skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's absolutely nothing in the Techcrunch article that would suggest this company is doing anything so technologically complex that it can't be easily duplicated. They even admitted they have no concrete plan (or proof) they can monetize.
Ric, this is a really good introduction, thanks.
tl;dr:

A->B: "pickles is the new word for f-r-e-e s-p-e-e-c-h. free speech."

<forbidden word detected: free speech. call terminated>

B->A: "So, we were talking about pickles... "
Interesting that the sale was on 666 thousand addresses, while Nortel has afaik a whole /8, 16.7M addresses. Where's the rest of them?
These are all good points, and I think you will eventually be right. But choosing which interest rate forecast is reliable is almost as hard as making a reliable forecast in the first place. If your strategy depends on easy access to capital, then perhaps it isn't such a good strategy.

I also think this overlooks some real changes in the technology space. Mobile device prevalence is new, and the devices are still developing. We're still working out the implications of social media. The industry leaders in those spaces have controversial business models, and those controversies may yet lead to still more changes. And many incumbent industries are grappling with adaptation to these changes. There would be effort to make the most of these changes in any capital raising environment.
The question is what happens if/when inflation gets out of hand. Raising rates causes deflationary collapse, mass unemployment, and default on government debt. Keeping them low risks crippling inflation which could lead to social instability even in the US. What's a Fed Chairman to do?

Deflationary collapse is the only path back to a sustainable model, but it's extremely painful in the short term and so nearly unthinkable that a politician would choose it unless all but forced. Are you thinking things just won't get bad enough to bring the situation to a head?
Leaner Programmer Anarchy (video)
Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide
How The #*&% Did Color Raise A Crazy $41 Million For Its First Round?
Help solve...the annoying way that surprise popularity usually means losing more money (hosting fees) by surprise.

Google is going to create an updated version of Geocities?
Where do I flattr this?
There was also an interesting point about the curse of having too much money. With no pressure from a publisher or from outside investors to ship, they were relatively free to keep blowing deadlines.
relavent link to his point about domain names: wallgreens buys drugstore.com for 409M.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/walgreens-to-buy-drug...
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156
Funny, the same thing happened in Germany last year. The police claim not a single complaint was filed by people who saw it. (The store that owned the billboard did press charges though.)
Earthquake Hits Myanmar, 7.0 Magnitude
There isn't actually any burden on anybody to prove what they believe. Perhaps if the goal is to win an argument, yes. Probably indefensible to believe a non-physical basis, but then again you have to want to defend your belief, which is again not required.

So, no, I have no explaining to do.
I think the domain name argument is bunk. The domain market isn't 'hot' again by any means. In fact it hasn't recovered from peaking in 2007-2008.
Oh no! Now I'll have to play Maniac Mansion again! :-)
Domain squatters are to be blamed foremost for this. There are so many beautiful domain names with stupid ads on them as the landing page. Domain names should cost like at least a 100 bucks, wait, would even that stop them!?
I followed the link on the last slide. You have an opportunity to give $100 on Paypal for "Color.xxx Venture Funding Capital Investment for Equities." :-) I wish I could flattr this too. Gave my coworkers and I a good laugh this morning!
The case of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater can be handled similarly: Customers agree not to do that sort of thing as a condition of being allowed into the theater, and if they break that, then they are guilty of trespass.

Not that I disagree with your premise, but an issue with this is that people like to see punishment that fits the crime - I'd expect public outrage over a misdemeanor prosecution for an infraction that may result in loss of life.

As a matter of fact, I have seen many fire alarms in large buildings with a sign that says something like "$NNN fine for spurious triggering of this alarm".

Those fines are actually due to local ordinances. As such they are an example of government imposition on individual freedom in order to protect the public, and are a bit of a counter-example to your point.
Cool, that looks reasonable.
So flickr goes mobile, gets funding, is sold for some billions, then a decade later it is dumped for a handful of millions?

