skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Philly Code Camp 2011.1 – Call For Speakers
Did you see the chart where revenue from music sales for the entire industry is down more than half?

http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music...

How can you argue that piracy increases revenues when revenue for an entire industry is plummeting? Is there another chart somewhere that shows aggregate revenues increasing for some category of media that has been digitized? Is there revenue that that chart does not capture that more than makes up for the lost sales, and that is positively affected by piracy?
Why publish this if it works? One article, a fleeting bit of fame, and a truck load of copycats. It would be more impressive if the article had read: "Researchers, upon discovering tweets predict the stock market, make $100mm before disclosing research to the public." No more need for University grants anymore, much more believable findings. As an aside, data analysis can be tricky. I'm pretty wary of loosely defined research objectives. For example, why is it 3 days? Why is it those 72 words? Over-fitting is a real problem with prediction based stuff.
However they are a part of Dell, so possibly feedback to Alienware will also be used by their colleagues in non-gaming areas.
Eh? Who pays up front? I think it's anything but "simple". There's a big incentive to free ride and let someone else pay.
We have had our entire account at threat of termination because of spam complaints. Here is the scenario: We aim to be for designers what heroku is for developers, so we resell amazon's service. A designer's client (Small business, medical industry) was mailing SPAM emails from yet another party's shady service, but linking to the AWS-hosted website.

Amazon sent a semi-threatening email directly to me, along with the email in question so I could deal with the culprit. It happened twice. The second time us, and the small business client needed to part ways so that I could keep ensuring AWS that we were being good stewards of their IP addresses.
1) Often the perception that code quality is so bad that a rewrite is needed stems at least in part from the "not built by me/us" syndrome (related to the "not built here" syndrome). Developers tend to overestimate their ability to write good quality code in real world situations.

2) A lot of folks here are talking about "throwing away the initial prototype". That makes a lot of sense at an early stage when it's just you and may be two other people and progressively less sense as you grow larger modulo some other factors. If the company in question has a 50M run rate, we are talking about a really mature product. I don't think you can call it the initial prototype any more.

My opinions are colored by observing, at close range, a failed multi-year attempt to rewrite a mature product from scratch at a major corp and success at refactoring in parts to significantly improve code quality at my own startup.
Depends how bad the code base is, I can see security being a big problem in a PHP code base loaded with technical debt. Speed is another one, certain things in PHP are just going to be slow with bad implementation.
Well, illegitimate use has to be handled appropriately as well, or we're in a "This is why we can't have nice things" scenario.
Show HN: Duplicate entries on the front page
Actually, Alienware would save money. Windows pre-installed does not come for free. A linux based system should be cheaper than a windows based computer.

I never liked to pay for a windows licence by default although I install linux anyway.
Are businesses going to start putting all their proprietary information in the cloud? If so, I could see a short term where getting a job might be difficult, until enough companies get burned and realized they should have never let their information off their network.

Back in the late 90's I had a choice. I could go be a programmer or I could go be a sysadmin. I really love programming. I in fact spend my "free time" (as much as a father of an infant and toddler has) programming. However at that time I noticed all the noise about how all the programming jobs were being outsourced.

I made the conclusion then that they could outsource the programmer, but they still need someone to run the infrastructure. I think that will always be the case. I've worked for business focused, rather than technology focused, companies my entire career. OK, 13 years in I've only worked for 2 companies so I can't say I have a ton of exposure, but still... My experience is that the business user wants things done a certain way and a lot of my time is spent engineering solutions to meet those requirements, which often change several times during the project phase. Cloud solutions currently are a pretty well defined box, one that I don't see a lot of business users being comfortable with the restrictions offered.

I do see some things going to cloud. Email for example... please take it. I could get more work done not having to do restores because someone decided to make a POP connection to their mailbox with their phone and deleted all their email on the server. However most of the other solutions I'd see going to the cloud are going to have to go onto basically virtual servers like what Rackspace and Amazon EC2 instances offer. And who's going to know how to manage, configure, and keep those security updates going? Oh yea, the guys who've done it on physical infrastructure for the past few decades. So basically if a company goes that way then I'll have less warranty replacements to worry about.

I think perhaps the cloud is going to change the nature of a sysadmin's job, but the profession isn't going to go away. Heck, I don't even know that I've ever been a pure sysadmin. Seems I've always had to do some programming, engineering and dabble in network the whole time I've been doing this job.

