skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a big billboard here in KC for the Kauffman Foundation's Education Startup Funding program. I thought "heck, that would be awesome, to be backed by the Kauffman Foundation!". Then I looked into it, you pretty much have to live in the ghetto to be involved in the program. Well, my wife wasn't too keen on moving to the ghetto, so I guess I'll try somewhere else.
Great idea, Sandeep!

Curious: what are you using for the email notifications? I'd love to have a discussion with you about that.
Maybe it will cause last.FM to shut down, or maybe if last.FM pulls out of the iTunes store, it will fuel iOS competition with Android. Or maybe it will fuel mobile browser app development. I like how the market will decide how this all plays out.
Tell HN: Why I'm ecstatic at Apple's subscription model.
The AppStore is not an easy-money kind of environment. It rewards hard work and quality, and consequently we've been able to do relatively well there. But as it has evolved it has become clear that low app costs are a permanent fixture.

So, for the past several months I've been working on moving our bread and butter app from a "Pay us $3 and use it forever" to a SaaS model. We'll make the app free, and give people 3-4 months of cloud service to go with the app. (This cloud service is a genuine value add for the app, so we're shifting models by adding a fundamental new feature.)

Then for the ones that like our App and stick use it-- and we get about %20 retention with some really fanatical users now-- the cloud service is a $1 a month subscription.

So, instead of making $2 per customer, we'll be making $8.40 per year for customers retain.

Further, as a free app we'll get at least an order of magnitude more customers, which means likely 5 times as many long term users as we're getting now trying to collect Customer-Lifetime-Revenue before they've even had a chance to try our app.

This is a much better model for apps where it makes sense.

Why are so many people complaining? Generally, it seems those who are complaining are not making their own product. I can understand how reselling something another person has made means tough margins. (Which makes me wonder how these book publishers are doing on Amazon where they take %70 in many cases, and only go down to %30 if they let you set the pricing.)

I looked at the Amazon Android Store terms the other day. They are horrible. The wording is vague but it looks like Amazon will pay you between %20 and %70, and they get to set the price. Which means if Amazon wants to do a $1 sale on your app to promote their store, tough for you.

But I also think the publisher model is on the way out- at least on the app store.

If I make an iOS game, I don't need to find a publisher, I don't need to appease the publisher producer, or any of that crap. I've been down that road. The game industry is broken because of the power that publishers have. (Or it was broken when I left.)

I am very happy that all I have to do is just distribute on the AppStore. Apple takes %30, but handles distribution, updates, customer service, taking credit cards, does a decent cross sell and will send me good marketing if I happen to get featured. That's worth %30 to me.
I think Microsoft tried that with Office (2000 and more ?), they had adaptative menus. Apprently most of the users disliked this feature and it was eventually removed (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/03/31/565877.as...)
OK well there is obviously a lot of investment in tech right now. The key question is how is it being funded?

If it's being funded by savings then fine when you lose your savings but that's all.

If it's being funded by debt then that's really bad as banks start taking a hit and they're already basically insolvent.

I'm not terribly concerned about it but it's possible some investors will get burnt out again on the sector but they'll come back when new opportunities arise.
No it's not a bubble. Sure some companies are trading at absurd valuations: Facebook, Groupon but there is not this froth of worthless companies like there was in the .com boom. Airmailing dog food across the the country, indeed. One difference is that it is much more difficult to do an IPO these days (for better or worse). Another is that entrepreneurial experiments these days cost far less than 10 years ago, YC now, vs VC's then. The bubble this time around was financial with another due in 10-15 years.
Anti-competitive legislation doesn't just apply to pure monopolies. For example see the investigation into tech companies agreeing not to steal employees of each other, just because there are other companies out there that hire developers it doesn't mean such practices can't violate antitrust laws.

A more relavent example. Consider that you lived in a city where some service was provided my only a single provider (for example a bus service or cable internet service), even though you could move to another city to use alternative services, those operators are still considered to have a monopoly because moving houses is a high barrier to switching.

Similarly switching phones is a high barrier due to contracts and other purchases (apps, books, etc) causing you to be tied in.

In the NBC example, switching between stations has negligible cost. Many pieces of legislation have been introduced for the sole purpose of reducing switching cost (for example reverse engineering for compatibility legislation), because high switching cost can create localized monopolies.
How would you improve this tutorial?
You can create a notification email every time someone makes an edit, or every time x number of people make an edit.

I'm the Product Manager of PostageApp. We can help with that sort of thing. ;)
It'll be a neglible effect. The startup bubble will only hurt angels/VCs who continue to dump money into shitty/me2 companies, so they can collect their 10% management fees.

The real bubble is in commodities. All the extra $$$ the Fed is pumping into the US economy is leaking into the emerging markets, where banks can get a better ROI on their bets, instead of investing in US small businesses.

