skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android).

I would say that WP7 has a superior conception to iOS, and I am a hardcore iPhone user. My phone is really about my communications and managing my data away from home. Apps are only a means to that end. Right now iOS is pretty App centric. WP7 on the other hand is personal data centric, which in the long run will provide better functionality for "managing my data away from home" with less friction.
If the decision turned out differently, Microsoft would have grounds to sue every F/OSS dev with a product similar to something MS is selling.
I'm not sure if it's enabled by default in Chrome. I had to turn it on the othernight on my Ubuntu box through chrome://flags.
Great link, thank you!
Do you also recomend the patrick's book?
It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it, and so on.
Is there any non trivial piece of software that's known to be patent free? Isn't it probable, even likely, that there are additional patent holders who'll come after H.264 implementations eventually?
The Vikings navigated very well, for the time, consistently over a long period.
Thanks, prior to today I had only been to that page once so I hadn't noticed the randomization.
Refreshing, honest, well said.

This part caught my eye, though: "we were honest with them. We let them know that implementing that would mean addition cost for us , but would still do it if they were ready to pay a subscription fee".

That's a common early feeling, and one that I've had as well. But you need to completely and forever abandon cost-based pricing if you're going to thrive (find your best customers) as a subscription web app. The task of figuring out what your web app is really WORTH to your customers rather than what it costs you to operate is the key to high profitability and happy customers co-existing.

The worth/value of your app is a percentage of the surplus of success it creates for its users, where success is defined by the user.
> to our paid service well.

From your website: "it's 100% free"
Don't see the harm in charging money for labor. Everybody needs to be payed and it doesn't seem a ripoff price.
MailChimp now free up to 2000 subscribers
Your attempt to split the difference kind of reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/690/ . Sorry. What does it matter if only 18 of the 20 messages were fakes intended to make him sign up, and 2 were real? Not that I'd think for a second that any of them were.
150k+ records in Crunchbase so it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. The good news is that anybody can edit any record.
> "Ads are an extremely unreliable business model."

How much money do you make from advertising revenue that allows you to quantify specifically how reliable it is? I'd question if you have enough data at your disposal to make a statistically valid assessment.

You can't disagree with data, and it's only unreliable if you don't know what you're doing.
You can't stick to your free version, I'm afraid. There's a built in expiration date in the latest free version; after April 15th 2011 it will no longer work.
Who are you trying to kid here? It's obvious to those here that it's an automated response system...a.k.a. a bot. Many of the users here could / have written such a bot at one time with far less nefarious reasoning behind doing so. You can't deny that the purpose of that bot is to fool people into thinking that they're talking to 'Jen', a user on your site (whether or not you specifically say so does not discard the intent).

Stop treating the people on this site like we're simply misinformed teenagers crying wolf.
sounds nice but once it asks for the last 4 digits of the SSN it dies because it can't pull my credit.
> it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details

this is how a lot of dating sites work. no contact unless you pay, no receiving messages unless you pay. its also how classmates.com works, not just dating sites. and one of the reasons they were sued recently is due to business practices similar to this.

> pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails

again, this is probably true, but there's no proof of it unless the dude signed up and found out for sure. more data required.

> the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it

shady indeed, but they're not the only place who makes use of this.
It's not the amount of traffic, it's the fit between your users and the advertising, how targeted they are, intent, etc etc.

Also it totally depends on the service/product. For stormpulse I don't think advertising supported is probably the right idea unless it's made more mainstream.

For example I'd start a "enter your email to get local weather reports free". Build up a massive email list, then start including promotional adverts at the top/bottom of each mailing. You'd be sending out a large amount of mails, to a large amount of people... I think it could generate a good revenue.

It's not as simple as slapping up some ads and going home. This is the mistake I think most people make.
Ah yes, because people in the past were just plain stupid, we as a species didn't gain the ability to intentionally take advantage of our surroundings or question those having dubious advice until 325 years ago, when Newton presented the Royal Society with his Pricipia Mathematica volume 1, thus bestowing critical thought on humanity.

All evidence to the contrary is simply coincidental. For instance, the cathedrals and churches contemporary to the vikings: They were not planned even a little. They are simply the result of some guy saying "lets build a cathedral" and piling stones until one of the piles resulted in a cathedral that didn't fall over. Every last one is like this. And swords and armor? Those guys just put funny rocks in the fire sometimes, and hit them for the heck of it, and occasionally when things cooled off, there would be a sword there!
Only on the web can 'charge money for a good or service' be considered a clever contrarian insight.
"Microsoft pays into MPEG-LA about twice as much as it receives back for rights to H.264." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-h...
Of course Firefox and Opera support WebM. Revenues of Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software depend on Google.
i'm not splitting the difference. if any messages were fake, its shady and legally liable. my point is, how can he know this for sure? all he's doing is saying that it is probably true, and not investigating. $30 from TC to sign up for a month and verify his assumption is just good journalism.
> I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil.

