumbing code for authenticating with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, etc.
WINE 1.3.11 released
I prefer to look at it this way, I'm taking an area where I think the current solutions are lacking and creating a solution was gives value both in terms of time and money saved. Yes as a side effect I can charge decent money for a product which generates more money in savings and extra profit than it costs, but amount of money isn't the real motivation.

I'd much rather work on something that fits this criteria than the so called "cool" webapps.
To those who are saying "oh you silly person advertising income is always seasonal": could you explain for the benefit of morons like me (1) why this effect would be so much stronger for iAds revenue than for AdMob revenue, and (2) why it would take effect so suddenly for iAds and not for AdMob?

Thanks.
Investors Deal Harshly With Dysfunctional Teams
Agreed, it sounds like an interesting library but I want to see some examples first to get a quick taste before I commit to downloading or trawling through the documentation.
Chicken is the size of Common Lisp, but without the benefit of standard specification or a community.

What exactly are arguing about then?
Has this changed? Are bands moving to Facebook? I ask because I'm not on Facebook, but I do find lots of info on Myspace.
Whoops, yes, I got that backwards. Anyway, the point is that what he's agreeing and disagreeing with are opinions that aren't just a matter of unambiguous facts and figures.
I think the lesson here is once you launch and gain even just a little bit of traction, push hard and fast while you still have the lead because there will always be someone just behind you ready to overtake.
I get an average of 3000 visitors a month and have 148 registered users, of which 60 or so are family and friends.

Most of the traffic generated has come from Google Adwords and testing ads for the embassy section. Next up is google organic, again, mostly for the embassy section. The rest are referrals from blogs/forums mainly to the Travel News section.
The Emerging Economy of Home Manufacturing
The valuations will fix themselves in time. That's how company valuations work.
I'll be that guy.

breath = noun
breathe = verb

"Breathes" New Life

That is all. :)
In my first failed start-up, I did what is now considered "standard advice" here on Hacker News and it was an utter failure (which might explain why I still question all advice, no matter how "standard").

The software was a small business system for manufacturers and distributors. I was the technical person, my co-founder was the business person.

How we did things:

- We determined the customers' most critical requirements.
- We built what they needed from those requirements.
- We installed the hardware and software.
- We got them up and running in "test mode".
- We adjusted, reworked, and went live.

What ended up happening:

- Critical features were invariably missed. I had to add them.
- There was always some scaling issue we missed. Always.
- Architecture had to be reworked with every install.
- My co-founder was able to sell far faster than I could build.
- My co-founder was unable to help me build.
- Customers became disillusioned.
- I collapsed, vowing never to go through this again.

What I now believe:

- Make sure your MVP is enough.
- Beware being consumed by customer service.
- The first two founders must be technical.
- Your architecture must scale, even if your app doesn't.
- Always be brutally honest with each other at all times.
- Make sure all your failures are recoverable ones.
- Plan for 40 hours/week. Stop working at 80.
- Never quit. Start over, but never quit.
The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

- Steve Case (@SteveCase)

http://startupquote.com/post/2684158876
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=adobecovario
It is in the works and your second suggestion is brilliant! Hadn't thought of that. Can also update on WiFi (which is what I was thinking about)

I think it is a little premature for a mobile app as there are a lot of kinks to still get through on the main page and investing time/$$ into a mobile app might be too soon, especially since funding is tight.
I recently started working in this sector, and I was shocked at the (poor) quality of its software.

I think I've identified a few causes:
1. Design by committee
2. Winners are determined by relationships and lock-in
3. Educators don't care about finding the best, just good enough
4. Great developers don't want to work in this sector

The first should be obvious. Anything run by government tends towards design by committee, and educational software almost tries to be bad in this way.

The second is true of other sectors, but it is especially true in education. Intermediate Units (I work in PA) and school districts don't try to work together by default. Even at the top, deals are done by who knows who or who hates who. And, the enormous cost of switching products for the large systems creates a lock-in environment. People will say/promise anything to get a sale, because they know they will really have to screw up to lose customers.

