skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least one of those screenshots is going to pull some heart strings for people who played games way back when.

I became a PC gamer at the tail end of DOS gaming, when Command & Conquer was only available on DOS and Dark Forces was released to mild acclaim. That shot of Dark Forces brings me back…
A Challenge to Startup Lawyers
I'm using this right now and I still really don't get it. As far as I can tell, this does the exact opposite of a social app: instead of bringing together people with similar interests or relationships (like Instagram, for all its faults), it exposes me to people who I have nothing in common with except happening to be in the same neighborhood. I mean, am I right? Can that possibly be the point? There is a 'group' composed of myself and three other people I've never met, all of whom presumably live or work nearby—and then another 'group' that's not apparently any different, except I haven't joined it yet. I'll admit that some of my confusion is due to the completely opaque interface.

EDIT: Ok, RTFA seems to indicate that these groups are fluid and intended to form themselves according to whom you hang out with most often, so presumably if I keep taking pictures then it will figure out who my friends are. That's a neat idea, but unfortunately still moves against my instagram-a-like point above: if we should have learned one thing about how people make friends in the year 2011, it's that physical proximity doesn't really enter in to it.
I pressed the green button at the end and nothing happened! Where do I send the check? Don't want to be left out!
On my droid x it often is rebooted when I try and send mail with the gmail client.
I was also really bothered that the script failed to handle filenames that may contain spaces correctly.
True, but I just gave it a new acronym :)

Edit: I'd like to clarify that the business model I'm suggesting feels different somehow. Yes people have built companies to flip before, but their valuation was still based on what they do as a company.

If what I am suggesting is true, Color's valuation is based on potential shares in the company that it's being flipped to. These VCs are essentially investing in Facebook, pre-IPO (set for 2012) without going through Goldman's special purpose vehicle, and without dealing with the SEC's 500 shareholder regulations.

If true, that would make this Color investment a very clever hack.
There are major differences:

1. System will be open to external parties (customers and partners) - you can invite people per Topic (see my comment above)

2. Form factor - Facebook layout is not efficient - we are looking at something like much better looking HN

3. Karma and competence profile - we will by (just like HN) building your competence profile counting karma points and average karma per submission. We will also find out which topics you are best at.

This will be a system that is built to retain & share knowledge and experience. We are not building social collaboration (like Yammer).

Social collaboration (quote similar to Chatter but works better) is our other product - you can check http://www.discoursehq.com :)
ifconfig is on the PATH by default for FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and OpenSolaris... to me it was always rather irritating that wasn't the case in Linux when I needed to find out the IP address of a machine.

I really don't understand why there is a need to throw out a perfectly good tool to replace it with something that is completely different and requires re-learning, and re-writing of scripts that are already using ifconfig.
Same boat here. Evernote was great for moving between devices but the limitations of the plain text note format way a pain to a list maker like me. When WorkFlowy started supporting iPad an iPhone through the web, I switched and never looked back.
I'm going to make a Convore thingy for it.
Also: binary decision diagrams (BDDs), Prolog's difference lists, and the persistent variants of common data structures. I like skip lists, too, though they seem to be fairly well-known among programmers who don't just naively use linked lists and generic hash tables for everything.
Geohot Takes Donations to Flee the Country and Skip His Sony Court Battle
This sounds a lot better than those n-tier scalable e-business solutions they were hawking a decade ago.
> if you don't know about anything outside of hacking.. chances are some neck-beard somewhere has already solved all of the problems of which you are aware.

I'm saving that quote for later use.
So, at first everyone criticizes these guys for being on the wrong side of the chicken-egg problem, then everyone says they raised too much money and are being too ostentatious.

Seems like they're attacking the chicken-egg problem in the easiest way, to me, the domain name and big dollar shine on everything make them look more credible and established. And they have enough runway to focus on product for the first few years while growing the userbase without having to monetize immediately.

Could still flop a million ways, of course. It just seems like going all-in could actually be a viable way to attack emerging social networky markets.
Is giving away a 'community edition' of software and selling an enterprise licensed one repeatable to other types of software, or is it a unique case where Linux became The other server operating system, and they were both lucky and skilled enough to become the number one provider of linux.

There are a lot of other companies doing this, or something very much like it. Some of them have been around for a while, but I don't know any details of how profitable they are (or aren't).

I do know I'm taking a stab at doing this model myself, so I'll let ya know how it works out in a couple of years. :-)
A guru is someone who tells others what to do, having long since achieved all his own goals. Who'd want those in a startup?
> ifconfig is deprecated

Deprecated by whom? Is there any source on this? Nothing is mentioned in the man page, and googling for it turns up a wikipedia article with a [citation needed], a reddit discussion from today linking to wikipedia, and this discussion.
Links to the other four parts:

Part One: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-google-tests-s...

