skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...and so how are they going to buy the next version of the operation system in a years time?

Like every Windows user does: bundled with a new computer.

You are not Microsoft's client. Dell, HP, IBM, Acer are their clients. Your purchases are rounding errors.
The Future of Barnes & Noble
So the companies acquired by Yahoo created the best software? Even from the technical point of view the majority is an average project and an average team, I really don't see why someone acquired is different from the rest of the owner company.
This type of concept is common in our geeky nature.

A tablet does not need HDMI. The average user would never use it. If you are waiting for HDMI for a tablet...you are doing it wrong. Get a 100$ apple TV thats always plugged into your computer and control it with your iPad as an amazing touchscreen remote.
Slapping down newbies takes on a lot of forms, too. This entire submission and the accompanying threads comprise a giant screw-you to relative newbies like myself.

I don't kid myself that I'm the kind of person that always remains civil in discussions, because I'm passionate about what I believe in. I know I'm hit-or-miss here, and often the way I communicate my point of view dilutes it and comes across as being a dick. I get that, and I've learned a lot about how to communicate with others from HN and other Web sites. If I'm the problem, though, which this submission and other comments seem to want me to believe, then I'm wondering what the solution is. Agree all the time? The burden is on me to improve, not the community to avoid me.

Every time I see a navelgazing submission like this I'm yanked right out of the community and I'm instead thinking about the community instead of the topics that I come to Hacker News to read and discuss.

What people don't seem to understand about community sites such as this one is that if you are discussing the community ad infinitum, you've already lost. A bunch of high-karma users, and one commenter in particular reminding us that "on behalf of the elites, this site sucks now due to you," is exactly the kind of thread that is contributing to the problem.

If the high-karma users here really want a walled, invitation-only garden where a circlejerk of valley gossip takes place and everybody agrees with each other, this is a pretty good way to go about it. It's really disappointing, to be honest.
This is a gamechanger if your transaction price is lower than $5.45 (EDIT: the tipping point where the 2.75% accounts for a larger portion of the fees than the $0.15). The further above this price you go, the more negligible the $0.15 savings per transaction becomes (compared to having a lower % of the total transaction).

For eg. I sell a service (in the offline world) at $50 and avg about 9-10 sales per day. With the removal of the transaction fee, I would save about $1.50 per day. With a lower % of the total transaction, say 1.75%, I'd save about $7 a day.

What about an option for business owners to pay a transaction fee but get charged a lower % of the total transaction?
I'm surprised that Netflix is still so tightly coupled to AWS, since companies the size of Netflix can actually reap the economies of scale of running their own infrastructure (AWS makes most sense for smaller operations). However, I wouldn't be worried about AMZ sabotaging Netflix's service; it would do massive and irreparable harm to AWS from a competitive and legal standpoint.
IPad versus MacBook Air: Which is right for you?
> I have been using Penultimate (notebook-like app where you can scribble with a stylus) to lay out nearly all of my ideas.

What do you use as a stylus? I've tried Penultimate but using my fingers is extremely clumsy.
What features Win7 has that OSX lacks? Why the switch back?
Building an Army of Entrepreneurs
That Erlamg screenshot is hilarious. Only one story on the front page didn't have Erlang in the title, why HN had been slow...was it due to the amount of Erlang submissions?
A couple of real quick and dirty thoughts:

A) Meatier comments/debates require a certain level of trust that the debate is about ideas and not about pecking order. That is enormously hard to achieve in most settings. It gets harder when the community grows. A smaller group is much more able to know each other and all that.

B) My best understanding is that formality is what older cultures with larger populations moved towards as a solution for such problems. I know I find some stuff at work endlessly annoying because of the disconnect between the setting and the social behaviors/assumptions. My mom is European and my dad was career military and my ex husband was career military. Europe and the American military are both more formal cultures than the American Deep South where I grew up (and live currently). I find some of the assumptions of more 'casual' cultures to be very uncouth.

I don't know how to raise the bar on formality for a place like HN but my best guess is that would help with this particular issue. I like a good, healthy debate. I rarely engage in it because most "debates" are really fights (ie they are "arguments" in the other sense of the word -- emotional, social, ugly), not intellectual discussions.

