skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree - if you head out to any small or medium sized "town" (my own, for example), you'll see the same kind of social bonding, loyalties, and cohesion amongst the people at organizations and even between organizations themselves.
It seems like no coincidence that the internet came back on just for these pro-goverment supporters to organize out of nowhere. Watching this all on al-J has been surreal...
Seems low to me as well. They took 6MM in Jan '07. The only way a 50MM exit seems great (for the VC or angel) is if they got 50% for their 6MM. If they had an average 20-30% Series A, thats around a 2.5X exit... which isn't awful. It's possible after 4 years given a 50MM offer, that they either a) ran out of money b) their VC had control and wanted out or c) they didn't get a counter offer from EHarmony, et al.
Personas for Firefox | Tangled Rapunzel Walt Disney
I don't think it is impossible, just very, very hard (and expensive), made worse by having an entrenched incumbent who has very deep pockets.
Maybe pushing the OKC is now a big, corporate sellout angle is enough to bootstrap? If you could generate enough hype to get even 1% of active OKC users to signup, you'd be in a good shape.
What Microsoft can do to start winning over the cool kids
More competition can only be good for the consumer, but unfortunately it'll probably take ages before it comes to Canada and the selection will probably be much smaller than in the US.

That's if all this isn't made irrelevant by 25 gig/month caps...
Apple launches "In-App-Subscriptions"
How about the fact that most successful businesses that have ever existed have charged for their products? Why is this data that can safely be ignored? It's the most proven business model out there.

Furthermore, it takes time to get good at anything. As you implied, making money from advertising is a skill, so how long does it take for you to get good enough at it to support yourself? Charging for things is simply more conservative. It's for people who don't want to risk going under while learning how to advertise.
Your list of companies is rather incomplete, and should include every non-H264-licensing company on the planet that ever created a training or marketing video.
My biggest mistake was uploading ASP code right onto a production server to fix an urgent bug when there were a few hundred people passing exams online. I didn't realised that changing pages would not bother but changing code in the APP_CODE section would make the website recompile the code behind and every data stored in cache or in viewstate would be invalid since the dll version had changed. Everybody online then hit a 500 error page when they tried to continue.
I have data from my own experiences, and while I won't release it, I will say that in our case subscription revenue is an order of magnitude higher than ad revenue.

I can possibly see my business becoming a full-time job from subscription revenue. I wouldn't even cover hosting costs from ads.
I might get hit for this, but..

1) As others have commented already: The product was free with basically _all_ features already working. Sure, it might need some work to support a complete new runtime version (i.e. 4). I don't know. And, problematic in this case for the image here is that this is a mostly "invisible" improvement. You still wonder "What do they actually add?"

2) Their "update or stop using" policy is sleazy, imo. I stopped using the tool at that point, because in my world that's not a viable way to offer any product (free or otherwise).

3) Taking over a free tool with the clear and open statement that "it's going to stay free" bites you, if you back off later. I'm sure there are good reasons (commercially) for this decision now, but it still ends up as a public "Whoops, failed" for me.

No love from my side, not because of the price (I agree with you on that point), but the "image" of this tool is utterly damaged in my world.
Is GNOME 3 going to melt your laptop?
I recently spoke to a lawyer, and the cost of starting a business through him seemed reasonable, until we discussed a privacy policy and terms of service. The cost suddenly doubled, even though he stated that he would be just copying them from a similar site and adjusting them to my site's needs. I realize the importance of these items, but I'm still not willing to pay multiple thousands of dollars for them.
Firefox and Opera had chosen VP8 in favor of H.264 before Chrome did.
The only thing I haven't seen is this. Ok, using the clickstream data is an established practice, but does Google use clickstream data from users making searches on OTHER search engines, or just their own?

This is the crux for me, Bing is using data from Google, does Google use data from Bing or only themselves?

Even if all true, I don't see it as unethical business practice. Definitely a marketing black eye, but not much else.
Honestly, I wish I could play the piano so I could play piano music I like, and more easily compose music. No financial gain, but I think I'd just enjoy it. Unfortunately as an adult w/ little time to practice, it seems like learning to play is not likely.

I can listen to recorded piano music, but it's not like actually playing.
I agree with you as well, but I don't see why my point doesn't stand. I'm not saying I agree with one side or the other just that everyone has a stake in this game.
The Daily is live in the App Store
I'm the lead developer at http://setformarriage.com and I can say that this is totally true. There are a lot of hurdles to running a dating site, the primary ones being dealing with scammer accounts and a stigma with the media and advertisers that borders on the level of running a porn site.