Part Two: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google-tests-s...

Part Three: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google-tests-s...

Part Four: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-google-tests-s...
Anytime. Hahaha for the MVP, I'll take 50% if you want it from scratch or 30% if we can use your existing codebase! No, really, I think there could be potential there. Best of Luck. Nice Site BTW. JB
Ask HN: Is the "topcolor" setting new?
Just noticed it in my settings. Is it a new feature? Or something you "unlock"?
Old timers will have a much better idea of what is popular and broadly interesting plus they will know the best times to submit the news.

Personally, as a new user to the site, a fair few of my submissions have done reasonably well .. so I don't think there is any preference going on.
Free-food finder: A student's best friend
I'm not so sure. According to Forrester, the average American will use 187 different photo sharing services by 2016. It seems like this could be a good chance to get in on the ground floor.
And what is wrong with

ifconfig eth0 up|down?

Why would I want to type more to accomplish the same task?

This is the same reason as to why I hated that Linux decided to have an ifconfig for physical interfaces, an iwconfig for wireless interfaces. It seems redundant...
Google has Dutch Sandwich for breaktax^H^H^Hfast
Thanks!

I really wish IDEs and editors adapted a portable format for code highlighting themes. It would make things much easier. (For example, I have a very nice scheme for Eclipse, and would like to use it on my laptop in Kate as well, or in gEdit... Or use the same syntax scheme to highlight text on my blog... too bad they all have wildly different formats)
It's something you get access to once you have enough karma.
I now get the joke with 'forever'.
Personally, I only pay attention to who posted it when I suspect they may be a spammer.
Argh. The article makes one little nod to CUDA, and then doesn't mention the compute capability. Sigh.
It sounds really interesting, but if we have to move for a job my wife would rather move somewhere warmer than the northeast, not colder!

Do keep in mind a lot of the boards are US-centric, which might also change the response rates.
Ah. I have a warm fuzzy feeling now. Time to cut out of work early and get a beer.
Man, my head is in the wrong place, I keep seeing "IED" when someone writes "IDE"....
when you opened up twitter.com, you could actually understand what was happening

with this android app? not really. very non intuitive icons and buggy as hell.

lets see what happens in the next iterations
Why would it be great if you never had to see another Eliza?

-Eliza
The hero worship of folks associated/intrinsic to a previous success has a shakey foundation. A good number of successes were at the right place, at the right time. The details of who was manning the ship were, ok not irrelevant, but not meaningfully correlated with the magnitude of the previous win. Sure they were competent managers, which is required of any company to succeed. But they were not Responsible for the success.

So its a little like sympathetic magic - if we get guys who were close to that other success, maybe some of the halo is still stuck to them and voila! investment rationalization.

Some of us have seen dozens of sure-fire new companies, staffed with experienced professionals, fall on their faces. Younger, perhaps naieve investors still have some lessons to learn.

Admittedly, the article pointed to 6 indicators of a bubble which are probably not quite right; then defended only 1 of them, and waved their hands about the others. That is what I found a little offensive, but to my logical sensibility and not as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to weather a lot more than link-bait, and need to grow a much thicker skin.
A Tale of Two Financings (Recounting two raises)
IMO, 99.9% of the time you don't need the more obscure data structures. And I speak from experience working in companies on software requiring high performance (runs taking 6 hours to two days are not uncommon).

That said, I was disappointed nobody had added the corner stitched data structure - I found that to be a very intriguing idea (and in my world, it turned out to be very useful).
Helps greatly. Thanks for the info.
I dunno... I barely even notice the "who" element when I upvote something. I upvote purely based on how interesting the link is.

I do think there may be an element of "preferential attachment"[1] going on in regards to how upvotes get distributed, but I can't prove it.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
What do you mean? Just because it's in the standards doesn't mean they are treated as the same address, does it?

I don't see anywhere that myaddress@email.com and myaddress#this@email.com must send to the same mailbox. I only see that an address must "[contain] a locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character."

Of course, this means that you can use - or ~ or # in your address but they don't have to be treated (and probably aren't) treated as the same address by most email systems.
There are a couple of exchanges like this that make me suspect that the jabberwacky author specifically included canned responses to answer splotchy's canned responses -- so it's not quite a fair fight.

In particular, splotchy makes a number of "conversational skills" comments and for most of them jabberwacky comes back with a zinger.
I wouldn't say never, but I do agree that scratching your own itch is a great way to go. If nothing else, for happiness.
I'm thinking getting in bed with the government is not out of the realm of possibility.
Ok, fair enough. If the idea is to just state what you believe without further discussion, go nuts.