Anyway thanks for tossing me a clue. That does help me think about the issue, unlike most of what I read in these discussions.
"in Javascript" is right. Apparently it's not self-hosting Smalltalk.
It's all about the "deal." Some people in business (esp. management/marketing types) just love making deals. It doesn't matter whether the deal makes sense or even works out in the long run. They just want to put the pieces together to make the deal and say "I did that."
I wonder how different the website lifecycle is from the cycle of nightlife hotspots.
What happens to bit.ly if Libya shuts off the Internet - Feb. 21, 2011
Use Python to Manage Enterprise Deployments with Fabric
So long as you have the personal bandwidth, you will almost certainly be a better editor than any algorithm you can come up with.

Thanks for the link, by the way.
I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit.

Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.
I think that if you stay at any online community long enough, you begin to perceive a drop in quality - even if that drop does not exist.

IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information.

On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.
If you're 26 years old, investing in t-bills is a horrible idea. Show me a 40 year period where t-bills have outperformed the stock market.

OP, she definitely put in as much as money as her employer will match. If there's more leftover, put in another 5k into an IRA (at her salary and considering she's already investing in a 401k, probably a roth ira is a better idea).

Put it almost all in a low cost index fund (either one that tracks the S&p 500 or something like vanguard's total stock market fund). If you want you can stick a little in bonds or international stocks although neither are necessary.
To put it slightly crudely, he thought GitHub was in the business of making a pretty UI on top of git repos, not designing Serious Technology that nobody sees.
Apple comes to mind, app-wise.
Is Lindy popular among the startup crowd?
If you look at the classic page he references (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic), the articles are nearly identical, with slightly different ordering. That seems to suggest the problem is smaller than he indicates.
The site's getting a lot of traffic right now, but reports should work. I'd try again..
The point was if you want to help a large number of people with their statistical problems, the basics should be really simple (like dropbox).
I've found the opposite to be true: Managers and Business Users LOVE the re-write, because it's easy to tell themselves the calming little lies.

Lies like "We already know what it should do!" and "We don't need to maintain the legacy, your issue will be fixed in the New System" and "There won't need to be any changes to business processes!"

I have never seen a re-write done with a greater understanding of the problem. In every case I've observed, the non-developer stakeholders start insisting on features working exactly as before OR start adding new, wonderful features from the get go. It results in a mess that solves NOTHING.

The debt metaphor is very apt. You can declare bankruptcy on your technical debt and walk away... But your tech credit history (IE your business systems) are a mess, your creditors (users) start to hate and mistrust you, and starting anything fresh becomes complicated beyond belief.

Re-writes suck. They SUUUUUCK. And people persist in doing them. That's why we keep needing these articles.
If they are still running XP and IE6, I suspect some other problem exists, like a very critical program that was done in, say, Webclasses or plain ASP/VBScript, that breaks under IE7 and nobody dares to touch it for it will collapse.
Ah, it worked this time. Nice!

I especially like the 'try it and then sign up afterwards' aspect.
You should read "Barbarians at the Gates" if you haven't already. It's a fascinating read about the takeover of RJR Nabisco and gives a good insight into how large corporations can act in schizophrenic ways.
Really?! Too heavy?

The 'Retina' display would definitely be a huge leap forward but can they make the screens iPad size for a reasonable cost yet? From what I understood that wasn't possible.

Camera is a no-brainer addition. Facetime/Skype video on an ipad would be amazing. I am starting to offload tasks from my computer to my iPad and this is another I would like to do. I already Skype on the iPad while working on my computer.

There is a charm to having trivial tasks, anything well suited to the app world, on a separate device than your computer. Somewhat like an extra monitor...but even more detached.
oh haha, I thought you are the author of the article. nm. :)
That was a really long time ago, at the beginning of the dot-com craze. On the contrary, in the last 5 years, YHOO share prices have declined about 50%.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#chart2:s...
The Day the Movies Died
I think your math is a bit off... How did you come up with $5.45?
Play with different scenarios - for smaller merchants with low tickets (<$15) Square can make a lot of sense:
http://feefighters.com/square-calculator
I was thinking in terms of communities.
Myegy
myegy
I've actually thought about this for some time now. Simply enough take email, is there a reason someone wouldn't pay $100/yr for a product of Gmail's quality sans all the ads and scooping?

For FB it seems tougher for me. I generally use FB now as a place to share articles and a giant address book. I use Dropbox for all of my pictures (on the 50GB plan), because I found that sharing all of pics wasn't that beneficial.

Do most people even care about their privacy? Seems like lots of people would sell their soul, so to speak, for less than $100.
There was a great article about the decline in the quality of movies in GQ recently. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day...
I "self identify as female". But I can't find a link to your site. You can email me from one of the sites in my profile...though be forewarned that I tend to be a statistical outlier no matter what the topic, so I have no idea how representative I can be of the secret stash of female knowledge you seek.
I agree. This is not a valid turing test, which was the purpose of the original project.
New T, L, and W series ThinkPads from Lenovo announced
Why can't you explain it?