This asymmetry between the stagnant developed economies, and the bustling emerging markets may lead to global stagflation, from high inflation, and high unemployment.

The effects will be increasing political instability throughout North Africa/Middle East, that could enter Europe visa via her large North African diaspora.

Also, China may have to take greater action curbing its money supply, which could push the all resource-centric countries (Chile/Australia/Canada) into recession.

The solution is to incentivize big banks to give out more loans to small US business, which make up the bulk of US employment, instead of making abstracted bets on financial instruments.

The American financial system is broken, and with it American capitalism, because capital isn't reaching the most product parts of the economy. Rather, it's going to lucrative, short term bets, that may be unproductive for the economy in the LONG run.
Now multiply that 10 minutes by number of scripts, utilities, libraries and applications in the world that handle URLs, and you'll be somewhere close to the magnitude of effort required to work around these broken URLs.
You are definitely suffering from a lack of female perspective :-) Women are raised with different priorities and different habits of mind, different strengths and mental and emotional tools.
bubble.
The embedded and device software are always a year or two out of step with the rest of the economy so the rescission does not matter.

New 3D-TV's, faster broadband, IPTV, tablets, smart phones , home networks for all and cheap always on computing are changing tech and no-one knows how this is going to work out or settle down.

Lot's of people going to make money, more are going to guess wrong and get hurt.
Ask HN: I don't like Rails. Am I missing something?
I started working on a rails project for a TechStars team this week. It's my first time working with Rails. I haven't touched a CRUD app or a relational database for a while. Rails is full of conventions and tools that need to be rote learned. I realize that they're designed produce DRY codebases, and substantially reduce development time. I feel boxed in - the app is very unresponsive and at I'm writing essay-like queries. I miss node, redis and socket.io. Perhaps this is such a painful process because I'm a rails newb.
whats the deal with all the dashes in the content? made it nigh unreadable.
Google Search Going Fully Social With Shared Twitter Links And Quora Data
The problem there is that 2.4's exception statements and 3.0's have two different meanings.

2.4 only supports this:

try:
do stuff
except FooError, e:
do stuff with e

3.0 and up choke on this; they interpret it as "catch exceptions of type FooError or e and do not give the exception object a name".

2.5 through 2.7 interpret like 2.4 but also support explicit parentheses to do what Python 3 does:

try:
do stuff
except (FooError, BarError) as e:
do stuff
except (BazError, QuxError):
do other stuff

2to3 requires that you use the new exception syntax only, to avoid confusion.
Google Sums up Android vs. Apple Perfectly... with a Conveyor Belt
> Cosmetologists, real estate brokers, doctors and lawyers all need government certification. All this does is legally bar others from doing the same job, so existing workers can charge more and sponge off the rest of us.

Citation needed? I kind of like knowing the guy poking me with syringes is a trusted professional.
I was using the cable connection at work, and it just took quite a while for the map to load and then to be able to click on the markers.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard / Chrome if that helps.

I love the maps API and the idea, I just have trouble loading everything quickly.
Start my Start-up for a required internship
I'm a college student with a university education, in order to graduate we are required to do a co-op/internship. I want to spend my 4 to 6 weeks getting my start up off the ground. What sorts of things could I do to convince my program administrator to allow me to do this as an alternative?
Screw you buddy! Apple has a monopoly on Apple products and everybody but you knows it!

Apple should be prosecuted for their illegal monopoly over their own products. I hope they are punished just as much as Microsoft was for abusing their Windows monopoly. Now /that/ would be justice!
I don't see a "tech" bubble, just (maybe) a social media one.
Battlefield 3 Teased - 17 Февраля 2011 - Новости GKH11.RU.
Tell HN: All 3 days of Watson's jeopardy game on youtube
Day 1, part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLdkJpAtt1I

Day 1, part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXH7jn2AHAw

Day 2, part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhDLUVAtqU

Day 2, part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR2_M8kL_3o

Day 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8iUjzgPTg
The countries Facebook has left to conquer
I'm not sure that GAE is the ideal environment to run Django in - the whole reason it scales is because it enforces a certain way of doing things (nonrelational datastore, no long-running processes, no local storage).

General Django PaaS will probably be 'nicer' with the various less-restricted options that are springing up (be that mine, ep.io, or others, like djangy, gondor.io, apphosted, or the several others I forget), since those tend to lessen up on the "it must scale" aspect and focus more on making the 99% majority of sites (i.e. medium sized or smaller) work well.
People also love to narrowly define antitrust as legal action against the perpetuation of monopoly without knowing what else it includes.

