skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That information about fixed time usage is interesting. But even with that aside, doesn't everyone know that fraction of a second decreases in load time is important for high volume sites?

For example, MySpace was getting at one point 24 billion page views per month. If you could reduce each page view by 1/100th of a second you save 40 weeks per month for your users (assuming the model where they look at a fixed number of pages).

In the Facebook model, if you assume a page comes up in half a second, this delay results in a 2% decrease in page views -- which is a pretty huge deal when your business model indirectly revolves around page views.

I guess my point is that even for people who come from a background where page load didn't matter. it would take 30s to point out it does, and I don't think you'd get any pushback.
Shane's conclusions regarding public policy run counter to most of what I have read. He says:

"We need to reduce the incentives for marginal entrepreneurs to start businesses by reducing the...tax benefits that encourage more and more people to start businesses. Because the average existing new firm is more productive than the average new firm, we would be better off economically if we eliminated policies that encourage people to start businesses instead of taking jobs working for others."

One of his premises from earlier in the book is that most startups in which barriers to entry are low are colossal wastes of time. This may be valid but it does not follow that GDP would improve if we made companies even harder to start.

Notes from the book: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17455578/hn/illusions-notes.html
You can experience this first hand if you have ever played or hacked with Kinect.
'Color' is a trademark of Color Labs Inc.
This is the last one about Color. Just couldn't hold my tongue because this is funny.
Look at the bottom of their home page (http://www.color.com) and you'll see that "'Color' is a trademark of Color Labs Inc.". Oh my...
According to Princeton University's WordNet, something is trademarked when it's "labeled with proprietary (and legally registered) identification guaranteeing exclusive use". So beware -- you can't use the word "color" anymore.
I thought nothing would get worse than Facebook going after everyone with a face or a book in their brand/website names. But here it is, folks :)
Stackoverflow uses .Net stack and scales just fine, using less hardware as well.
No, the fact that myspace looks ghetto killed it.
NS Basic: Develop apps for iOS and Android on Windows
You're giving your personal reasons to stay on Facebook and I'm sure many people stay on for similar reasons.

I think, however, that those who do not use it are well aware of the potential advantages of Facebook. The point is that to them, the well-known disadvantages, which you didn't mention, decisively outweigh the advantages.
I'm not blaming anyone currently alive, but it's definitely sad that millions of people, along with their cultures, were wiped out wholesale by rapacious or at best careless invaders. I don't think that's a controversial sentiment.
OAuth 2.0 for Google APIs (contact, calendar and docs)
Don't they take a 50% cut for every coupon sold? I am sure they have other spending for salaries, offices, servers, etc.. but these things probably don't scale up (too much) with revenue, so I would think that revenue growth would be a really good indicator of profit.
I like that idea of doing a video, but instead of showing what are the different features of the application, show the problems this solves.
Thank you!
This example really illustrates the point.
I will try this! thanks!
I tried to only use names that were commonly known infrastructure components at Google, so I don't think this is really an issue.

I've searched for each of the internal projects (i.e. "google blobstore") and if there were no reasonable results, I've removed the references. All the others should be well known, so I've left them.
I remember PG saying something like "Every time a big company institutes a procedure to prevent something from ever happening again, they should consider the cost of that procedure to future development." I wish Google would take that to heart. I think that the executives do understand this, but many of the middle managers are too concerned with doing their job well to think about the negative impact that has on other people's jobs.

Actually, what I wish more companies did was have annual "feature killing" and "procedure killing" parties, where you reevaluate everything the company does, and if its cost is greater than its benefit, get rid of it. So "we'll institute a procedure so this never happens again" becomes "we'll try to institute a procedure so this doesn't happen again in the next year, see what its impact is on productivity, and if it saves more than it costs, we keep it."
I haven't used Safari in a long time, but it used to have non-O'Reilly books. I'm sure some of those publishers aren't as willing to go without DRM.
Instead of settling for one or the other, you could write some jQuery that interacts with the forms using some predefined dialogue. Maybe have a half-dozen of these scripts made that rotate when the script runs out or the user reloads. Possibly add some humor in these scripts? just to get the user to watch the show a bit longer. When the user clicks in the chat, maybe relinquish control from the javascript to the human so they can test drive it.

FWIW, I think it's neat. But for some reason, my brain acted like a deer in the headlights when I saw the two chat boxes side by side like that.
It's this "let's hack together" mentality that seems to be lacking in Southern California, where so many schools & companies still insist on cubicles. Time to take the train up to SF...
How I wasted two years on Twitter, all because I wasn’t tracking
like you said its a way to connect with family and friends.. Your assumptions about privacy differ from mine. I do want to share with family and friends but not the entire world, thats why my pictures and posts are hidden from everyone except them.