Lastly, I support my company. When there's an emergency, I am available to handle it. I'm not busy managing several other companies disasters as the same time. My business can also dictate my downtime. Oh, you're having a conference in New Zealand during the time we have our normally scheduled email maintenance, well let me just move that window for you so you can get your job done. Don't forget, we're a service based industry and you're going to get a lot better service from someone you pay to be dedicated to you rather than from a company that supports a few thousand customers. You don't have to wait in line for this car wash.
Famous rewrites:

- Microsoft Word, "Project Pyramid". Never finished, the company decided it would take too long to rewrite + keep up with adding new features.

- Netscape 6. Practically killed the company. Dragged on for years.

- IE4. Turned out OK and made IE the leading browser.

- Ericsson AXE-N. Huge project to rewrite the succesful AXE phone system in an object oriented way. Failed miserably.

I'm sure you can think of a few more. I wonder what Microsoft did right with IE
"Many people how don't know about BitTorrent would still not pay."

And some would. So where does that leave the overall argument?
I am a cyclist and it is all about suffering. Sports or workouts where I don't suffer just seem kind of boring now. v02 for life. :)
This property led to non-redundant effects being reported by people who had used computer monitors with uniformly colored phosphors to do word processing. These monitors were popular in the 1980s, and commonly showed text as green on black. People noticed later when reading text of the same spatial frequency, in a book say, that it looked pink. Also a horizontal grating of the same spatial frequency as the horizontal lines of the induction text (such as the horizontal stripes on the letters "IBM" on the envelope for early floppy disks) looked pink.

I remember this happening to me! Anyone else?
Flexible employment is a positive thing, as long as people can get employed at the level they want.

For example, I know people who would go stir crazy taking care of kids or elderly parents at home if that was all they did, or people who have interests that they're passionate about but don't pay the rent (starving artists, startup founder, etc.)

When I was starting my business, I asked for and got reduced hours at my "day job", and it helped me get over the hump to profitability (still doing consulting for them).

Underemployment is a problem - usually caused a structural deficiency in the way that non-pay benefits are allocated in this country. Plenty of employers wouldn't care if you worked less than full time if they could get the work done and they didn't have to pay extra per employee for health care and other benefits.
The (hypothesized--I think it was Tim O'Reilly who has written about this) issue though is that, with books, time is much more of a limiting factor with books than with songs or simple iThing games. Even if an author makes substantially more per copy with an eBook, there's a limit in how many more copies they'll sell even at a much lower price; people only have time to read so many more books.

I'm not arguing it's all doom and gloom but, as the article discusses, I hear a lot of reflexive "Give it away; you'll gain visibility and make money somehow." I heard that plenty as a consultant by people trying to get me to speak or write for free and it mostly didn't work then either.
IMO the prudent thing to do as a businessman is to wait until your startup is no longer a startup but a well operating business when you can deal with such technical debt by hiring a smart guy who'll refactor piece-by-piece in the background. Until then you just patch security issues and cache the hell out of it.
This doesn't completely answer your question about certain music artists doing just fine, but might also be an interesting read.

http://blog.tunecore.com/2010/10/music-purchases-and-net-rev...
I work as an engineer for an email service provider. I can tell you that deliverability is one of the core things you bring to the table when you are doing sending for a lot of people. It's the sloppy, people oriented aspect that developers ignore (imagine you've got a huge send going out and gmail just flagged you as a spammer, you better have a contact there to fix it fast). Sure, you can write an app to send a million emails in a few minutes, but your work (and bandwidth costs) are pointless if it never makes it to the customer's inbox.

There are a lot of dirty details in sending at volume. But like the old saying goes, "where there's muck, there's brass."
Coming full circle
Leila Chirayath Janah on Being Female in a Male World PtII
Here's Joel on Software article from year 2000 about code rewrites: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

(titled "Things You Should Never Do, Part I", mentions Netscape 6).

Made me respect and fear the impulse to "rewrite".
"I'm sorry, but these are the rates I offer to non-profit agencies. Please understand that these rates are already much lower than my standard rates and as such, are non-negotiable. If you decide to pursue either of the two solutions we have discussed, contact me and I will be glad to help you at the rate I have given you.

I wish you nothing but the best in the future.

Regards,
Name"

Something like that? Honest, polite, but to-the-point.
That was my point. If I buy a computer with linux on I expect it to be cheaper than Windows, so it was weird that Alienware are asking people that question.
Facebook About To Launch New Monetization Process
I haven't seen SES yet, but if it's anything like the rest of the AWS suite, they're not entirely comparable. Amazon's products are complex, and their statistical reporting focuses on the bottom line numbers, rather than detailed, action-based reporting. For example, Postmark app provides a nice interface for managing bounce emails. From the SES FAQ, it appears that they simply forward bounces on to an address that you specify. One could build a Postmarkapp-like service on top of SES, but SES is not a direct replacement for Postmarkapp.
Why can't we do better than these crappy torrent sites?
If I have $3k to drop and need that much horsepower I'd rather build a small cluster for the price.
Ah, this old chestnut again. Just because Joel said it, doesn't make it true. Granted, the line between "refactor aggressively" and "rewrite" can be pretty blurry at times.
I think we'll see more serialized, short length, low price point works. Will someone pay 99 cents for 20-30 pages of a well-crafted story? I think probably yes.