Is it because your post is a bunch of poorly conceived bullshit? Is it because you don't really give any time to consider the intent of what's being said and the social context of the terms employed? Is it cause you're looking to be offended?

If you can't provide some analysis of the origins of thoughts and feelings which are presumably your own, maybe you should keep them to yourself till you can.
I run a slang dictionary website which lets users assign an offensiveness score to each term. That would be an interesting bit of data to add: not only the raw word count, but how offensive the swearing is for each language.

(For sample data, the 100 most vulgar words on the site are in a table here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/lists/most-vulgar-words/ )
A business is looking to hire someone because they believe hiring that person will bring them a return on their investment. Therefore, an online job board is helping the company make money. Therefore, the company should pay for that service. You always have to pay for something in time or money. If you are not paying in money, you will have to pay more in time (ala filtering spam/irrelevant replies from Craigslist).

BTW, your posting is a little contradictory. In bold you write, "Nonetheless, you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life" but then state "We don't care what hours you work."
I've been using http://www.webpagetest.org which is pretty well known in WPO circles. It's not as "pretty" as your site, but offers more features like recording video, Dynatrace recordings, firstview vs 2ndview, etc.
Case in point: here's a thread from 2 years ago where we all talked about atheism. Civilly.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236808

You couldn't get anywhere near that today. Discussing tough and interesting subjects civilly with some of the smartest people I know wasn't what brought me to hn (startups were), but it was a big factor in keeping me here. I knew if I posted some crazy half-assed startup idea that might piss people off that the community could talk about it logically and dispassionately. That allowed each of us to open up more.

Those days are gone.
The points system has been gamed. There's some organized down voting for critiquing some big players (MSFT,APPL). There's clear fanboyism that gets inexplicably upvoted. It's mutated from "slightly cynical hacker" to "astro turf public relations".
That is an interesting thought.. I've never looked at it from that angle, but formality is certainly a buffer against "pecking order" fights. Then again, as much as I'm happy in a less casual setting, I wouldn't go so far as addressing fellow HN posters as "Sir" or "Ma'am" :) (But maybe I should...)

It's also interesting that in the last 6 months or so I ran across a couple of sites that take your HN karma as a predictor of your geek-worthiness. Well-intentioned, I'm sure, but it encourages gaming the system. HN karma now is not only something valuable to the HN community, but outside.

It would be very interesting to see if kuro5hin/slashdot/reddit "decline" periods correlate with wider acceptance of their karma metric.
FFI and Ruby 1.9.2 |
Information routes itself around the path of least resistance. In this case, it is spam filters. Once spam filters get smart enough, then GoodMail loses its utility or pricing premium.
Gated communities are effective means of preserving the identity of communities, they all employ some bar of entry whether racial, religious, ageist, or economical.There are many social maladies that are also unique to the gated community, the insularity often breeds all sorts of creepiness. Preservation all to often morphs to Stagnation.

Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.

I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.

The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.

When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.

When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.

It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.

More people, more heat, Entropy.
Pretty simple... and no bugs yet.
Nice. Name is great.
Simple and useful
Based on the title I expected a discussion on features being designed without any concept of customer's need (feature bloat), rather than companies intentionally crippling systems for market segmentation or to be anti-competitive.

There are multiple cures for these issues, open source software is one of them, but basically it comes down to customers demanding something different and then using it. Open source efforts could be looked at as a competing entity that is competing on features and price (free) but lacking other things.
They were a joke? I thought finally people were interested in something cool. :(
It's true they are going to maybe someday sell this thing. Right now I think it's just a prototype.
Very nice.

Better than tools.pingdom.com in that it loads all the javascript and code form the site.

Next features that would make it very useful to me are (in order):

- Display timings on the timeline (in Chromium I can't see them, maybe display them on click or hover)

- Recurring checks (of course this is your core. You are already working on this I imagine)

- Different locations in the world (including being able to slice up my reporting based on the location)

- Custom alerts on specific urls (url X cannot take more than Y seconds to load inside my page, beyond more classic ones like total page load time and such)

- Hot cache-Cold cache

- In case of alert also generate a tcptraceroute and compare it to one that is collected every X minutes.

- Ability to set the host header separately (so I can use the IP address in the site url and the host for a specific virtualhost, this is useful when a site is geographically distributed and you just want to cut out the DNS lookup).

