skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do people latch onto the superficial aspects of other startups?
1.	Startup names are becoming annoyingly standardized. You basically take a word that relates to your industry then ad –ly or instead turn it into a verb by adding –ify at the end. Yet these aspects are completely independent of the startup’s success. Instead why don’t people try and come up with a name that is short, easy to remember, intuitive to spell, and descriptive of what the company is about. That might actually affect your success as a startup.

2.	FORGET VIRALITY! When I was a freshman in college I uploaded a video to youtube that received 20k views in a week and millions by the months end. I got calls from all the major “funny video” websites and ended up selling to collegehumor.com (~$400), which was a mistake since a week later I got a call from ABC who was interested and offered 3k. The point is the more viral you are the more prone you are to fizzle out faster. The whole ordeal lasted less than a few months. IMO “Virality” and virality coefficients are a waste of time if you want to actually build a business. Spend the time you would improving your viral score and build a better/more useful product.

3.	Do you really need a mobile app? There are plenty of industries in which a mobile app would serve no purpose except wasting the time and resources of the developers.

4.	A/B testing is a waste of time. Instead use that time building a better product! Craigslist/Google, for instance, has barely changed any of their layout/design. Good developers spend time improving their core product and doing things that are important/matter, not testing the effectiveness of different font colors.

a.	Does design/brand image (logo) even have any effect on success?

Cliffs: If you are going to copy another company at least copy the parts that attributed to their success.
//rant
What does Verizon mean for the iPhone 5?
The recent announcement of the iPhone 4 on Verizon is somewhat unusual for Apple, which tends to release new versions of the iPhone in June or July. Because the Verizon iPhone 4 is not slated for release until February, does this signal a disruption in Apple's yearly iPhone update cycle?
It's a play on Groupon's press release: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/groupon-raises-like-a-billi...
It's a reference to how Groupon's recent press release, titled "Groupon Raises, Like, A Billion Dollars'

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110110006746/en/Grou...
This just doesn't make any sense. They still need to transcode to H.264 for Mobile Safari, Safari (using Youtube's HTML5 mode) and soon IE9 too; none of these have announced plans to support WebM. Not to mention the fact that the flash videos are generally H.264 wrapped in Flash. If they wanted to cut storage costs then they'd be better off dropping support for WebM.

Also, I'd imagine that the storage cost for Youtube doesn't come close to their bandwidth costs.
Wrong! Those are exactly the questions that are asked.

The tests use a group of control subjects vs test subjects which is standard throughout science. This means it takes out a factor such as what environment the animal is stored in by simply storing them all in the same type of environment. This is done every time a study is run to remove minor variations.

Science is all about controlling the variables, it is actually what scientists spend most of their time thinking about.

What really went wrong in this case is when they got to the point of testing humans they stopped doing "science" and started doing "business".

If they hadn't sweeped the bad data under the rug they could have published a lovely paper about how the standard tests for depression in animal models failed (in reboxetine's case, one goat a herd does not make, the tests could just be bad for reboxetine for some reason).
IOS 4.3 beta offers new hotspot, AirPlay, multitouch features
It's 1-3 developers per chapter. Last I heard, 50 developers had already signed up to write.
Thing is I like to customize some things and sometimes I do that by writing an extension and adding such and such so using other browsers at the same time becomes harder.

I use chrome now because it starts up fast and I have all the things I like, if firefox started up faster and had similar window freedom (last I checked linux wasn't as lucky as windows) I would switch back. The update thing was just a nitpick that if I could see changes happening over time rather than one huge update it would entice me back.
Teleportation will never be possible.
If those distortions were filtered it sounds pretty accurate.
Scientists Demonstrate Mammalian Regeneration Through a Single Gene Deletion
I mentioned lightning earlier and that’s relevant here. There is a way to make use of the “plasma issue”, because plasmas conduct electricity. So in theory it would be possible to use a laser as a long-distance taser! The laser would first create a conduit of plasma out of the air, and then with a high enough voltage, an electric shock could be send down the plasma to the target. This would not be a subtle weapon: at this point the lightning analogy is not really an analogy anymore. It would basically be a lightning gun, and would make a noise to match. I thought I was being really clever when I thought of this, but it turns out I’m not the first: the US military has experimented with them.