Third, educators as a rule are afraid of technology or are at least more unaware than anyone here on HN. They don't want to spend the time to learn; they want to spend whatever it takes to get the problem off their plate. Remember, there are a great deal of people who went into education because of the vacation time. Some people really care and work hard, but the percentage is lower than other industries, I think.

Finally, for all the reasons above, the greatest developers don't want to work in education. The bosses are almost never developers; winners aren't determined by quality; most code is CRUD type code with lots of rules and exceptions from state law/procedure.

I get excited at the thought of change, which is why I stay. I want to be part of that change. But, on the low days change seems impossible, and I start thinking about other jobs.

One side note: why isn't there more OS in education? This really bothers me, as it seems like a perfect scenario for it. I'm thinking it goes back to points #2 and #3. People want to pay for something now rather than funding something everyone shares. If I could be part of the change in one way, this would be it (I'm looking for ways now).

EDIT: One more: pay. Because most code is crud code, and because bosses aren't developers who can discern good from bad code, the perception is developers should be paid like teachers (or worse). Not going to attract the great developers that way. In the long run, all these software costs more to develop as a result of not hiring the best, but non-developer bosses can't understand that.
I have thought about this, but that is a very very long term goal. I can't juggle too many balls and have to create income off whatever I have first before I go into growth.

But, frankly, yes, a lot of my close friends have suggested I jump ship to that career because of my passion for travel.
Ask HN: What is going on with the Boxee Box and Netflix?
Does anyone have any insight to offer about why the Boxee Box still doesn't support Netflix? Netflix as a company doesn't seem to have many issues putting their service on every device out there, why would there be a hold up with the Boxee Box?
there's a big group of people out there that only want people to use their apps and are not in it for the money.

It is my well considered experience that this is simply untrue.

Sooner or later even these supposed saints of usability will come to wonder "why won't people pay me for my hard work?"
Turning JSON into a ExpandoObject
Ask HN: How do I delete my account here
Hi,
There should be a way, to delete all my comments here, and close my account here. What is the way?

I could not find a way for it. If there is none. I request and authorize any of the admins to do it for me please.

Thanks,
Facebook happens to have the best advertising product that ever existed. When I click on your company's group's ad's like button, all my friends see it. No other advertising has ever parodied word of mouth advertising so successfully, and they've hardly begun to take advantage of this fact.

In addition, Facebook has reached the mindshare of the masses in a way that no other internet company has. No other internet company has EVER had my parents and aunts and uncles talking for hours about an internet company though the holidays. It brought talking about the internet in public to the masses.

Facebook will have a 12 figure valuation by this time next year, and Google will lose its current level of dominance in the online ads sector. I'll put my money where my mouth is if someone want's to propose a safe way to go about doing it...
Congrats, Brad! Best of luck with the new startup.
Sorry for the late reply but here goes -
It appears that the GPL works fabulously well in environments where there are few restrictions on how code is developed, modified and executed. In closed ecosystems the GPL's copyleft clauses make the code hard to use (there are server based loopholes). I think the unwieldiness of the GPL in closed environments is a net win because it creates incentives to moving to more open systems.
The FSF / GPL were started in an era where the PC environment was similar to the mobile environments of today. Over the period of their existence they have contributed to pushing the world in a direction where developer tools are freely available and the idea of spare time hacking is no longer a fantasy. I am hopeful that someone will create some mobile software under the GPL which is so useful that it creates the wedge required to open the mobile app landscape such that there are no restrictions on what languages are used to develop and how the apps get deployed.

In short its not the GPL thats broken here, its the closed nature of the system in question (iOS). In the short term this might require some activism and sadly at times this might result in things like VLC being removed.

Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with the FSF, Nokia, Apple, VLC or any other party in question.
MySpace is done. They've been done.

They tried to reestablish the brand with a general focus on entertainment, but nobody was buying it.

I'd say up until the last six months, they still had 80%+ of the artist market using their service. You can't give that up...but they did. Now every artist is spreading out to sites like Bandcamp.

without the artists, what do they have? a social network? ha!
"Money or the ability to make it doesn't impress anybody around here. " -- Mark Zuckerberg (the social network)
Yes, in personal terms I'm very happy I did it. Learnt heaps and had a lot of fun. And got my name in the NYT and WSJ :)

But as a startup, it failed :)
In the Top Ten articles to show what is wrong with Wikipedia.