However, if you've got some kind of unique angle (like Set For Marriage's focus on marriage-minded people or Ashley Madison's controversial focus on facilitating adultery) or some kind of newsworthy technology it's not really that hard to line up interviews with local news stations and blogs (the founder of Set For Marriage was interviewed by something like 15 local news stations around the US from a single press release and some nudging). Going to online dating conferences can also be very good too, as many of the people in the industry are very willing to help out serious and interesting newcomers.

There's definitely a challenge in building traffic though. AdWords and SEO for dating terms are very competitive, and affiliate traffic can be very scammer-heavy. CloudFlare, some decent flagging algorithms, and OCD developers who check for spam accounts multiple times a day can help out tremendously with this, and we've given one nice woman a lifetime premium account for reporting a ton of suspicious accounts to us.
A Few Thoughts on Readability and Paying for Content
Vinge is, in my opinion, the preeminent hacker SF writer. He was a CS professor at SDSU and both the two ZoT novels and Rainbows End show that he really grasps the end-to-end nature of technology and how hackers interact with the world. I also thought that Rainbows End was a great story about how hackers age, and it's just as well worth reading as Deepness.
Having been a member of both match and okcupid, I am sad to hear this news. I went to go cancel my match account the other day and to my dismay saw that my credit card had been charged again without my direct consent. After looking over the terms I saw that Match took the liberty of auto-renewing for me. While it is clear in the service agreement, I feel like these sort of things are a shady way of operating. To avoid any auto-renew, you need to literally cancel your membership and while doing so, you are unsure of what is really going to happen.

I am hoping things remain split as they are or as other have mentioned, match gets a boost in its technology. Anyone that has used both knows that match seems to be far behind on the times. Their features are crap, platform crap and overall design is ugly. I often found myself thinking how I could replicate the site (design wise) in a night with all the boiler plate code I have. I am not optimistic, but hopefully something good will come out of it for match.

Congrats to the okcupid team. Great work.
I'm really curious what draws people to these two books (and I've read both books and the review). I found them both to be somewhat slow and about half-wasted with all the stuff about the "Tines". While I love Vinge's writings on the future of technology, his books (including Rainbows End and The Peace War) have never worked for me.

I have a pet theory that people who really like Stross' Accelerando (super-fast, super-speculative buzz-wordy, hard science fiction), Banks' Culture books or Morgan's Market Forces would have a harder time with A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky. Yes/No?
0.1% actually. I kid you not. (This causes me a minor issue once a year. One of my autoresponders caught a flag in January for having 6 / 4000 = 0.15% spam complaints. They were quite clear in their mail: I'm on probation.)

Have I mentioned I love MailChimp? They take deliverability seriously.

(Also, they do have actual human beings who you can talk to if you get flagged unnecessarily. For example, within 24 hours of opening my account and funding it, it was closed because I used the word "bingo" in a draft email. Their filter smacked me down for promoting gambling. I mailed them and the CS department got back with "Thanks for your explanation of what your business actually does. OK, we reinstated you. Be careful.")
While testing a live update to a safety-critical traffic monitoring system I had four sessions running. Development, deployment, shadow, and a link to the live system.

I was checking the deployment to the shadow system, repeatedly running over the check-list to ensure that the deployment went smoothly, and then running a comparison between the shadow system and the live system to check that the update took place properly.

Between each test I took down the shadow system and brought it back up in a clean duplicate of the live system. Except on this one occasion when I had a brain-fart and killed the live system.

It all came back as designed within 30 seconds, re-initialised and restarted without loss of data, but it was a scary moment.
I disagree. This article is full of wisdom like "They had learned how to Do Agile, but they didn't know how to Be Agile.

These are the best and brightest Agile evangelists? Why so many failures then? The article bemoans how Agile hasn't taken off as it should.

I humbly submit: because its not as good as it sounds. Everything will get done on a Friday! Really? how likely is that? Interrupting intensely concentrating programmers on a schedule - that will improve productivity?

I'm a little bitter. Been at two shops now that torpedoed productivity by "going Agile".
As far as simplicity goes, consider this. As a sole proprietor, you must file a Schedule C with the IRS if you intend to take any deductions. Filing a Schedule C also dramatically increases your chances of an audit. Also, when you are audited, the audit covers all of your personal finances. If my corporation is audited, the audit does not automatically extend to my personal finances.

Having a corporation actually simplified my situation, even when I was a one-man consultant shop. I've always maintained separate bank accounts for my businesses, which gives me a clearer picture of my business performance by isolating my personal finances from the picture. I find the required filing to be minimal in contrast to the added clarity.

I can't make the argument that it requires less paperwork, but IMO, it does make the paperwork simpler.
>I think this usage may have come from Reddit?

I remember seeing it on somethingawful as far back as 2003. They started a lot of memes, tl;dr, o rly? and so on.
Dude, I've seen your comments on this thread. Several of them are basically asking people to confirm facts everybody agrees on. You should come better prepared for the next discussion.