So we don't get lasers but we do get plasma cannon/particle beams/PPCs? I'm okay with that.
He seems to harp on the costs of a SAN as one of the drivers(not surprisingly, he's an IBMer), but according to http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture they're running off of BigTable.
Back up MySQL Databases with a Simple Bash Script
If you host your own blog or any Web-based application running on the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack, you should have a backup system in place for keeping data stored in MySQL databases safe
Exactly - I don't think they'd deprecate every hardware accelerated platform they already have (tens if not hundresds of millions of phone/computer/settop units shipped) for something with no shipping (only promised) hardware support.
Ask HN: Do you think TechCrunch generate this Pump/Dump effect?
Does anyone else feel that TechCrunch provide certain startups with more exposure than the rest. They get regular posts updates on their revenue, growth figures, traffic, etc. Then some time in the future, these startups almost certainly get acquired. Thought in stocks, it's call pump n dump.

Of course, the startups could be doing a much better job in engaging TechCrunch, etc.
6 useful resources for hosting successful events
The entirety of your comment:

"Ineffective modification of an existing drug as a means of extending the validity of a patent is a widespread practice. This was possibly not the case here. But given that we are tolerant of such practices and defend them, it comes as no surprise to me that an established drug on the market has no effect on the symptom that it was meant to address."

I only see your explicit admission that the first situation (questionable patents derived by making small changes to existing drugs) might not even apply in this case. You do not "point" to a "possible interpretation", you were breezily suggesting a lazy and fallacious connection.

Privileges granted that you disagree with are a different matter than scientific dishonesty. We could remove the whole issue of chemical-tweak patents on drugs by allowing perpetual drug patents, or by ruling that new drugs must be chemically different to some particular degree to not be covered by a patent (expired or not), or by abolishing drug patents entirely, and none of those solutions would imply anything as to the efficacy of future drugs or the trustworthiness of drug research.
I'm going to have to pick up web workers
Computer History Museum Launches Version 2.0 - Investors.com
Yes hedge funds are notorious for liking volatility along with HFT algorithms, so steady bull markets maybe not so much. I realize people are bull/bears long/short call/put etc. However, hedge funds really should have made more than most in 2009/2010 unless leveraged and caught in the financial housing special products or overseas in EU rather than in other better performing diversifications. Hedge funds usually just like 'movement' or volatility to play off of. However a solid bull market is just as easy as a solid bear market to make money in especially for the leverage they have in volume/size of the funds.
Is the MakerBot $1200 for the printer, or $1200 to print one thing?
"A/B testing is a waste of time. Instead use that time building a better product! Craigslist/Google, for instance, has barely changed any of their layout/design."

Oh, if you only knew...

I have first-hand experience with many of the changes to the Google search results page since the last "noticeable" visual redesign last May. I can think of a dozen or so purely layout & CSS changes that have gone live since then. I bet you didn't notice any of them.
What's purple and commutes? An abelian grape.

What's purple and commutes and is worshipped by a limited number of people? A finitely-venerated abelian grape.

What's purple and had all of its children committed to mental hospitals? A simple grape (it has no proper, normal subgrapes).
Not being at another company's mercy seems like reason enough to me. Right now Google is a company that's sunk hundreds of millions into Android and it's all at risk because Oracle bought Sun. I'd imagine that wake up call made them look at other vulnerabilities in their product line.
I'd like a bigger font like in http://www.hackerblogs.com/
"I like the current design better."

"It's missing that extra "superficial hipster" touch, though, you have to admit."

Seems pretty clear.
You can copy photosets from Flickr to Facebook or Picasa using http://showzey.com. It manual process now (photset by photoset).
I wonder if enough people are interested in paid option for continuously sync between these services?
ah, got it. thanks
The "background noise, thick accents, and quick speech" is actually the most difficult part.

Google did not really do anything new. Speech recognition is around for a while, as well as translation engines. Although putting the two technologies on the cell phone makes an impressive demo and good PR, it does not actually solves the problem at a practical level.
A cutoff of 66% has nothing to do with the complexity of the marking requirements nor any standardisation done.
The commercial ones use real people I think, not really an option for a free service.
India Employment Portal
I would really like to know… do you think your figures are realistic? (let's say compared to what other employees of successful companies may have made in the past, for which I have no info. e.g. Google, eBay, etc.)

Warning: the following will make me look jealous and bitter, but so be it:

That the early employees get a giant pay-day is deserved, but the later you join, the less influential in the overall success you are, in addition to the fact that you're not taking any risks, like you would in an early startup. It seems that joining Facebook a year ago as a developer wouldn't be much different than joining Google or Microsoft in terms of benefits, salary, perks, responsibilities…

I guess I can only blame myself for not working at the right companies, or not making myself marketable enough to be hired at these companies, but I've never had a job that ended up with a bonus in the $500k-$1M range.
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I think Google's playing the long game here. So they won't switch tomorrow but they'll try to make WebM the defacto standard by getting everyone but Apple on board. Then they'll leverage the open nature of the codec and its new found market dominance to force Apple's hand.