I can only smile thinking about the couple hours of facts and debunking that Sheldon Cooper can fill talking about this page.
The objection is he making is essentially the objection a rule-consequentialist would make. Which is that although in this particular situation it would produce better consequences to kill the innocent man and save the 5 people, overall it would produce worse consequences if everyone followed the rule that killing innocent people is an acceptable means to some end.
You have to email the owner, Paul Graham.

By the way, I see you told everyone you would "quit HN" if you didn't get a satisfactory response to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088044

There are people here who down-vote simply because they don't like your face. Don't take it to heart. Just keep contributing useful commentary or stories and shrug it off.
Congratulations, I'm really looking forward to where this can go.
software has been sold to individuals and
businesses alike for decades now, the things
that have changed the equation here are:

- download sites for PC software

- open source

- massive piracy

How are those (except for open source) new? Piracy has always been massive, in the past even more than it is today. Do you know anyone who actually payed for any piece of c64/atari 8-bit software?

And for a long time the first place to get software from (particularly games) were BBSs.

In these times of Steam, App Store(s) & easy on-line purchases via the likes of Paypal I expect people actually buy software a lot more often than in the 80s or 90s.
If you ever saw Across the Universe, Timothy Leary is the guy played by Bono from U2. The guy was fucking nuts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
Maze Generation: Prim's Algorithm
Think of TGP as a filtered version of TDG. It's a high impact, low word count book that covers 90% of what you'll ever need to know for Javascript.

TDG, on the other hand, tells you _everything_.
Yes, I don't like the elitist negative voting policy of this forum.

So I want to quit. The community by and large is good, so I will be a lurker still. But I shall not be down voted.

PS: Would hate to bother PG with this. Have a lot of respect for him. So request any other admins to just remove my account. After deleting all my posts.
Eliezer's answer seems to be "do no harm, even when this seems to be beneficial, as your judgment is likely to be wrong".

For instance, quite a few dictators seize power and suppress dissent because they honestly believe that's the best for the people. It's all too easy to convince oneself that something that is convenient for oneself but harmful to another is, ultimately, "for the greater good".

Of course, exceptions to the "do no harm" rule do exist. However, the probability of the current case being an exception may be vanishingly small, even if you are convinced it is an exception. If this probability is indeed very small, the "do no harm" rule produces a better expected outcome than a "pragmatic/utilitarian" point of view for a human (imperfect) agent.

In the philosopher's "100% sure" case, a true mathematical weighting can be made and (true) utilitarism wins; but no human can ever be that sure.
Link download windows 7
The systems dynamics folks point out that systems with more rapid feedback often have more variability.

You've got systems dynamics folks completely backwards. Smaller, more frequent controls tend to stabilized systems, not make them unstable. A simple example we've all seen: take a stable ODE. Now try to discretize it - if you are unlucky or uncareful, your discrete approximation can easily blow up exponentially.

The example you provide is different - you are describing two different control strategies, one of which fails to correct for noise (and note: any HFT who makes this mistake loses money FAST). If you made orders every day based on the 7-day moving average, it would be better than making orders once per week based on the 7 day moving average.

This is exactly what we saw with the flash crash - there was a large exogenous shock and the system self-corrected within minutes.
If you have the means, I highly recommend it
I think it's a bit more subtle than that, although he does point out the danger of imitators. See my reply at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088562.
PlayStation Phone captured in the wild, on video
Hmm, maybe that's what Diaspora should have been building - an open protocol for exchanging users' 'social' data, meaning you could migrate your FaceFriend account straight onto MyBook without setting anything up, or you could add friends from completely different services into your feed just so long as the same SOA was maintained across companies.