The lesson here is not to blame the idea guys, they will profit from it dearly. Or blame the initial and subsequent investors all the way up to the (ponzi) pyramid, they will profit too. Or even blame the guy who signed the deal when bigCorp bought them, he got his cut under the table too.

Blame the poor souls who own shares of bigCorp for not enforcing accountability in their C*Os spending money left and right chasing the next bubble.
You could do fairly accurate real time voice recognition in 2000 on a home PC. Accuracy was and is an issue, but you only need to tag interesting conversations / people not perfectly transcribe everything. Now finding the lowest cost per FLOP is complex but to be safe let's say 1k of computing can decode 10 phone calls or 100$ / call. Now the amount of time people spend on the phone varies a lot, but let's call it 5% of the time on average to be safe. Edit: each call uses 2 people. Thus somewhere around 1 billion people * .05 / 2 * 100$ = 2.5 billion you could buy the hardware to transcribe everyone's phone calls in china. As to hiding things you could keep the computers anywhere so it would be fairly easy to hide.

PS: I would assume you could probably do it for a lot less but these numbers where just to show it's possible. Doing something like this in the US for ~750 million is going to be vary tempting, but I think the manpower costs for false positives may be the real issue.
From Colo[u]r.com:

"Think fast!

Find someone. Take pictures together.
Party. Play date. Lunch?

Simultaneously use multiple iPhones and Androids to capture photos, videos, and conversations into a group album. There's no attaching, uploading, or friending to do.

Share together in a new, moving social network. Just look around."
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us...
This wasn't true at the time, and it is definitely not true today. You could get similar performance at comparable price (then), and much better price/performance ratio today -- you just have to buy reasonably cheap stuff, not IBMs or HPs.

It's possible that by going to Sony, the airforce was able to ditch the tender requirement (no one else is supplying PS3s ...) thus making it possible for them to get things going, rather than waiting for 2 years until all the paperwork is done (and then getting 2 year old technology, because that's what has been bid on and approved).
All well and good to decribe the process of "identifying" mental states. But we all know, being inside of a brain and thinking as we read this, that something other than behavior is involved with consciousness.
Don’t Ask Known Investors to Sign Non-Disclosures
From what I've read they can automatically reconstruct a space on the fly using the images captured.
How to get on the front of HackerNews in 2011 
* Make claims that we are or are not in a bubble

* Encourage someone to apply to yc under the false
pretense of being discouraging

* Tout your profitable weekend project without providing any quantifiable metrics

* Mention airbnb

* Mention Hipmunk

* Mention Quora

* Link to a random pseudoscience article with an
engaging infographic or video

* Write a blog that starts with "X ways to ..."

* Be zedshaw
This has raised a lot of discussion here in the NW about Cascadia fault line, which runs off the coast and causes an 8.0 or higher earthquake about every 250 years. It has been 311 years since the last one.
You could run it anywhere, it is just a sinatra/rack app.
This is the best thing in 2011 by far. I enjoy the fact that more people are seemingly calling bullshit on this industry, it kind of needs a dose of realism.
I guess it is a matter of terminology but I have to disagree on this one.

A bubble is all-pervasive and extreme. It represents a systematic investment mania where everything becomes surreal. People sell vast tracts of land for a prized tulip. Junk companies with nothing to offer but a vague concept about revolutionizing how this or that will be done owing to some new phenomenon such as the internet make serial stock offerings to the public and get hundreds of millions for a modest percent of their unproven company. Lenders pile on with countless real estate loans to unqualified borrowers secure in the belief that what are really worthless loans will make them huge profits because they can be packaged and disposed of through artificial securitized instruments and because housing prices will continue rise broadly for endless periods. All this begins to occur in endless and ever-expanding streams until, in the end, large numbers of people are sucked into the vortex.