1. Delete the fake bot accounts

2. Re-word your homepage so that it is clear to users that you need to pay money to do anything useful

3. Come out and say 'in an effort to ramp up user engagement we went too far and made a mistake. apologies'

I signed up for your site years ago. I have slowly watched it progress from something useful to a totally degenerate spam and bait site.

(Edit: I will add that if it is your affiliates who are doing the spamming, then ban them and put in better controls. I just logged into my account and got 3 messages in less than a second)
Where did he say it is immoral to index public content?

Google complains about Bing using public content. Google uses public content.

Snarky question? Fail?
As you said, not in OS X.

They are working on it in theory, though I'm not sure what is taking so long:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13148
Google (and pretty much every other search engine) puts your search terms right up in the page title, and they show up in several other places around the page. The Bing scraper couldn't miss them.

Honestly, if Bing isn't giving Google special treatment, this whole debacle shows that their click tracking model works.
To further clarify, here's OpenSRS's pricing structure, which breaks down the registry cost, ICANN fees, and their charges:

http://www.opensrs.com/services/domains/domains-pricing
Ask HN:What job roles are suitable for a generalist?
Pardon me for the new account but I'm long time HN reader and poster, just wanted to remain anonymous.

I know there are a lot of really smart people on HN and if possible I'd like to get their opinion on this.

Let me explain:
I consider myself generalist, i.e. I do not have one special skill.
I'm not hardcore/technical enough to be high end developer/hacker or sysadmin.
On the other hand I understand business and marketing things quite well.

In the past I worked as a web developer(frontend and backend), IT support person(windows), sysadmin(Linux), ERP developer, even tried freelancing.
After couple of freelancing years I got into financial trouble and had to quickly find a new job.
Then I started to work at position with mixed responsibilities - 50% IT and 50% computer unrelated activities.
Only then I understood that I'm good at business decisions and dealing with people.
I successfully solved few big problems in the office between employees and manager.
A lot of things that improved our operations(IT and non-IT) was suggested by me.
Unfortunately I do not get credit for this. My manager gets all the recognition.

Now I'm little bit lost if I should try to specialize in something and earn better paycheck(I have a family) or try to move into non-technical role.

What would you advice to do at this point in life for a generalist?

What job roles would you suggest for a person who is technical enough to read code but also is business savvy?

P.S. Just in case it's important I'm not from US, I live in small Eastern European country, but considering to move to a better place.

tl;dr What job roles include dealing with technical and business side of things?
In short, yes. A friend of mine was head of corporate strategy at Paypal. As of 2007, they had spent $300M dealing with fraud. We had a lot of talks on this subject when I was working for a startup providing anonymous credit cards for online shopping.
Will a PlayStation-Android Partnership Hurt Apple?
$35 isn't bad, and Reflector is an awesome tool. It'll pay for itself it no time. If it started generating some revenue, they could probably give more time to it and make it even better.

As a developer, you need to maintain your toolset. $35 is small fries. Sure, enterprisey .NET has a slew of expensive profilers, testing frameworks, and everything, but I think the price for Reflector is very reasonable.

Other fields are far more used to paying for their tools. Construction, mechanics, machinists, mechanical/electrical engineer.
I genuinely wonder if it will in the future.
Does not the same reasons for pulling H264 from Chrome hold for the Android browser too?
I don't think it is the same thing. Unlike ActiveX, video can be re-encoded (fairly easily I guess if you are going to use 2016 technology).
Zach, I'd love to chat. Care to email me at jameson [at] launchrock [dot] com?
They do, but they aren't clones of each other. I'm in southeast Michigan and I often see Maumee OH and Hodgkins IL as the source, but I also sometimes manage to get things shipped from Nevada. Our diapers come from Lewisberry PA, I've got some nuts from Philidelphia, and we got a book a couple months back from Louisville KY. I certainly do not simply get everything from my closest distribution center.
Not so much backing down as switching tactics. The demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir square are now under assault from what the news is describing as "pro-government demonstrators", who are throwing stones. They're marching with slogans like "thirty years of stability, nine days of anarchy", but things only turned violent when they showed up. There are multiple reports of these people being found to be bearing police IDs.