One thing you have to realize, is that everything in the public is on the internet forever, all it takes is one mistake or slip of judgment to ruin something for you. People have lost jobs, or been rejected because of their lack of though into what is shared. Also do you really want people to judge you by the snippets of thoughts from Facebook. Its not only personal relationships but professional ones that are judging you. This is why I'm more private on Facebook rather than being shy.
Clickable: http://bit.ly/caqoMT
Thanks for the insider account, nice to hear in a sea of speculation and rumor.

One thing though, what do you mean when you say Facebook was 'Socratic to the core'? I'm only aware of that in context of the Socratic Method of teaching, but am not clear what it means here.
Why mobile is way bigger than you realize
This is a great news because OAuth 2.0 is much easier for developers to implement.
Documentation can be found at :
http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth2.html
I grew up reading Asimov's robot stories and knew I wanted to work on artificial intelligence growing up. I realized when I got to college that computer vision was the closest thing to what I had always thought AI research would be like. (So I did a PhD in computer vision.)

On a related note, David Lowe, of SIFT fame, once related to me a story about when Isaac Asimov visited his research lab in the early 1980s and when they explained to him that computer vision was about enabling robots to see the world, Asimov shrugged and said he never realized that was even a problem -- he just assumed robots would be able to see.
Capitalizing on the Cricket World Cup Fever
I'm wondering if any entrepreneurial activity is going around capitalizing on the Cricket (not the one that chirps!) fever around the world.
It's interesting to see how little coverage is provided here, given the highly passionate following world-wide. Thoughts?
This submission would be better suited as a comment in one of the (many) Color threads, or submitted separately as a blog post.

If this post ends up [dead] it's probably for that reason, and not part of some conspiracy on Color's part.
It's not so much that certain programmers don't think that page load speed matters; it's that the culture around the platform doesn't encourage speed.

You're conditioned to not care anymore, because ASP.NET Web Forms makes it so damn hard to achieve responsive web apps, and building responsive web apps almost universally means breaking away from the standard ASP.NET Web Forms style of development. You have to abandon pretty much everything that makes the platform convenient in order to get good performance.
Mozilla admits to mishandling Comodo disclosure
I'm curious: if most of these companies go on to raise rounds by going through the proper channels, why bother focusing on the pitch and not just the demo? It seems to me that if these companies still have to pitch to individual investors anyway, why not use the current iteration of Demo Day as their "Elevator Pitch" deck to investors, and use Demo Day as a real day of demonstrations, the "sneak preview" of things to come to wet the mouths of investors before they hear the real pitch?
Reliability? Scalability? Apparently if your lappy goes down, so does your site, and if your site ever makes the front page of HN your ISP will probably cut the figurative cord to your house.

Unless the purpose of your site is to show pics to grandma or host a tiny blog, this doesn't look like it would end well. And if that's all you're doing, there's a million easier, more reliable ways to do it than have your own web server.
I see what you mean about how it makes it more interesting. It's good that you put some thought into it though...my first impression was that you just went with it just cuz
Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers [pdf]
European Parliamentarians participate in Document Freedom Day
It got solved by moving off of RoR...
Just create the form with JavaScript. 100% no spam.
I don't completely agree with you, however the fact that various gaudy, non-crossbrowser page themes could be added by third-parties was part of what drove me away. Towards the end of my time on MySpace I would make sure to disabled styles and flash in the browser to make it bearable.
I don't know if I agree with the notion that the service model itself (or at least it's pricing model) isn't viable....

People ARE using services like these (see UptimeRobot and Pingdom as the examples mentioned above). Some of the services are free, some cost $10 a month, some $40.

That said, MY implementation may not be viable, but it's not costing me much of anything to find out, so I'm still going to give it a go.

As to what the service offers, there is obviously more that needs to be done for critical infrastructure monitoring, but for the average Joe running a website or three, keeping an eye on the web server is a good, basic start.

I'm also thinking of people like affiliate marketers (which I'm also attempting to get into) that use their servers to host landing pages and ads (and their tracking) for which they may get charged without a result if the server is down. THESE guys just want to know immediately, I should think, that they may be losing a lot of money with no chance of ROI.

In any case, I certainly appreciate your feedback!