In such cases, broad markets affecting an entire society are sent into a frenzy by which average people start both to get rich quick and to want to get rich quick. Large numbers of people leap in, therefore, in the hope of making fast money and abandon their common sense in the process. And when things go bust, this has a major systemic effect on the broader economy. A stock market that had reached stratospheric heights loses 70% of its value. A real estate market that had become so pricey as to make housing unaffordable for average buyers plummets to the depths, taking down people's savings en masse.

The current phenomenon represented by high valuations in parts of the startup world is more transient and limited. It has not affected the broader society at all, only an insular investment community. If it fell apart today in toto, it would leave a trail of victims within the VC and angel communities but would be felt scarcely at all in the broader economy, or at least would likely have no systemic impact.

Viewed from the standpoint of the broader society, I think what we are looking at here is a speculative frenzy affecting a comparatively narrow asset class. The prices of some startups have increased considerably. The prices of companies generally in the business world remain moderate, if not depressed. Is it a pricing frenzy within a particular segment of an asset class? Probably. Is it a bubble? No. Or at least not by historic definitions.

Again, I wouldn't disagree with a single specific point made in this piece, and the author as usual makes some astute observations. I would disagree about the terminology, though, and would say that we should reserve use of the term "bubble" for the sorts of massively dislocating events that it historically has come to represent.
I'm going to post this up on Path for my friend to see!
I feel even more confident about my 2011 prediction:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970634
More to the point, people lack any domain experience.

Don't get me wrong: it's cool to be an awesome hacker... but 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 don't see why not. It looks like a standard Rack application so you could follow any guide to deploying rack applications, for example using Passenger (http://www.modrails.com/documentation.html) or Unicorn and nginx (http://blog.tomkersten.com/2010/11/14/nginx-unicorn-rvm-serv...).
If you've set -o vi, then when you're editing a command line:

esc to get into command mode.

v (just the letter v) will open the current command line in a vi or vim session (depending on your default editor).

Now vim to your heart's content.

:wq will get you out of the vi/vim session, and execute whatever you did in your vi/vim session.
Good contradictive viewpoints. I think everyone has a good argument. @jonhendry made a strong case. Even I can agree that the quality (performance & display) for reading books on dedicated eReaders is much better than iPads'.

I guess I'm just looking at this from an investment standpoint. If iPad offers 50%=.5 of the eReader quality against Kindle, Nook, etc. then the iPad (for eReading) cost equates to (~$5001/65,000)(.5) = .038 cents.

... There is room to argue that nobody is going to download 65,000 apps (and memory won't even allow for it). But still, the cost/benefit is substantially in favor of an all-inclusive tablet.

*That is, if you like to use gadgets for multiple apps.
"I decided to confess because they'd caught me".

Reminds me of when I was studying in china. A Pakistani student was caught doing something mildly illegal (renting an apartment off-campus without the university's permission), and was caught by the police. They posted the story on every information board in the school. The final sentence was 'after interrogation by the police, he admitted to his fault and regretted doing it'.
> But why?

Jury nullification. US Juries can find in opposition to the facts, the evidence, the law, the judge's instructions, etc.

In short, if you put a case in front of a US jury, with a clearly documented violation of a clearly worded law, you may still find the jury returning a verdict of 'not guilty'. And that's just the way it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria
I also think that B2B is still underrepresented, and I am more interested in that.

It is, but there are a few of us around. I'm working on an enterprise software startup, focused on information retrieval and knowledge management. Pretty far removed from the typical HN "location aware, social photo-sharing with gamification" stuff, but I think it's actually more interesting. But that's just me...
Previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370847

Certainly worth re-thinking nonetheless.
In Singapore, a Failure to Fail
Criminal Minds Season 6 Episode 19 With Friends Like These
* Post a meta-thread
Mom-of-the-Year Gets 20 Years for Streaming Sexual Abuse of Toddler Daughter
Why these kind of people don't get life in prison, I'll never know.
Building to flip is hardly a new trend.
The Nancy Grace clip is especially infuriating. How can someone be so willfully ignorant?
The android client capable of taking pictures and communicating with the service? Yes (minus the graphics, I draw like a retarded goat).