Perhaps Mubarak's idea is to say, "it's me or this chaos." But it may very well be his police (otherwise invisible over the past few days) that are creating the chaos...

EDIT: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon seems to think that's what's going on; he was just on al-J English saying that violence against peaceful demonstrators is unacceptable...
MailChimp Launches Simple Transactional Service on Top of Amazon SES
I didn't even read the article. It's late and I'm not going to bother addressing any of the author's points.

But he's wrong.

I can't understand why people make posts like this.
Let's boil it down to eCPM. What is your eCPM going to be? Multiple that by impressions and tell me how you're going to support N employees on that revenue.
If you haven't read the Dating DDOS article featured a few weeks ago you should: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065604
StackOverflow and Hacker News both seem to actively discourage casual participation. I am the sort of person who doesn't like to speak unless I have something new to add, so I don't post comments or answer questions often.

However, I'm quite happy to use my time and energy to tend the garden and pull weeds, and plant something new when I happen to have a really great seed. HN and SO both tell me they don't want me there -- fine, their sites, their rules. But I do feel this encourages a high noise to signal ratio, eventually clogging the site and making it less useful.
That's a valid point regarding partners and mitigating risk. If you're a one-man company, it's a lot easier to manage the risks, so forming a corporation may be superfluous. I think it depends on your product as well. The chances of being sued while providing a simple product like bingo cards is minimal. If you're providing a service to businesses, you stand a much greater risk of being sued. It's all a balance.

BTW, I'm not suggesting that you should form a corp. Just to be clear on that. I do think this conversation is beneficial for the topic starter though.

I hear the "weak corporations are worthless" argument a lot. I will say that our simple little corporation is holding up really well, and we didn't spend a bunch of money forming it. We did not use one of those insta-corporation sites though. We paid a local attorney, with whom we sat down and met with, to establish our corporation and provide guidelines for maintaining it. It cost us less than $1000.

IMO, the bottom line with litigation is that it comes down to who has a bigger war chest. A weak corporate structure doesn't appear to be the shot that will sink our ship. Being unable to sustain the fight is the top threat.

When the personal lawsuit hit the door, the first thing I did was investigate bankruptcy. It is possible to discharge debt resulting from a judgement, but it depends on your circumstances. I definitely lack the depth of understanding required to explain it fully, but the gist of it is that receiving a discharge for a judgement isn't always as straight forward as something like credit card debt. Anyone engaged in a business with non-trivial risk of legal exposure should understand the implications before dismissing the benefits of having a corporation.
Ask HN : PAAS - Vendor list are where to begin?
Please give some insight on :
Platform as a service : Which are the best in business vendors and where to begin.
>"DON'T launch with paypal unless you have all the documentation sorted out"

That is the problem. It appears to be impossible to know in advance whether your documentation is sorted out.

Even if PayPal had a 'how to not get locked out and look like a shady operator' HOWTO somewhere on their site the situation would be more acceptable but right now it seems people have to live their life with the (vain?) hope that their capricious payment-processing overlord will continue to smile upon them.
Let me consult my list of companies which would benefit from WebM: Google

Don't pretend for one second this is actually about "open standards".
That's a pretty self serving statement (from Gregg Blatt.) On the one hand, it doesn't look good for the future of OKCupid in its current state (I've never used it, but I love the data they publish and the general look/feel.) On the other hand, I guess it opens up some amount of opportunity for a decent ad-supported player in the online dating space if OKCupid goes the way of Match.com.
Instagram Raises $7 Million, Hits 1.75M Members
Possible, but not probable. H.264 has been researched extensively prior to it being broadly used. Compare that with WebM, which was not vetted in the same way H.264 was.
That sounds like an argument for free and open formats in general more than an argument for strict obedience to the W3C, but I see your point.

At the time those Korean sites were built, I'm guessing there was no spec nor open alternative to do what they were trying to do.
I'm imagining OkCupid/Groupon instead.

Cheap dates?
A Deepness In The Sky
Test or Regret
But Reflector was free for years until Red Gate took it on. And since then, Red Gate haven't done a lot with it to justify the cost: apart from the Visual Studio addin, the basic functionality is the same.
Draggables - Exchange contacts/events/resumes between sites using Drag & Drop
Getting started is 100% free. It seem's like it's the actual talking to other people that you have to pay for. If not bait-and-switch, these weasel words are certainly misleading.