Facebook could do this themselves to stop anyone else ever getting a large share of the market (destroy the barriers for entry).
There’s no such thing as a free sample
The policy itself doesn't promote elitism. There really are just people here who think the down-vote button is for expressing disagreement, or for situations where someone is commenting against someone getting up-votes. Don't let one guy get you down. Seriously.
Sounds really similar to my last startup and I'm glad to see it. There hasn't been a good solution so far to making news relevant to you without making you search all day for it. NLP, Machine Learning, smart news alerts, etc., can all make some interesting solutions to these problems without needing to be perfect. Also, mainstream news is the least socially connected news source out there and there is a lot of work to be done in this space.

Woven sounds like a Gist competitor to me (like we indirectly were), but I felt like Gist transformed into a plaxo type company in recent months rather than news intelligence so I'm not so sure anymore. At any rate, I look forward to seeing Woven grow!
It's OK if you have a plan for how you'll make money. If you're just building something cool, and figure, somehow..., later..., you'll make money, that's what he is saying is not OK.

DHH at 37signals would probably agree too since that's his thing -- if you can't charge from the get go, you're not building a business, you're just gambling on 'good luck' happening somewhere (ie getting bought out by Google, etc)
I haven't read/used TDG in a while; I have read/used TGP recently. TGP is definitely "Aha," compared to TDG's "Oh, OK." Both have their place; TGP is handier to understanding and working with some of JS' quirks.
That's interesting. Could you tell more how he reacted and what happened after that?
The limits of evangelism
Bruce Byfield asks, “How do you persuade people they want something that they don't know exists -- and refuse to believe in?” as he discusses “The limits of evangelism” in his latest blog post.
Show HN: The Infinite Maze - collaborative maze drawing
Pearls Before Swine
Jon, “Maddog” Hall, in latest blog post says, “Paying good money for bad products and service is like casting pearls before swine.”
Iran Air Crash Kills 70
Time Machine uses hard links within it's directory structure, so dedupe or CoW wouldn't be much help unless it was redesigned using ZFS specific features (ie, instead of rebuilding an entire hard link structure as TM does, you'd clone the TM filesystem, then apply the source changes).
Ask HN: Good Ruby IDE?
What's a good, free IDE for Ruby (OSX)?

I'm thinking of downloading Aptana but a lot of reviews are saying its rubbish. Rubymine is only a trial so that's out.
Wow, you must have a tough time on the internet with this thin skin of yours...

Relax, why do you care about karma so much? Make your comments, and forget about them. If you get downvoted, you might want to think about why, but acting on it (and throwing a tantrum about it, which this is, basically) is pointless.

Just comment when you feel like it, try to add something to the discussion when you do, and forget about the rest...
I was under the impression that music (venues, bands) was the last bit of territory that Myspace was able to defend.

My wife and I have turned into old fogies and don't get out to local rock shows much anymore but the few garage bands I've caught recently still seem to have Myspace pages that they haven't abandoned yet.
Congrats! Woven sounds interesting, can't wait to try it.
My band is on facebook primarily for event invitations. We use bandcamp for posting songs, and our own .com that basically serves as links to facebook and bandcamp. We also use reverbnation on our facebook site.

We _also_ commission physical flyers from local artists.
Free Web VNC tool to manage your server remotely
The difference is that Facebook continues to innovate while everyone else is still cobbling together features to compete and mimick facebook.
While we're on the topic of great JavaScript references for people learning the language, this one is worth considering: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

The author's open source projects are quite pedagogical, as well: https://github.com/marijnh/
I do not understand how that follows. It's entirely possible to imagine a world in which a god/God judges you by the results of your actions instead of your intentions. (E.g. a woman may have been raped, but pre-marital sex still condemns her to Hell; or, perhaps less unfairly, you're not "saved through faith alone" but rather judged by how many people you've positively affected.)
Ask HN: iPhone Alarm Bug Post-Mortem?
Has the community heard anymore on what happened with the iPhone alarm bug? It is interesting that the alarm fixed itself on January 3rd. Could the app not allow year changes in the middle of the week?
Subprime mortgages were in the set of bs fantasy valuations. Their puncture did hurt other people.

...but for the individual who spots a bs fantasy valuation - logic suggests shorting the stock.