The service behind? No, but I highly doubt they have been spending only a weekend on it.

In two months? Properly, though it assumes that there is nothing more to it than has been described so far.
You know we're in a bubble when everybody thinks that everybody else is a hacker ;)
I wonder if encouraging people to digitally record everyone around them will lead to legal troubles at some point? Back in the day when I shot film, I'd often get the subject to sign a model release. Society and technology have changed a lot, but if we're going to monetize something like Color, the people whose images appear may want some of that money.
Ha! The UI is so bad that you will spend the entire event trying to figure it out – missing the entire event. Then you HAVE to use Color to see what the hell happened.
Not location aware, less deals than a groupon. Lame.
I love how the backlash of this app racing through the web.

I'm not sure if this one bad investment is a horseman of the startups apocalypse but I think the valuation is definitely wayyyy off.

I still wish them the best but until this thing hits critical mass I don't see myself using it....

Maybe that was the plan all along.....Get alot of hype and backlash at a crappy app...get alot of users willing to try it since it sucks soo much...BAM...critical mass => the app now has value??
That's harsh... especially considering American jails are a picnic compared to what happens to you in a Russian jail.
Goofy thinking. Just because two things are demonstrably different instances of something, doesn't mean they can't be in all meaningful ways congruent.

The pitched-ball metaphor doesn't begin to touch memory, learning and association, which we use to compare ideas.
I can implement 2 in hardware by holding up 2 fingers. That doesn't make 2 a physical object.
Since that's legacy from IANA, maybe they can't transfer it? My officemate found a significant number of smaller allocations belonging to them.
Another good resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_history_of_Duke_Nuk...
Zed says we ARE in a Bubble, Cites Quora, Hipmunk, AirBnB, YC
Not really, just testing this theory:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364195
I've got one for vim users, its one of my favourites. I call it the "poor mans cscope" (btw, if you haven't learned about cscope + vim yet, you really should..)

The following vim command:

:cex system('find ./ -name "*.h" -exec grep -Hn some_string {} \;'

.. is a 'poor mans cscope' in vim. It will exec the system command specified, which builds a list of all locations in all header files from the cwd containing the text "some_string".

This list is then inserted into the quickfix list (the list of errors usually encountered by vim users when they type 'make' and get a list of compile errors), and can be navigated as such, using ":cl", ":cn", etc.

I absolutely love this quickfix hack .. it makes finding things in a large tree of code very easy. Try it!
It’s Not About Having the Right Partner. It’s About Being the Right Partner.
Clicky thingy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364195
all that could be said by a lot of startups. After the somewhat unexpected success of twitter, facebook and all that social crap, all investors are afraid of missing out on the next opportunity. Thus, artificially increasing the market and inflating the "bubble"
IPad2 will Available in 25 More Countries on Friday
You are connecting the two different instances by use of a third thing -- what is that third thing? That's the question... The way in which they connect is (in my thinking) a Form and Forms are immaterial.

.

This link[1] might aid discussion.

----

[1]: http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/platform.htm
They specifically allow it now, and I don't think this article has to do with 47/8. They probably cannot transfer 47/8. There are other, smaller allocations in ARIN WHOIS; my officemate rattled them off out loud but I couldn't add in my head fast enough. Dig through WHOIS, it probably adds up to 666k.
This isn't anti-Hacker News. I really love the site and read it every day and try to contribute as much as I can, but I find the dynamic of which posts get elevated very interesting. I assume HN favors long-time users who have posted a lot and as a relative newcomer here my stuff just languishes. I have so desperately wanted to do an experiment where two people, a long time user and a new user, post the same article and see which one bubbles to the top. In other words, I don't think we don't get the most interesting stuff on the front page; what we actually get is the stuff posted by the most highly rated users. Anyone have thoughts on this? (Again, not trying to be negative even if it sounds that way. It is just an observation.)
I couldn't find this info on the site, so how is this different from DosBox?
I'm surprised more people don't do this stuff. AFAIK, the only single-letter Unix command or widely installed program is 'w', the rest are up for grabs.
Quantum physics explanation for smell gains traction
I have money, may I invest a lot of it in your company?
Its hard to get a dose of realism when you live in California!
ISPs charge money for static IP. And now we see it's being bought and sold. Isn't that a shame?
I did this same thing about a year ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1521308) with jabberwacky. I wrapped the jabberwacky calls in a ruby script and got two bots talking together.