This is the same strategy Apple's using against Flash by only supporting HTML5 and to my eyes it's working.
Arrington divested himself of all his shares in tech companies.
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Wow, 5000 users by name and splashpage alone!
umm... Yeah ok. But you are off base on A/B. We got a 5x conversion based on text changes that we made. Same great product that users love.
"...we have to strike while the iron is hot!
My experience is that this is rarely true."

Wow that was the exact quote that helped me come to a similar conclusion in my "Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink" post below. I rather enjoyed the TechStars book.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2029190
In before senseless reddit bashing...

The reddit admins are quite adamant that their growth was independent of digg.v4 and if you look at their numbers, they seem to be right. There are some increases associated with v4, but reddit was enjoying growth prior to that as well.
But what company are they at the mercy of for online video? The whole point of the open standard that is H264 is for a group of companies not to be at each other's mercy. It seems riskier to switch to a new format created by one company than to go with the standard everyone else backs. I think there must be another answer.
I assume this is referring to the ability to build up a list of arbitrary data in memory, then execute it. In most languages, you'd parse some string to an AST, but in lisp, your fundamental data structure is essentially the same as the AST.
Highcharts is definitely one of the most impressive chart solutions I have seen.

I don't remember its VML performance being particularly slow but I do know its' SVG performance screams in IE9.
That's one way of looking at it.

An alternative view point: By not using a general principle, a sales pitch could ambush you with a new scenario that isn't in your list of specifics. In that case, it's easier to learn to be dogmatic in saying 'Are you a legit business? Then no freebies for you!'
Inflation: Good for Entrepreneurs
Then you have the wrong impression. That question is asked, and the answer is "yes." The followup questions are "by how much?" and "what can we do to minimize the effect on what we're studying?".

Validity tests are important because if you're going to blow $50,000,000 on research you want _something_ to help guide the way, and you don't want it messed up by having non-conducive lab conditions.

Searching the free access medical literature at NCBI I quickly found:

"Refining animal models in fracture research: seeking consensus in optimising both animal welfare and scientific validity for appropriate biomedical use"

"From Bedside to Bench and Back Again: Research Issues in Animal Models of Human Disease" with the abstract starting "To improve outcomes for patients with many serious clinical problems, multifactorial research approaches by nurse scientists, including the use of animal models, are necessary. Animal models serve as analogies for clinical problems seen in humans and must meet certain criteria, including validity and reliability, to be useful in moving research efforts forward. This article describes research considerations in the development of rodent models."

I'm certain that you'll easily be able to find others.
I think you're quoting two different HNers.
Sounds like it was written by a good Perl hacker if it still just works and nobody has needed to maintain it after all this time.
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good app. Shopping for a CD and want to hear it (or at least previews) now? Scan the barcode or album cover and boom.. music

I'd pay $4.99 for that app.
That isn't how you patent troll, you first go after smaller targets to build up case law and/or settlements. Then you go after bigger and bigger targets.

This seems like a really speedy way to invalidate your patent
Isn't the "closed" vs. "open" status of Flash a total red herring? Flash is a browser plugin that any browser maker can choose to support or not to support. Google is arguing that a specified standard should use something more "open".

In other words, I have a hard time seeing how bundling a plugin and not supporting a proprietary codec that is vying to be part of a new standard is hypocritical at all.

And that above all seems to be the most important part of Gruber's "argument".

edit: minor grammatical correction
MPEG LA can still change the terms whenever they please and theor recent behavior has been troubling (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100430/0232599255.shtml)
LOVE the new name. I think it's a winner.

Congrats Jason
ES5: Strict Mode
One big issue I've been having with the current FF 4 builds are extremely blurry fonts (supposedly due to hardware rendering). There are a number of work arounds but I'm concerned that it doesn't work right out of the box. If it's still just as blurry in February it won't be usable for me.
it was an ecommerce system for photographs. To be able to store and display the assets from an ssl page with out that pesky warning.
Thank you for the link. I have sent it to few people who will use it. Good luck with the project.
That joke doesn't quite work: 7 and 8 have the same (odd) parity.

Pieces of nine, on the other hand...
I'm sure Google's lawyers are good, but they aquired On2 in 2009. They've had barely a year to research On2's patents, prior art, and MPEG-LA's patents. As well as research the changes in VP8 (from VP6? the other allegedly unencumbered codecs) and compared them to H.264.
OT: My first website back in the mid-90's had both a <blink> and <marquee> tag in it... so so sad...
Twitter Clone in C
I had a thought after the last discussion.

As far as I can tell, the present GIMP multiple window mode feels pathologically brain dead because the tool windows get hidden by random windows from other applications (how dumb is that? knocking usability down by something like 90%).