I'm thinking of something like "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" - obviously Yudkowsky can't sell that because of its fanfiction nature, but something of that quality level, I think I'd pay a buck to read 4-5 episodes of it. Especially if I got hooked by the first 10 chapters being free.

This should bring lots of new opportunities, especially for fiction writers. Hopefully, less fluff and more density too. Would you pay $2 to read a highly polished 20 page manual by Steve Blank? I would. Hopefully this becomes a way for content producers to get paid to craft high quality, dense content... I think this could lead to something of a revolution in quality, dense, though shorter content.
My feeling is that better solutions would require user registration, and thus exist largely on either private torrent sites, or not at all (because people don't want to hand over details when doing illegal things).
Corona now supports Android dev on Windows
You don't have to negotiate fees - if you reducing the requirements by the appropriate cost, you aren't haggling over the rate. And while I know the kind of customer you mean, a price sensitive customer isn't necessarily one who won't pay on time. I have a non-profit customer who is very price sensitive, but is one of my most reliable in terms of on-time payment.

If you are set on turning down the work, you can say that you have a minimum project size for first time customers. This isn't uncommon - a lot of people aren't interested in taking on tiny projects from new customers. You have a certain target client/project you are interested in, and changing the requirements won't fit that anymore.

Or you can tell them that quality is very important to you, and you don't recommend that they try to complete the project by cutting some of the requirements. You couldn't in good conscience work on that type of project, and if that is the direction they are going, you will not be a good resource for them. That's not impolite - that's true.
My experience is that my job has never really been very hardware driven. My experience with hardware is keeping our standard server spec up to date with the vendor. Installing OS and applications. I also manage keeping track of warranty status and handling hardware failures, and of course backups.

That's a lot of words to describe work that isn't a lot of my time annually. Especially on a team where the load is distributed. Take into account that a few hundred "servers" are virtual machines running on tens of physical servers and there you go.

My skill set already requires me to manage multiple operating systems and applications. My biggest value to the company is problem solving, whether it's engineering a solution to meet new business requirements to diagnosing and fixing a problem that can happen anywhere from the hardware to application layer. Sysadmins don't just sit and look at blinky lights all day waiting for one to go orange.
Been a while since I've seen SDL mentioned... got me started on my first C++ video game. I didn't understand casting at that point, so the code was an unholy spaghetti horror, but SDL sure didn't get in the way.
Foursquare went through a rewrite but I guess that was pretty early once the team had got a proof point that there were people out there who would use the app.

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0ATHAG0M-0vxXZGNicHo...
Pair programming: Be a better navigator
> struggling to come up with ways to cover actual production costs, which haven't really changed much

The cost of buying food hasn't changed much, but the actual costs of doing the recording/release/distribution have decreased a lot, which lowers barriers to entry and increases supply.

To produce a recording whose production values are seen by the average casual music fan as "good enough", and then sell an mp3, requires much less capital investment than putting out a decent-sounding record in 1975 would have, or even a decent-sounding CD in 1990.

Sure, home recording on a Macbook isn't going to get you the quality a professional studio would get you, but the quality gap is much less than it used to be, especially for someone who spent some time reading (free) documentation on the subject. Rather than home recording producing unreleasable cassette demos, they're now often good enough to upload to YouTube or sell directly to fans. As a result, the people who've paid for professional studio time now have to compete directly with all those home recordings, whereas previously they could more or less ignore them. That drives down prices.

Related, many artists actually put a negative value on their time: there are quite a few people who love what they do so much that they're actually willing to subsidize their own art-production by working other jobs (e.g. waiting tables).
I am torn.

We are not really a startup, but we are small and have a startup attitude among the technology people. The platform we are running on goes back about 10 years, and it's starting to show.

There is a single shared database that is used by MS Access, classic ASP, and ASP.NET applications. This means you can't change any one piece without affecting all of the others. We've had people leave because of the resistance to change inherent in the platform. Tiny little changes are very very hard to make sometimes. Small changes can take weeks. Certain major changes might as well be impossible.