Also have a look at many of your potential competitors like Gomez.
"one kid seems to love the Speedo man"
Very nice, the suggestions seem more useful than some of the other tools I've seen. Is it possible to combine this with an SEO checker, spellcheck, and browser incompatibility check?

PS: running slowcop on slowcop.com yields a few areas of improvement ;-)
Google Renews Battle Over Facebook Contacts, Blocks Phone Dir Sync On Nexus S
Interestingly, all of them purchased by Amazon.
Case in point - this article.
You seriously weigh up how much the earn out is really worth to you.
Leaker Reveals ‘Mystery’ Nintendo 3DS Augmented-Reality Games
You're right; Amazon wouldn't damage their rep as a cloud provider by playing dirty tricks, even without the threat of legal action.

To your first point, Amazon knows as much about running massive scale systems as anybody. I think Netflix would have a hard time capturing those economies of scale.

The fact that Amazon's VOD works on Linux, is the most personally compelling feature. I don't know how many other people are interested, but that's enough for me to look closely at it.
Everything that can go wrong with Windows Phone 7 update does
Rumors Of Apple Rumors Now Leading To Rumors Of Counter-Rumors
While that was probably tongue-in-cheek and meant to be humorous, Walt Mossberg is one of the more respected tech reviewers and is pretty clear on his ethics policy, which you can read here.

http://allthingsd.com/about/walt-mossberg/
Regardless of whether you get acquired or not, if you build a company that won't persist without your individual presence, the process is still incomplete. (And what you really have is a vehicle for your individual talent.) Any company that's supposed to last more than a few years must be build so that it can handle key people leaving, because that's what people always do in the long term, one way or the other.
Try http://ibisreader.com. It's a web app but has offline mode.
Google Pushes Gingerbread To Nexus One, Improves NFC Support On Nexus S
Efactor: is your goal to earn as much disgust as possible from your target market? Or do you really think that registering a slew of new accounts in a day and having them shill for your product is going to go unnoticed?
"... I think HN does a crappy job with general tech news and a so-so job with content that’s specifically relevant to startup founders and employees. These days, HN does a downright terrible job with deeply technical topics; that’s the area I hear the most complaining about on Twitter and in private. Since deep tech is HN’s weakest point, let’s go after it. ..."

The weakness of the argument is that the engineer/developer/programmer view is a subset of the interests hackers, founders and entrepreneurs. I draw a clear distinction between tech guns for hire who only want depth as opposed to those who want to solve technical problems and maybe innovate which requires both depth & breadth.
He wants an ISO that packs in SP1.
No Kno (Not Now, Not Ever)
But the interesting issue here is that those who write interesting commentary may not be good at discerning good quality. (according to whatever standard we're holding)
I don't know that formal culture necessarily has that much to do with using titles (though that can be a part of it). I think it just doesn't assume familiarity. Informal cultures assume a degree of familiarity which you logically can't achieve with your 80K closest friends and I think that is one of the roots of evil here, so to speak. I read a story once about a young American man who had an affair with a British woman and then ran into trouble because when he met her in public, she was offended that he behaved in a familiar fashion merely because they had slept together. Her view: "We've never been formally introduced."

That may make no sense to many people here. I can't think of a better example though right now. Formality gives people a certain degree of social space that a "small town" mentality (for lack of a better phrase) fails to provide. That space reduces friction enormously.
Depends what you're looking for. Industry information is covered by the NAICS. http://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/
Since that's put out by the govt, it should be recognized as accurate by anyone you're working with.

If it's a smaller industry or industry subset, I'd recommend doing a Fermi estimate of the industry size: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fermi_problem

You can also do this by looking at a company in the market and estimate up from there. You can often find press releases from companies that say things like 'we've captured 35% of x market'- then if you compare that to their sales you can quickly figure out the size of the market. Alternatively, add up the sales of the biggest companies in the market and assume that they account for a set % of the total, and figure it out that way.
Ask HN:Kindle Popularity and the affect of physical books
Has anybody else noticed the cost difference between physical books and kindle books on Amazon seems to have shrunk significantly?

As an example, Guy Kawasaki's book
Enchangement is more expensive as an e-book than a physical book.
http://www.amazon.com/Enchantment-Changing-Hearts-Minds-Actions/dp/1591843790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298425537&sr=1-1

Was this inevitable??
Do you think we will likely continue to see an increase in the price of e-books?
Nice, looks like the Facebook widget takes the longest to load on my site :)
How are you going to test LAMP on Windows 7? L stands for Linux.