However, if we're discussing it (and the fact that comments exist for this poll leads me to believe that we are) I would ask if you care whether what you believe is actually true. If so, it's not rude of me to ask you to demonstrate that. If not, that's an indicator for me to run away.
Mae Sai and Chiang Rai were the closest towns to the event. The report that buildings swayed in Bangkok is almost certainly false, Bangkok is 800km from the epicenter. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake...

Searching for mentions on twitter this is the only report that I have found so far:

RT @Thai_Talk: Someone in Mae Sai said quake so strong that she felt nausea. One house collapsed. Power intermittent.
"And, yet, there's a long list of well-documented sexism-related incidents in open source, including sexual assault at the most recent ApacheCon: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_in....

If there is a long list, please produce it. One incident is just that, one incident. Are there sexist developers in OS? Very likely. That doesn't imply that they are a majority, or so dominant that it is impossible to find OS projects without sexism.

You can find events to prove anything. There was even an Open Source murderer (I suppose, not sure how the Reiser murder mystery was resolved), yet not all OS developers are murderers.

You can also find lots of events where men were discriminated, or whatever. It is irrelevant, because in OS you are free to pick your projects, nobody forces you to put up with abuse.

(I only read half of your last post before I got bored - ever considered that you might be too self-absorbed? People retweeting your musings does not prove their merit, either. remember, 3% of Twitter is just Justin Bieber).

If you are so interested in psychology, maybe you should study some more. There has to be a reason why this subject bothers you so much - maybe the same reason people retweet your stuff. But it might not be what you think it is. Think about it: you clam you can not even detect sexism, yet you feel you have to accuse everybody of being sexist. What is driving you (except a trollish desire for retweets)?
Color Me Fascinated: A Photo Social Network for the Here and Now
Thanks. Zynga are the exception rather than the rule. I don't expect my app to go viral like Farmville (but I wouldn't mind if it did!).

I've already been all through FB's dev website, but wanted to get some feedback from real users.

Thanks again for the input.
My gosh... that's a lot of content and I really don't feel like slogging through it all right now. Bookmark and move on!
For real! These guys are masters of the universe. Obviously they couldn't massively overvaluate something.
Ah, they have Dark Forces on the downloads page. I just played through the first level, and memories came flooding back.
Rumors of Firefox’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Some science-based quotations
187 different photo sharing services?! I think that's a gross over estimation... I bet I'll use closer to 10-20 by 2016.
Dibs on the color #80881E
The fed's version is the PCE/PI, which is the most general measure of inflation that is theoretically possible. You might have that confused with the CPI, which is a different index, the one you usually see in the news.

Finance is pretty easy to understand, relatively speaking, but the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high. The average finance news site tends to be a wretched hive of investment advice nuts and unreliable emotional opinionators.
That's a great example. I just replaced it as the example in the Top 10 List on the front of betterthangrep.com. Thanks.
Found a video of the hacked billboard here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1263729266 (skip to 1:20, NSFW obviously)
There is also a huge (multi-Billion dollar) "industry" for corporate level software that is under serviced in many areas (i.e. the software is churned out by large development houses and is below par).

Yet very few startups seem to target these areas.

We took a product into a badly serviced industry and were wildly profitable within about a year on minimal funding. I always worry that there is a growing amount of speculation on "great teams"/social media and less focus on creating useful stuff that companies/people want/need (and, damn, there is a lot of it).

My boss always moans when I talk to him about startups and VC's, he usually says "if you give me $100,000 and 6 months I could come out with at least 5 profitable pieces of software and sales to return your investment by the end of the next year".
neck beard, that's awesome and so very true.
I believe Silicon Valley Bank does debt financing rather than equity financing. On top of that, I believe all 7 co-founders are worth over $1M each and several are worth multiple $M with multiple startup exits over the last 10 years.
But only if it's open source, portable and scalable.
I think we can expect even Facebook to start using the word "think". That would be hilarious.
Exactly. And the point of standards like OStatus (and it's component specs) is that we don't all have to be using (or contributing to) the same software... instead we can build a myriad of apps that work together.
You had me at Mr. Belding. Where do I send my money?!
German physicist pleas for rationality about nuclear power
Selling software to large corporations however requires significant support effort and bending over backwards to make the sale. I seem to recall an article about hunting elephant versus deer that covered the issues quite well.

Dealing with just the development side of it in my day job, no way does dealing with them on my own or in a small startup team appeal.
MYTH
http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=6481
The one thing in their favour (potentially) is network effects.

If they can get everyone using their software before someone else comes along then the collaborative nature of it gives them a significant advantage in that there are more people you can collaborate with.