You don't have to have a monopoly to have the DOJ investigate. All you have to do is engage in anticompetitive practices. Monopoly is only a potential result of these practices, which you can get an overview of here: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=3145
I would have to agree. If you consider what the average facebook user looks like social data will be little more than white noise, especially when you consider how easy it is to game.
Even if some of these name brand companies deserve these high valuations, there is enough stupid/speculative/me-too money that will follow and create a bubble.
I don't know what John Carmacks definition of 'restrained c++' is but this might interest you -
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/c++example/

"...a 25 page document outlining the most important aspects of C++ and steering you around those aspects of the language that would need to read an 800 page manual to understand."

Edit: Found this from John Carmack. Mostly c++ convention stuff.

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom3/source/CodeStyleConventions.doc
Faking dozens of personas online gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'we are legion'.

Scary indeed.
"Either way, when the chain ultimately ends, few, including Cuban, will feel terribly sorry for those left holding empty envelopes."

Except that lately it is usually the general public that is brought in, to help the investors no longer be the last in the chain. Maybe this will begin to happen with VC financing?

Along the lines of the quote I have read from several sources "when my barber and the shoe shine boy has a stock tip, it's time to get out."
The copyright claim always seemed to me to be an afterthought. I'll be much more interested in seeing what happens with the patent claims.
WPP chief on apps, mobile and social networks
Some industries move ahead of the broader economic cycle (housing is often used as an example - when time on market in the US exceeds 9 months on average, a recession will usually follow) and some lag behind that cycle or invert the cycle completely (liquidation lawyers, I'm looking at you).

'Tech' is fairly broad, and also (increasingly) linked to other industries. I'd hate to be selling enterprise software to property developers right now, but love to be a start-up connecting companies facing administration with experts to turn them around.

So is it common to have a tech boom (I'll get to bubble later) coming out of a recession, leading the way? Yes. Recessions force businesses and consumers to improve efficiencies. They are also times when large corporates 'trim the fat', which often leads to talented people being out of work. Talented people (starting their own business, or applying their talent to aforementioned efficiency demands) create opportunities and value - necessity is the mother of invention. I'm chasing sources now, but can point to businesses like HP and Cisco, and even those that came out of the 70s recession (MS and Apple) as having benefited from the recessionary mindset.

Does that means it's common to have a Bubble? Probably not. People are looking for efficiencies, but they don't necessarily have a lot of money to throw at the solutions - and a lot of money is what creates a bubble.

Does the rise of the VC over the past 15 years means that liquidity for investment during a recession now exists and we have a bubble? I think it's more likely that what we're seeing is a growth period, heading into a boom, and while some companies may prove to be over-priced it's not an industry bubble.
I'll be reading this for the rest of the day as it got burned on my retinas. Never use brilliant type on a black background.
Node.js ComboHandler: An Interview with Creator Ryan Grove
Quoting (possibly [1]) the great Winston Churchill, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

[1] http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
We will see. If I were a betting man, I would wager that Helicopter Ben will announce QE3 before June.
Tell HN: Why I'm ecstatic at Apple's subscription model.
The AppStore is not an easy-money kind of environment. It rewards hard work and quality, and consequently we've been able to do relatively well there. But as it has evolved it has become clear that low app prices are a permanent fixture.

So, for the past several months I've been working on moving our bread and butter app from a "Pay us $4 and use it forever" to a SaaS model. We'll make the app free, and give people 3-4 months of cloud service to go with the app. (This cloud service is a genuine value add for the app, so we're shifting models by adding a fundamental new feature. Anyone who doesn't want it will have the functionality they have now.)

Then for the ones that like our App and stick with it-- and we get about %20 retention with some really fanatical users now-- the cloud service is eventually a $1 a month subscription.

So, instead of making $3 per customer, we'll be making $8.40 per year for customers we retain.

Further, as a free app we'll get at least an order of magnitude more customers, which means if the retention rate drops by half we'll have 5 times as many long term users as we're getting now. Many people don't try our app because we're forced to collect the entire lifetime customer revenue before they even get a chance to use the app.

This is a much better model for apps where it makes sense.

Why are so many people complaining? Generally, it seems those who are complaining are not making their own product. I can understand how reselling something another person has made means tough margins. (Which makes me wonder how these book publishers are doing on Amazon where they take %70 in many cases, and only go down to %30 if they get to set the price.)

I looked at the Amazon Android Store terms the other day. They are similarly bad. The wording is vague but it looks like Amazon will pay you between %20 and %70, and they get to set the price. Which means if Amazon wants to do a $1 sale on your app to promote their store, tough for you.

But I also think the publisher model is on the way out- and I say good riddance! These are essentially middle-men and they don't make sense in the age of digital distribution, in most cases.