- John
Intermittent WiFi issues with iPad 2
Yup, that's me. Great hearing from you Yan. I left NYC for SF for YC last summer :)
Whether there is a fundamental difference between the two is still an open question.
I believe social sites are completely fickle, and at this time FB is whats in right now. People will eventually migrate to something else regardless. Social sites and internet in general are like snapshots of life. How many of us can go back and see our MySpace profile and say Oh my god, or look at our friendster page and say cool thats how my life was then. 5 years from now after Facebook goes public, we'll be saying .. the same.
It got solved is the important thing. From everything I've heard about MySpace, technology was not the real issues but rather management, development pratices, etc.
Stereomood: Music With Emotion
Thanks. FWIW, we do own optimize.ly but we have it set up with bitly Pro. This makes it easy for us to do short URLs (see: http://twitter.com/optimizely). Unfortunately it costs $995 per month to do the root domain redirect (see: http://bit.ly/pro/products). Hard to justify the cost considering how many delicious burritos per month this could buy.
CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers
Yes, sad in that for a large group of people, myself included, the first thing I think of when I hear the word Apache or Cherokee is not two tribes of Native Americans who lived in North America for thousands of years with a complicated culture and language but instead two webservers that have been in existence for less than twenty years.

I can't help worrying that we geeks may have unwittingly removed a last piece of their national identity by hijacking and replacing the meaning of their name... and (in the case of the Apaches)relegating them to 6th place in a Google search for their own term.
Startup *School*
Facebook hasn't always been a good performing site. I remember up until recently if you clicked on the "Info" tab on a person's page you'd get a loading gif for 10-15 seconds.

Hearing a blogger that has no idea what he's talking about make such generalizations as 1) There are no good c# developers and 2) There are no good developers outside the bay area shouldn't bother me but it does.
Similar question, north SF Bay Area (Sonoma, Marin). I got a BS in CS last year and all of the entry-level jobs require 3+ years experience. Even the fast-food jobs require prior experience, no joke. I am currently back in school to refresh my IT skills, but I will be in the job market again in two months so I may as well start looking now. Is anyone in my area hiring inexperienced developers?
85% Tech Founder, 15% Business Person. It's not the idea, it's the execution.
Confirmed - http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4005:9gkoc...
The way you said it originally made it sound more like they simply don't think it matters. I think what you really mean is what you said here. They are newbies when dealing with high volume sites where page load time is critical.

IMO, that's a very different statement. One is a difference in experience with a domain, the other is ideological.
Sure, this doesn't replace traditional hosting unless you are really big on the privacy thing and want all your data on your own hardware.

But it's pretty useful if you are designing websites or writing web-related software and want to be able to show off your work to a colleague or client, without having to go through the hassle of deploying it to some remote server.
Just a few things (I'm the author).

First: I'm kind of blown away that anyone's reading this and thinking about it at all -- including those of you who disagree. Thank you all. Second: I don't want anyone to think that I believe the iPad is more powerful than a regular computer. Several people have said that I think that, and I don't. I know I couldn't survive on just my iPad. But what I am saying is that the iPad is kind of like computer training wheels. For a lot of normal people, it makes it possible for them to explore without worrying. That doesn't mean in any way, shape, or form that all computers should be like that. I don't think so. That would be terrible. We need open computers, but there is a place for that and a place for closed ones, and I think most people do better with a closed one.

Finally, I am well aware what the Android folks mean by "openness", and I am deliberately redefining the term. Call it "relative openness" if you care that much. Openness comes at a cost, and unfortunately, it doesn't scale. Have any of you ever watched someone use an Android device? They don't get them. They find them confusing and difficult. They make people hate their electronics because they aren't worth using, and that's no way to push things forward.

I would never want to live in a country made and run like iOS, but a country is not the same thing as an electronic device used to communicate with others and the same principles cannot be applied.
Hard, difficult, or merely overcomplicated?
Joined. Then left because of web literalists.

Now have a band (read: marketing) profile.
Coz you mentioned elegant sync programming. I think the async CTP for C# solves this problem of nested callbacks.

Take a look here

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Anders-Hejlsberg-Intr...
It is likely that their tracking systems are working just fine from their perspective. The customer is paying for all of the bytes that go back and forth from malicious port scans, ping sweeps, and the like. This might not show up on your gee-whiz windows app that tracks your pc's usage and its possible that this may not even show up on the south side of your cabls/dsl router but you can bet that your DSLAM/Cable head-end is measuring every byte, rejected or otherwise.

Over the course of a month, this can mean significant data transferred that you never see as "traffic".
I suspect it's because we in SoCal prefer actually getting work done instead of being trendy and being seen hanging out with other trendy people doing trendy things.