But then all of the advice I've ever heard says "don't rewrite." What if we don't rewrite, but build a new platform? Solve different problems than the original?
Your exact point happens to be addressed in an article linked to from the article under discussion:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music...

"It's also a bit unfair to compare the 2000s with the 1990s, since the '90s enjoyed an unnatural sales boost when consumers replaced their cassette tapes and vinyl records en masse with CDs."

"But industry insiders and experts argue that the main culprit for the industry's massive decline was the growing popularity of digital music."

Also:

"Last decade was the first ever in which sales were lower going out than coming in."
The desktop I bought at BestBuy ~3 years ago came with raid, it's not an uncommon option anymore.
Telemarketers are a whole different story: You never asked them to contact you. : )

Websites are a whole different story. You decided to visit them. Once you are on their site, they decide the rules. (As long as they are not doing anything illegally.)

Also note that I sometimes choose to block ads even if it
I always use the self checkout with a chip-n-pin debit card in the Sainsbury's downstairs from our office - actually getting served by someone at a checkout or using cash now seems terribly quaint.
You think that's complicated? Boy, back in my day, we didn't have no fancy "management console" or "tabs". Why, you had to play with your AWS services by hand! And you liked it.
Single server durability (MongoDB)
Why Angry Birds +could+ turn into a major identity player
The thing is, persecuting some piracy but not all is part of a complete price discrimination model.

The idea is that the marginal cost of a copy of windows (or a electronic copy of a book) is zero. If the end user is unable to pay for a copy, it's definitely better for Microsoft (and, I believe, better for the publisher and author) for that user to get a free copy, understand it, and contribute to the reputation of the product as "the one to use" than for that user to use another alternate product. Where would Microsoft be if all the poor people just used Linux? in a world of hurt, I think. I believe the same could be said for book publishers and authors.

The problem, from the point of view of those trying to make money off this zero marginal cost good, is that if it's just free, many people who could pay for it would take it for free.

This is where enforcement comes in (and why it's in the interest of publishing companies to keep the penalties civil rather than criminal) If I have no money, generally, I'm going to be a lot less concerned about people suing me. You can't get blood from a stone. On the other hand, once I have some assets, suddenly the idea that you could take them away is a big deal, and maybe paying out a few dollars for insurance make sense.

Now, obviously, suing a poor person is still a pain in the ass for the poor person, so you can't sue /everyone/ who pirates your work, but for those with assets, just suing some can get the fear juices running enough that they pay for nearly all their software.

The IRS uses a very similar model; they trust you to calculate and pay the correct taxes, and then they check some small percentage of returns, and heavily punish people who cheat.
When and how should I start with marketing.
I have a startup I'm working on(yes, sole founder, yes I know it's going to be tough) which I estimate would be ready for alpha users in about 4 months time.

I have a email register for those interested on the site at the moment. Should I focus on marking only when I have an actual working product?

Also, what would be the best methods to market my product when it's ready?
Old discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803505
I agree with the main proposition that search by its very nature is not neutral, you are searching for something specific and therefore biased towards that something.

However, I do not think he effectively argued that google does not manipulate its results by favouring itself, specifically in regards to paid results or paid ads.

These paid results are presented to the user in the same style and fashion as the organic search results, but differentiated subtly by a very light different colour background.

They are above organic results, right below the search box, making it much easier for users to click on them.

Due to their prominent placement, they attract most of the attention, although web savy users might have learned they are ads and thus have learned to ignore them.

Finally, for all practical purposes, the paid results are the first ranked, suggesting therefore that google finds them to be the most relevant.

The conclusion is clearly that you can buy your first position on google, even if it is not the most relevant.
http://bit.ly/11dVsF
I thought one of Alienware's distinction was their support. Presumably they need to hire support reps for whatever flavor of Linux they support. Also presumably, this is more costly and intensive than hiring someone with an A+ certification. Obviously this is conjecture, but it would explain the 'charge more'.
"Russia needs Israeli-style airport security" Dmitry Medvedev
Seriously, the lack of a flat fee model is the main thing that has kept me away from AWS.
The thing of it is, the author usually doesn't get much of the cost of the book. If the author could sell as many copies of an e-book on their own as they could with a publisher, they would usually be making as much or more charging one dollar a copy, I mean, if they got to keep all of that dollar.
Makes sense to me. Those gradual rate increases show they're pretty wary of the spammer threat.
If you don't mind my asking, how much of a pain is it dealing with spam complaints and deliverability issues on your own versus through Silverpop?
The thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute core of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like a vine on top of them, providing things people want.
There used to be a client side python active x control for I.E.