I used to work in the game industry for a studio with a deal with the largest independent games publisher in the country. If I make an iOS game, I don't need to find a publisher, I don't need to appease the publisher producer, or any of that crap. I've been down that road. The game industry is broken because of the power that publishers have. (Or it was broken when I left.)

I am very happy that all I have to do is just upload my product to Apple and they take care of the rest. Apple takes %30, but handles distribution, updates, customer service, taking credit cards, does a decent cross sell and will send me good marketing if I happen to get featured. That's worth %30 to me.

This is a new model for iOS apps, and it is great news for iOS developers.
DHS incorrectly associates 84,000 web sites with child pornography
Another thing to consider: A bad investment needs a lot less cash to do what it did back then with all the cheap space, bandwidth, and CDNs running around. You could fund 20 risky startups for what might have been a first round for a single risky .com in '99.
IE6 @ work here. No luck viewing this page. HA!

Looks great on my Droid though...
Either way government money flows to VC's doesn't it? How would this be any different than say a pension fund who receives government money and invests that in a VC fund? It seems like this would almost be an American sovereign wealth fund, sort of like Singapore and the Temasek Holdings company. It's better that the money go to startups and innovation rather than buying more sub-prime mortgage securities.
You might, but all the people using Facebook really don't. Especially the whole 13-33 contingent raised with the internet - the convenience of being able to keep in touch with your friends circle is worth more to them than their privacy.

If you think privacy concerns are going to hinder Facebook's profitability you're completely wrong.
Maybe these phones are an attempt to change the way people interact with their contacts. If it is executed properly it could be the pivot point.
They actually completely stopped development on IE between version 6 and 7. There was no IE dev team, beyond people patching bugs.

Obviously this did not prevent other people doing GPU-acceleration, but the leading player deliberately halting development will and did cause the market to stagnate.
Right, what I remember from Thermo II 20 yrs ago is that heat transfer in turbulent flow is higher than in laminar flow. Heat transfer is basically deltaT * someFactor, with someFactor depending on a ton of parameters. One of them is whether it's laminar or turbulent.
I agree that that's broken too. But this is not about uploading to the device. It's about uploading to the store and they said it's Free.

Also required were W9 documentation and taxation numbers.
Looks like some kind of javascript based justification routine. It kicks in shortly after page load.

I read the whole thing and didn't notice there was dashes till you pointed it out. Maybe it's broken on your system in some way? Or am I just more used to seeing these in print, for whatever reason, that I no longer even notice them.
Correct me if you disagree, but it sounds like there is a pretty healthy non-monopolistic ecosystem in the mobile market, doesn't it? It confuses me how people can equate Apple with a monopoly, when they clearly are not controlling the entire market (unless you reduce the market to "Apple App Store", which really doesn't make sense).
So many optimists on this board, talking about 'the pop won't be as devastating this time'.

This time:

- 30% of mortgages are underwater http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/09/real_estate/underwater_mortg...

- U6 rate for Jan 2011 is 16.10 percenthttp://www.congress.org/soapbox/alert/25908506

- labor force participation rate at 64.2%
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/labor-force-participations-...

- 43 Million Americans on food stamps http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/02/02/some-43-million-am...

In 2001:

- 66% labor force participation http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

- 8% for U6 unemployment http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

- 17 Million on food stamps http://www.dailyjobsupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/Food-Stamp...

Oh, and income stayed relatively the same, http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php while food prices doubled or tripled http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/wheat.html http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/chart-suga....

Pretty sure that once this pension/money printing funded tech bubble bursts, it will hurt even more this time.
Yes, but that scenario leads to customers going 'where's my app gone?', at which point a percentage of them put the App name into Google and guess what pops out...
Interesting. Put the theory in the head, where it's easier to work with. You can reason with it, make predictions, maybe even develop an intuition, integrating it with existing knowledge, find metaphors. You can't do that if it's in the interface; you have to manually try each one. Even though you could extract the rules, you don't need to.

It also makes your product stickier (harder to change products; a switching cost), if users have internalized the rules.

It also may make the product harder to adopt, initially. A nice combination would be to make it trivially easy to do some common tasks (adoptable), but require internalization to do tricky things (a rewarding path to mastery; proficiency with your product becomes a markable skill; people look up to you; you become one with the tool; the power enables you can get things done).

There are other aspects of ease-of-use that aren't related to {internal,/external}ization, such as consistency of interface. e.g. ls -r means reverse, not recurse. Even though having to learn arbitrary differences will make it stickier.
I'm curious, did you have specific demographics or criteria in mind when you chose your testers?
All the analysts were saying similar things in 2000... the field is misunderstood, there are great transformative forces at play, you needed to subscribe to our new theories about how things work to understand everything, etc., etc. These valuations are naive projections of future growth -- most likely these firms will reach constraints on future growth.