Although I do exclude certain portions of LA and Hollywood from this description.
For the "No and I plan to stay off" group, I wonder how many were on and left, versus those who never were on at all? (I'm in the "never were on at all" group.)
Plenty of Fish served 2m pageviews / hour with one server.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/aspnet-and-iis-...
Ruling: Apple did not violate Nokia patents
Having interviewed at several 3-person companies - the good ones have everyone in the company interview the candidate, then everyone reports back to the CEO and a single "no hire" nixes the candidate. That obviously won't scale to Google's size, nor should it. In an early-stage startup, it's crucial that everyone be able to work well with everyone else. In a 25,000 person company, not so much.
I agree with the debt reason. I personally want to make sure that if the ship goes down, I'm not stuck with inescapable student loans. Live cheaply, pay off your debts...then you have nothing holding you down from doing what you want!
I do think that a .com is better than a .ly because we've grown sick of "cute" domain names, but we've (at least I've) mostly grown sick of non .com's because they often tack on top-level domains to create nonsensical English words (see: my HN username, chosen for lack of creativity). The strange thing about Optimizely is that they've gone for one of these nonsensical, top-level-domain-inspired English words, but not the domain associated with it; to me, it seems like the worst of both worlds (note: I don't personally care that much; I think the site and product looks great, it was just an interesting point I noticed). More importantly, I honestly think people would hear about Optimizely, and then get frustrated or confused when optimize.ly redirects to bit.ly (though I guess people who aren't then willing to do a quick google search might not be their target audience).
It's articles like this that make me wish desktop browsers supported phone-style multitouch zoom.

Tiny type, off-center, in a fixed column that takes up 1/4 of my browser window... ugh.
I am in the same boat as you, here is a reddit discussion from a similar NodeJS post: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g9zbg/building_...
There is no single answer to this question - it's totally dependant on the relative value of your contributions to the company's success. Where is the secret sauce going to be?

If you're building a mass-market offering (eg. facebook or SAAS), then they are worth a lot. New crypto product? New search engine....time to pony up.

If you are in a space where sales and marketing is more important than technology (eg. a groupon clone or anything where you're reselling an existing framework), then I'd retain the lion's share of the equity. You aren't going to win on technology.

Are you putting capital into the deal or raising a large chunk of capital to get started? Are they drawing a salary of some sort? I'm not giving 50% of the equity away to an employee or someone who I'm otherwise supporting.

Finally, while this is usually a bad idea, what are the alternatives to adding a tech co-founder? Can you outsource? Use consulting help?

While the latter is usually an express route to total stupidity (most startups with outsourced development quickly become comical), if you could truly run the operation without a dedicated in-house tech person, I'd retain a larger share of the pie.

Finally - I disagree that "business is easy for smart people" - a good business person can add a lot of value to the team, particularly if you're targeting large companies. Many entrepreneurs make significant mistakes in their deals and delivery process that put their company at risk - a good business guy should be able to reduce those risks and accelerate the pace of execution.

And no..I'm not a MBA...I straddle the two camps (business guy who can code and codes a lot).
Into_Now iPhone App Review
Harnig Botnet Scuttled after Rustock Botnet Takedown
When Crowdsourced Data Meets Nuclear Power
My AI lecturer remarked that AI was a great term for hard problems, and that once a field or area was effectively solved or developed, it no longer got called AI.
I would say that while there are indeed a number of approaches to various problems, viewing AI as a series of only vaguely connected problems is a mistake. A true AI needs a new way of looking at things as they all relate to the system as a whole.
Certainly. The most important thing in the first stage of any business is selling (a.k.a. getting customers or users) and figuring out the most effective way to do so. Not design, not logos, not getting funding, not adding features, and not even refining and perfecting what you already have. There's no point in polishing a turd or putting it in a fancy suit if you can't figure out how to get any traction for the basic version.
The irony: #22 on this list, which just made HN a few days ago:

http://searchengineland.com/25-things-i-hate-about-google-re...

The reason he puts it as "LOVE" is directly because products aren't allowed to launch unless they can prove they have sufficient capacity. And AFAIK the policy was put in place because of a few high profile failures where a popular service launched and then keeled over from high demand.

I don't necessarily think it's the right trade-off, but it's important to note that it is a trade-off, and other people absolutely love the effects of something that I find rather annoying as an engineer.
That's the AI Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Just a vote of confidence: I've been using flux for more than a year, and it rocks. Light is critical to sleep cycles and angle and temperature of light is part of that. Flux takes care of temperature for you.

And more than one person has thought they were hallucinating when they saw my screen change temperature, timed to the sunset outside. Extra bonus awesomeness.
there is a site that has all these cool interesting stats on iOS. I don't have it handy. I will post it later.
Yea but so this means they don't want to leave (because of their friends). Or they are not sure yet.

'Yes and I want to stay' of course does not mean that you don't know a single reason to leave. It means exactly what you are saying: That the pro-arguments outweigh the counter-arguments.
> And they did it with crusty old PHP

PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology.

PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to be some of the worst (though I have no experience with either, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about).