But even that isn't a particularly strong lock in when the apps are free or cheap and available near instantly anywhere you have a data signal. Someone using a different app? Just go grab it - it's not like convincing all your friends to leave Facebook to go somewhere else.
Why would anyone believe that number? It sounds insane.
Actually, speculation should drive up prices, which will encourage people to move to v6 faster...
I think the key is to build a network of Twitter followers or other near-real-time friends, and get them to upvote your submission. Being too obvious about it will get you flagged by news.arc and HN users, though.
SteveBlank - $5 million for idea = bubble,$5 million for scale = LEAN.Prescient?
The link on the final slide is a paypal link.
>If your mind could exist as a machine than I could print out schematics with every switch/gate/electron position set so your mind could be rebuilt elsewhere.

Yep, I think this is the case.
I don't think this investment is bullshit at all, and here's why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363943
Interesting, useless experiment. It was invalid from the start. He went in 'knowing' that standing for long periods 'made' him sleep better. That may or may not be true. It is anecdotal. Not only that, but he may have drawn the same conclusion that standing on one leg also worked and that doing 4 sets was best, etc. I'm not saying that standing's effect on sleep doesn't warrant proper exploration. I am saying that the placebo effect cannot be ruled out with this guy's work.
It depends which industry you pick - but often the problems are over-hyped. It's true; I had the same trepidation you talk about when first having to face doing sales... and at the start it can be a disaster ;) but you can soon pick up the tips & tricks needed to sell to corporates.

In fact; as hackers we are actually at an advantage selling to corporates, so long as you "get" the process, because they tend to be "attuned" to the sort of tactics employed by sales types. Often you can cut through that using feigned ignorance and a little simple social engineering :)

And at the end of the day... once you have a little traction hiring a dedicated sales guy is easy :) Many startups do exactly that when completing the first major round.
Others have answered the question and there are a few. However, if Paul Graham is looking to inflate the stats ala Campbell's Law... I'm actually a white African-American. ;)
Hello, my name is Ms. Connie Jones . I am from SILICON VALLEY . I have recently inherited a social program from deceased prime minister of SILICON VALLEY with valuation of USD 100,000,000,000 . Contact my barrister to arrange transfer of USD 41,000,000 to secure ownership
Effective Developer Experience (DX)
Interesting article by Jeremiah Cohick about how platform product developers can facilitate better user experience (UX) outcomes on their platforms by crafting better developer experiences (DX) for engineers building apps on their platforms.
"Sorry, we are unable to retrieve the document for viewing or you don't have permission to view the document."
I felt the lack of kick-ass features. In fact, I vehemently felt that.
Guys, caution, this looks like some kind of fraud.

Regards, a prince from Nigeria
On the absence of qualifications, licensing and certification for programmers--I think it doesnt exist because its not yet an effective indicator.

People who can pass the tests can easily add no value (or negative value) to a project

People who've never bothered with the tests can quickly build great things, rescue projects, and fix the bad code/designs/patterns of test-passers.

If certifications/licensing/qualifications becomes and indicator of value in the future, I'm sure it will be adopted in the market then.
I wonder the same about colour.com which they also own.
FileUtils is a step back as far as I'm concerned. In fact, all the file-stuff is both ill-documented and anti-ruby-readability.
Why not? They used a pretty solid methodology, I'm sure. http://xkcd.com/605/
But will it leverage my team's core synergies and bring a critical competitive advantage to take us to the next level?
I'm going to look it up on Cuil.
Will “The Wire” Creator Make VCs Look Bad In HBO’s “Treme”?
Er, I think it's a joke. Did I miss the point?
Favorite part: Praise Bob!
I'm sure they take bitcoins.
If it's worth doing, you will be caught and tortured. "Extraordinary Rendition."

The worth of the phone is to prevent you from turning into someone who ought to worry in the first place.

Bugging room / furniture / clothes / windows is expensive.

The NSA is known to use voice recognition and keyword search. It is no longer necessary to already be a target in order to be extensively and intelligently eavesdropped on.
This is a great point. To condense what you said a bit: the dot-com bubble followed the democratization of stock trading (which itself got a technological assist from the internet). Lots of people, myself included, who never bought a stock start using online trading accounts. The housing bubble followed the democratization of home buying. Lots of people who never had bought a house before (or a second or third house) start buying houses.

The question I've been asking for a while now: what's the next great financial innovation that's going to revolutionize access to some market to which average people don't currently have easy access?

I want to be on the upside of the bubble.
A Story We Need To See In U.S. Media
High P/E ratio to be checked for a tech bubble...
Normal industry P/E's ratio are between 15-30 in tech but we then to see even larger P/E not in big firms but on mid-cap and small cap firm can top up to 400 and rank on average around 100. Ex: JDSU, BIDU and OPEN. These are major signs of overvalued stocks especially with billion dollar company
Why Profit Matters
DEAR SIR/MADAM,

There is nothing conspicuous about this.