I can only imagine what the bounce rate is when you put the payment details after the signup for a nerfed account. You can't do much until you upload a photo of yourself and by then they have already gotten something from you: the appearance of activity and photos they can dangle in front of other users. What do they call that again… bait for the lobster trap?

http://www.woome.com/woome/privacy/

Use of Information Obtained by WooMe

When you register with WooMe, you create your own profile and privacy settings. Your profile information, as well as your name, email and photo, are displayed to people in the networks specified in your privacy settings to enable you to connect with people on WooMe.

...

Profile information is used by WooMe primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings.

You know, it is certainly possible that those messages are all either spam accounts or real people trying to make the money they paid worthwhile by meeting someone. Then again, pyramid schemes are perpetuated by real people trying hard to make their investment worth it too.
Interest on national debt: 'Skyrocketing' costs ahead
> The devil you know versus the devil you don't.

You don't know the H.264 devil any better. It's just as likely that some lone patent wolf will come forward and go after H.264. It's simply FUD to say that WebM is somehow more susceptible. Just because MPEG-LA makes you pay for their set of patents doesn't mean they're protecting you against patents they don't hold.
Sounds like you could easily transition into a number of roles... maybe project management, maybe business analyst, maybe even product management, or just general engineering management. Or if you really like the business side of things, but want something with a technical flavor, study up on business process improvement stuff and set yourself up as a consultant in that space. Or you could focus on software process, IT management, etc. and do something there.

I'm not necessarily advocating any of this buzzword stuff in the general sense, but... if firms in your part of the world are using CMMI, or Six Sigma or ITIL or any sort of formal methodology for managment / process improvement, you could probably make bank by specializing in one of those areas. If Agile methods are popular, you could become an Agile consultant.

Or you could become a lean startup pirate ninja rockstar and specialize in helping startups iterate. [1]

[1]: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2011/01/lean-startup-ju...
Hack and Tell (http://www.meetup.com/hack-and-tell/) is a popular one that a coworker of mine runs.
Microsoft's behavior comes across as sleazy to me, which no doubt is Google's intention. I respect mathematical advancements and clever algorithmic solutions to search which Google has always been impressive with. The method Microsoft is using with their toolbar just comes across as lame and uninteresting.
What may be misleading about Google's statement is that it paints the picture of engineers hunched over laptops patiently typing in nonsense queries a keystroke at a time.

I guess I just have trouble seeing it taking more than about 3 minutes before 20 of the top industry engineers figured out a way to automate the process. Which is pretty long compared to the 2 seconds it would take for them to start thinking of ways to improve the SEO.

It's the human factor in Google's "experiment" that just doesn't fit. If they wanted a controlled approach, they would have written an application and run it and logged everything. Instead, it appears that they provided laptops so that the engineers could experiment and innovate their way to exploiting the Bing toolbar.
Nokia touchscreen creates texture illusion [video]
Good point. We have multiple distribution centers too; so I get the same thing. But of course here they are all 24 hours away. :)

facepalm it should probably have occured to me :)
Yes, we get free 2-day shipping with Prime, or $4/item for 1-day shipping.

It's pretty rare that I opt for the 1-day, but when I do, it's awesome. The other day, I ordered something at 3pm and got it 9:30am the next day.
Herb Kelleher, the Complete Interview (Co-founder of Southwest Airlines)
Why AOL's content strategy is the future of online media
History of PayPal

The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com. Confinity was initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. X.com was founded as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999. Both companies were located on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Confinity's website was initially focused on reconciling beamed payments from Palm Pilots with email payments as a feature and X.com's website initially featured financial services with email payments as a feature.

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#History
My best record was the first time I ever signed up to Prime; ordered something 10pm at night.. and it came 9:30am the next day!
It’s no easy task; don't expect anyone to listen to you about your new free online dating site because no one will. No one will read your emails and no one will reply. Your biggest visitors will be people that want to scam or steal your members away to other dating sites or 419 deals

There are several new hot free online dating sites started every year, mine is still running but after stopping my advertising campaigns it has languished.

If you’re still interested in doing a free online dating site then more power to you and I hope you have better luck than I did.
On errors in the "abortion lowers crime" study
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/11/im-shocked-shocked-to-see...
overview of freakonomics 2 and how it shouldn't have been surprising that the errors were numerous and more obvious than in the original, due to the authors being less familiar with the topics in addition to selection bias
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009...

Detailed discussion of blatant, blatant errors on their article refuting climate change. Makes you wonder if they knew their contrarian position was weak, and still put it in the book for controversy and the headlines it brings.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/12/superfreakonomics-erro...