Sorry to be an ass. But you're wasting my time on this site, since I have to wade through your questions to get to the interesting ones.
Dubner.
First Recorded Usage of word "Hacker"
No, I'm agreeing that you're right that the cap is effectively unknown. I missed that footnote (shame on me). My point is that even with an unknown cap, the license rates are predictable for the foreseeable future:

Free under 100k units
$0.20 per unit above 100k
$0.10 per unit above 5 million units

Now, I'm no fan of software patents and I wish they would be done away with. But given the choice between that and the practical/technical/patent uncertainty of webM I don't feel like those are massive payments.

I'm glad Google open sourced the on2 codec and I can even see that maybe the H.264 prices have been influenced by that move. But from a practical standpoint, I think Apple and Microsoft are making a reasonable move. People say it's short-sighted, but I think they are relatively protected.
And Apple is telling Google GFY and taking record profits. Why is that state of affairs going to change?
Here's an analysis, which builds on the analysis in your link. I think it's obvious which one makes more sense if you read both:

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-p...

Some highlights:

"Dark Shikari makes several considerations, some related to the implementation itself, and many related to its “patent status”. For example: “VP8’s intra prediction is basically ripped off wholesale from H.264″, without mentioning that the intra prediction mode is actually pre-dating H264; actually, it was part of Nokia MVC proposal and H263++ extensions published in 2000, and the specific WebM implementation is different from the one mentioned in the “essential patents” of H264 as specified by the MPEG-LA.

If you go through the post, you will find lots of curious mentions of “sub-optimal” choices:

[big list of the identical features with minor differences between H.264 and VP8]

What we can obtain from this (very thorough – thanks, Jason!) analysis is the fact that from my point of view it is clear that On2 was actually aware of patents, and tried very hard to avoid them. It is also clear that this is in no way an assurance that there are no situation of patent infringements, only that it seems that due diligence was performed. Also, WebM is not comparable to H264 in terms of technical sophistication (it is more in line with MPEG4/VC1) but this is clearly done to avoid recent patents; some of the patents on older specification are already expired (for example, all France Telecom patents on H264 are expired)."

There's also a follow up here which discusses the thought process behind the 49 potential H.264 patents:

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-webm-again-freedom-quality...
I don't even think they should just blacklist Google. They should just respect robots.txt.

edit: I should have clarified. I know that the Bing crawler likely respects robots.txt, but if they are using clickstream info to build their index, it seems right that they should respect robots.txt there as well, no?
I like it and I see why a service like this would be helpful. But, is there enough incentive for your users to answer the texts?

For example, if I'm at a bar in NYC drinking with my friends and I get a text (from a stranger) asking how much a pitcher of Coors is, I'm likely to answer because it's a quick text back. But, if someone asks me to list what's on tap, I'm likely to ignore the message because it's a lot of work and the payoff seems very little.

Also, I would have been quicker to signup if I didn't have to use a third party.

Overall, I think it looks awesome.
When MPEG LA which holds several codec related patents in its pool cannot indemnify its H.264 licensees, Google indemnifying WebM sounds far fetched.
Thanks, didn't see that.

Wow, that's disappointing. They took a developer's free tool in good faith and now they're locking it away. They give continued maintenance and improvement as the reason for the change, but all that means here is that they've just now figured out what they should have realized when they took the tool originally, which is that a slightly-improved version of Reflector that cost money wouldn't be able to compete with the original if the original was provided for free. The original is plenty powerful enough for most people.

The only reason they can't release the free version to the web, non-timebombed, and put a disclaimer on it that says its no longer supported/maintained is that they can't compete with it.
Live Coverage of Launch of 'The Daily'
You might find this interesting. An alternate fan-fic ending of A Fire upon the Deep (and what comes after for the direct participants) by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...
I used WU's online service for a while. Then for no apparent reason it locked me out, and I've been able to figure out who to kick to get back in.

Possibly ironically, this has resulted in me falling back to my backup payment sending approach - paypal.
Apple and News Corps. "The Daily" Newspaper Hits The iPad
I haven't read their analysis yet (I will try to when I have some free time), but in general, I would argue that trying to compare a document database to a SQL one is always going to be somewhat misleading. I'd care more if they were comparing Clustrix to MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL.

If you are using MongoDB in a way that is similar to the way you would have used a SQL DB you are probably doing something wrong. Specifically, you are trying to place normalized data in a database designed for denormalization.
I think OOP is easy, so long as the system you are modelling can in fact be broken down sensibly into distinguishable objects. However, a lot of people try to use an OOP approach when this is not appropriate and end up getting into a bit of a mess.
"But if you write code that doesn't change the existing system, you simply test the additions" boils down to the open/closed principle. It's much safer to create a new class (often by inheritance) than to modify the guts of an existing class that already has dependencies.
I love this book. When I first read it I was really into real time strategy games. What I took away from this book was, focus on your economy and you can do wonders when you want to flex your military.