You can read more about it here: http://www.thepursuitofquality.com/post/1/the-pursuit-of-art...

Or if you're just interested in the code: https://github.com/gavingmiller/joan-wrapper

</shameless but relevant plug>
That Wired article is a great story and insight into perhaps the biggest pitfall of software development: over-perfection. I refer back to it from time to time as a stark reminder.
Pay attention and you'll see that the rich have been getting richer even with the recession.

They need investment opportunites and investing in real estate probably isn't popular. Hence angel funds have tons of money to throw around.
As Easy As Parenting, Part II: Non-Hostile, Non-Custodial Interviews
The team will consist of rockstars and gurus, but no ninjas and pirates? Yer going to be doomed to failure, arrrr!
Alright, which one of you keep sending ID software boxes of Bazooka Joe bubble gum?
Because of things like peak oil, growing resource demand from the developing world, etc., I think it's going to look like this for the immediate/foreseeable future:

Alternating cycles of inflationary bubble economies followed by deflationary collapse. Basically think 1995-2001 in .com or 2002-2008 in real estate, over and over again, forever. Inflation, deflation, inflation, deflation...

Beneath this alternating bubble-bust economy will be an underlying trend that I've heard called in-deflation: deflation in the value of everything you own, inflation in the value of everything you use.

Food, energy, and fuel in particular have nowhere to go but up for the reasons I mentioned at the top. Things like owning a car and driving it everyday are about to get orders of magnitude more expensive.

From a social point of view, the bubbles will serve a kind of bread-and-circuses role. Everyone will get to think they're going to get rich in the Next Hot Thing.
Create the new Skype for Mac chat style
To Hear What You Need, Stop Listening To Everything
Haiti One Year Later
That is some epic revenge there. Kudos to the victim!
My point wasn't that it isn't possible. I mean, who's gonna make that bet, especially on this website.

It was more that it would be impossible to do without it being flamboyantly obvious that you're doing it. I was referring to 'hiding' in terms of infosec as opposed to 'hiding' in terms of physically stashing away the boxes.

If they were doing it, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere along the line, as opposed to rumours originating from paranoid citizens.
>>> has left monetary policy so easy that if it were a woman the village would be talking. <<<

I like the comment, but that's just sexist and offensive on so many levels that I lost count.
I just Google Waved it!
It's not an argument, it's a fact of law.

There are certain activities that, by various state and local laws, require consent. Entering into a contract or getting married, for instance. A minor legally cannot consent to these things.

That doesn't extend to everything a child may do or be forced to do.
Having a different view is always welcome.
Having a different view due concerns not supported by the evidence, inequal standards and emotional arguments is not.

Nuclear is not a silver bullet.
Fossil fuel is not all bad.

You seem to be arguing against something other than what I wrote.
Dosbox was not self-contained [i.e. when you fire it up, you have to mount a directory and then run the game]. It looks like boxer makes the .app for you
i am guessing that it is a DosBox wrapper, to make management and running of games, both easier and prettier. :) No more mounting and all that crap.
Bubble Smubble. This bubble has a long ways to go before it pops. We're coming out of a recession! We have a few years left before we should be concerned.
What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...
“You should make it a portal”
StatusNet uses ostatus. So does rstat.us.