If the GIMP was to simply cause the tool windows to appear and disappear "smartly" based on whether a main GIMP window was present, the problem was be much less (I vaguely recall some early versions of some Adobe apps worked this way).

I don't know if this is a better solution but it seems like a very easy solution. I.E., one that might have taken at most a month anywhere along the line (though my guess would be a week or less).

But what do I know, (other than Linux GUI programing with C++ and QT)?
If you want a simple reason, I doubt you'll find one. Each of the people who agreed to that no doubt had their own reasons for doing so and I honestly don't know if we know what all they are. All I can point you to is what they agreed upon to give as their explanation.

Also, that wasn't the "preamble" to anything, that was the entire Copyright Clause. It's from the list of Enumerated Powers in Article I, Section 8 (the clause itself being clause 8), if you want to check for yourself:

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

Anyhow, William Patry is a first-rate scholar of all things copyright. If that information isn't in one of his books, good luck finding it.
Here is my entry (http://www.crajsh.com) and the related write-up (http://bit.ly/godroY).
lol - http://translate.google.com/#ja|en|%E3%81%A9%E3%81%AE%E3%82%...
People should stop posting every single shitty photo they take. What is the point of that? Follow the links to the author's flick account. It's full of complete garbage. Not just garbage, but also repetitive garbage. There are sets of nearly identical tasteless snapshots. Who gives a fuck if you lose them? Its intrinsic value being displayed on a public photo site is zero. Just dump them on a hard drive, no need to display your garbage publicly.
While that may be true, I find the writing, editing and overall journalistic style to be a bit lacking.

Just in the last week I have read at least two articles with blatant spelling and other errors, as if not even the author proof read their work.

TechCrunch is great, but it is still fairly amateur - though I do value the site overall.
MySpace Comfirms Sale Is Likely in the Near Future
At which point does you stop being a volunteer, and start being underpaid?
This makes no sense. He seems to talking about the cost of having to store multiple formats. However, the only reason they have both WebM and H.264 is because they spent $100 million to acquire WebM. They could have simply not bought WebM, saved $100 million, and they would not have the storage problem.

It would make more sense if it is about the licensing cost of H.264, for the encoder they use and for their commercial streaming of H.264 video (does it count as commercial when they are not charging users for the video, but are monetizing the site with advertising?).

However, given the cap on annual license fees under the H.264 license, what they spent to acquire WebM would have covered their YouTube H.264 license fees through the remaining lifetime of the H.264 patents.
> The only operative difference between the two codecs is that WebM is free.

by moving many features of the codec into postprocessing, the video format becomes scalable; a decoder can do “less work” while still playing back the file, albeit at a lower quality. -- http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/292

I have naively taken that to mean that the trade-off of resolution for battery life can be handled in the decoder; that fewer encodings need to be stored on the server to target the same wide range of devices, vs. h264.

I would love to know whether this is true, and what other practical differences there are between the two codecs from the POV of content producers.

edit: VP8 ... Technically, it produces output on par with H.264 High Profile, while maintaining a low decoding complexity on par with H.264 Baseline. -- http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#vp8
If only they would add "use Lua"...
There is also a more general problem that Gimp is hard to build. I was doing some JavaFX exporter fixes and getting the environment right took most of the time. Otherwise, I found the code base quite clean.
Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud
Gruber had an interesting take: "It's unlikely that this will happen as there is too steep of a learning curve for this [touchscreen] setup."
Mirrors are not 100% efficient. That fraction of one percent will kill you if the incident power density is high enough. Once one little portion of the mirror is absorbing more energy than it can dissipate, that portion will heat up and up. When it gets hot enough it tends to become less reflective - it oxidizes or maybe just evaporates - and then you've got even higher absorption at that spot, which makes it fail even faster and helps heat up adjacent spots...

When this happens with a pulsed laser you can sometimes hear it. That tiny snap-snap-snap is the sound of your three-hundred-dollar optic heading for the trash. You'll look at it and see the telltale little spots. If you're cheap you'll try just sliding it sideways to a non-spotted bit of surface, but sometimes there isn't enough mirror for that...

That's with a high-tech custom-designed laser mirror, not a random surface of some random object. And we're generally not trying to destroy it. And yet they often get destroyed, when you screw around with high-intensity lasers.
I feel like the problem is even deeper. The animal tests actually confirmed expected findings based on changes in brain chemistry. The changes in brain chemistry happened in humans, too, if I'm not mistaken. Yet, humans showed no changes in depression, and the article made it sound like that the change in brain chemistry should have had some effect based on that alone. It seems to point to a flaw in part of the modeling of the brain itself.