Pham Nuwen is a real role model.
My favourite part of the program archaeology is when he digs right down to the core and discovers the computers are still keeping time in seconds since the time when man landed on the moon (and then discovers it's really a time a bit more than five months afterwards).

I never did think of UNIX time as tied to the moon landings that closely, but it's a nice fact. It was still odd seeing small negative timestamps when we were working on spacelog.org, though...
Mailchimp launches Simple Transcactional Email service on top of Amazon SES: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches-transactional-e...
I found the reference to Dijkstra interesting because he was a huge advocate for up-front thinking. The difference between Dijkstra and Waterfall is Dijkstra wanted the programmer to think before working on the feature. The order in which features were developed was at a higher level. Waterfall is about listing all the features beforehand and parceling them out to be implemented or scheduled on a monster Gantt chart.

A formal methods based process can definitely be agile, so long as the planning has a feedback loop that includes iteratively-developed finished products.

It is clear to me that formal methods are avoided because they are difficult. It is very hard (I've tried) to learn to verify programs without formal education in the methods. Yet, we can write software without formal methods and we can make it pretty darn correct without proving it correct.

Formal methods will probably not catch on unless a concerted effort is made by CS baccalaureate programs to teach it from the beginning. I fear that most professors are not proficient enough to teach it. So, it will probably be one of those things that may be a good idea but will be unlikely to ever gain traction.
mongoDB and morphia: my DAO is pumping
To the defenders of Bing - would it be ok if Bing similarly used visits to amazon.com and various URL parameters to reimplement their "bestselling" lists for each category? I'm sure they could, and it seems clearly unethical. They are doing the same to google, right?
Interestingly, I'm pretty sure that the original wasn't obfuscated, and Red Gate obfuscated it after they received it from the original developer.
I guess in summary then, both are viable.

I've been making a living mainly from advertising income for just over 10 years now.

I've also tried getting users to pay for things, and it's orders of magnitude harder (for me).
In the past? Launching ventures on intuition is common to this day. (Otherwise nobody would start a business: no amount of effort will turn it into an exact science.) In the past, people were just more apt to ascribe intuition to magic or divine guidance. It wasn't that long ago in the United States that a farmer could hire a diviner to tell him where to dig a well, using a divining rod to find underground water.

People who succeed through luck are more often than not credited with insight. They believe in their own skill and have no problem finding people who admire them, trust them, and follow them. If you can believe what you read, it happens on Wall Street all the time.
Awesome! Any chance you can get the site to load more quickly?
Google asking for helping finding Exec
Your not going to get very far.
A lot of shops "go agile" really badly. There are many ways to fail, for example the emphasis on avoiding unnecessary documentation can turn to an excuse for not doing enough up-front thinking. And if you embark on a TDD path and then don't write your unit tests, you've got a quality disaster.

That said there are a lot of agile successes: projects and companies, techniques (team ownership, SCRUM), and philosophies (the minimum viable product). So don't generalize too much from your experience.
Note to the wise: OKCupid still allows you to delete your entire account. They imply that this deletion is real deletion, and totally permanent, except that your user id won't be taken over by anyone else.

If you don't want IAC to have all your personal data, you should do this now before they merge systems.
It's important for bootstrappers to understand the mass traffic that's needed for advertising to fuel growth.

$20 eCPM means to have just a $200k/yr. business you need 10 million impressions per year. $0.10 eCPM means you need 2 billion.
Tony Bates interview: Geek cred, Cisco lessons, and Skype's core values
An exclusive interview with Skype's goal oriented CEO, Tony Bates. He talks about how he came by his tech cred, why he chose to work at Skype, the challenges Skype faces, and the company values and themes he hopes will guide Skype to serve a billion users.
hopefully the Military backs the people against the pro-government secret police force
You write:

" But the truth is that philwelch and I don't. The whole point of this argument is exactly that."

Yes, exactly. That's what I said. The disagreement is fundamental. I was trying to get you to realize what the end result will be of the trajectory you are following. But you write "I'm essentially going to ignore it". As such, there is not much more that I can say. It is time for me to end my participation on Hacker News.
Just as a heads up.. this is NOT available yet to iTunes users within in the UK.
US Seizes Sports Streaming Sites in "Super Bowl Crackdown"
>"whether or not they should require their students to have laptops/tablets."

A requirement for laptops should be in response to a specific educational purpose. Sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog...or free laptops for administrators for every 50 the school buys. Curriculum should come first, not technology.
nooo!
it usually adds a point to existing posts...
sorry!