skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As you may or may not know, this is my 8th grade year.

Interestingly, the sentence that completely blew me away had nothing to do with the argument being made.
I get what you're saying here. I lived in New York years ago (where Hilary lives) and loved how genuine New Yorkers were. Then I visited again recently and was shocked by the way the ethos of the folks in the city has changed towards over-inflating their successes/experiences/credentials. Especially the start-up folks I met.

Does this mean that to get ahead in America in a start-up you have to become good at mis-representing yourself?

I know a lot of wonderfully talented people who have awful credentials. Should they feel pressure to over-inflate their 'personal stories' in order to keep up?

Is Hilary just doing what she has to to stay in the game or is she part of the problem and perpetuating it? It seems she's done a lot of good stuff for the start-up community in New York and she works hard.

Anyone got any insights on why some people have started to feel the pressure to 'talk big' in order to be in a position where they can get things done?
It makes me dizzy but its def intriguing and inviting otherwise. I signed up. I'm working on a similar landing for the website promoting my mobile app. NYC based, trying to decide between cityscape and zooming in on a particular experience within the city
I was 14 a couple months ago. I don't believe in breaks for people because of age, but i'm not attacking him personally or anything! My point is simply that his logic is failed, nothing more.
I'm trying something very similar in a hack of news.arc. I submitted this just yesterday, but it fell of the new page pretty fast: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935 I don't have enough data yet to tell if it works well though.

I agree that /r/ doesn't quite do it. Some of the communities are just too small to pick up on some very good submissions.
I value open source as much as the next guy, but here I agree. The competition is so great (this is Apple we're talking about) that the usability needs to be spot on. Apart from the open source project, Google needs to protect a brand as well.

I hope Android will be open as much as the next guy, but right now Samsung et al have made some decisions that have impacted usability, so I hope that 3.x will be so greatly improved, usability-wise, that there won't be a need to keep the source closed, as nobody will find it necessary to "improve" upon it.
Option 3.
Ah.

Well might I suggest that YOU need to work on your writing to make sure it's not mis-understood, and it's clear what message you're trying to deliver. YOU need to think of your audience, and how what you've written might be interpreted. Sometimes the most obvious meaning to YOU is not the one that people will most often see.

And of course I mean YOU as in the "general you", the reader.
excellent, thx!
I thought the article was terrible, but rather than contribute anything useful, I'm going to mock the title. "99% less open" is idiomatic and means "1/100 as open". It's a round number, conveying an order of magnitude. On the other hand, "99% more open" implies you've measured precisely enough to claim that the iPad is 1.99 times as open as the best alternative. Thank you.
Money Can’t Buy You Love: Why Some Apps Work and Some Don’t
"We left the test running until the results were statistically significant to a 99% confidence level."

This is absolutely the wrong thing to do - not that I'm doubting the conclusion, but the data does not support that confidence level.

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html
Given that Brave New World described a utopia, I think "Hate is Love" is the only way to put what the article's saying.
This sounds like it's coming from someone who hasn't had any real experience with large scale spam problems.

We operate a forum with 250k members and ~800k posts per month, a new registration every minute and we get so many spam bots even with captcha (mechanical turk etc) and without captcha it's unworkable. Captcha is a necessary evil, but it does help.

This seems to be coming from someone dealing with a site where spam wouldn't be that much of a problem, who would sign up to animoto to spam? Very silly post.
Most porn sites aren't worried about selling to people who don't want porn. Basically, if a person decides to ban .xxx, they probably wouldn't be customers anyways.
The answer to your concerns about riding the bubble is not to ride it. Momentum investing has always been riskier than growth investing. There are no Momentum Warren Buffets.

However, at the moment, VC is obsessed with Momentum, and that's really the point of the post. That will change eventually.

Cheers,

BW
How much of each domain is worth depends on how it's being sold. For example, I was asking a domainer how much my domain eskimokissing.com would be worth the other day, and this is what he told me:

If it expires and drops, 300 - 600 dollars.

In a wholesale liquidation of an entire portfolio: 800 - 1200 dollars.

On it's own, with a list of 50 potential companies that you're willing to cold call, and you've put in the work to find the right person within each company: 6,000 - 20,000 dollars.

The above scenario, but if there is a bidding war between two or more companies: 15,000 - 40,000 dollars.

So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them. With some of these domains it's clear that you can put together a list of 100 leads if you're willing to put in 10+ hours per domain, but with others I would guess that you would probably have to liquidate them at bargain basement prices to get any money back.
Tim gets it. Those who can pay, will.

Those who can't pay, this time: 1) benefit from the information and 2) may pay for a book in the future when they can afford it. 10k in circulation is free advertising, to some extent.
Seems to me that the important part of Android openness was the ability to sideload and run competing app stores.

It's great that the OS source was also open, but it seems like this has only a very indirect impact on end users and app developers, unlike app store policies.
Which is the right way to discourage large-scale piracy.

If I put my copy of an O'Reilly ebook online for anyone to grab, it's obvious the copy floating around is mine and I'm a jerk. But I can still give a copy of the PDF to a few friends and encourage them to buy a copy if they like it.

And, there's absolutely no way this is going to somehow bone me in the future. The authentication server isn't going to go down, it's not going to mistakenly think I lent out my "last copy" or lock me out of my purchase because I don't have internet access.
> I would pitch it to the adult industry as follows:

Ah, so you're going to lie to them.

> Let us filter out these useless bandwidth leeches for you.

What are the odds that you'll do a better job (from their point of view) than they will?

More to the point, why should they believe that you're even trying to help their profits? When there's a choice between the nannies and their profits, which way will you go?

> in an area where sex is so taboo they will not possibly whip out their credit card for a porn site

Since such an area doesn't exist, we know the answer to the last question. (Seriously - I'll bet real money that there are folks in the Vatican paying for porn.)

There are folks in India who are paying for porn. Since India is one of the "bandwidth leeches" that you're protecting me from....
Wasn't a domain only sale. The domain alone sold for 7.5 million.
You can apply the same to CAPTCHA as well, its not hard to automate CAPTCHA input either. But the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of spam bots are simple and for every additional check you put into your form you increase the effectiveness by a magnitude.
I think the goal might be not to reduce the quality of the worst phones.
My flip-side take of the same idea: sure Linux is "open", but every time I try to really use it, I get mired in obfuscation and decide that shelling out a few bucks will get me a lot closer to my goals a whole lot faster.

Kinda like driving vs. walking: sure, moving your feet will take you anywhere - anywhere! - you want to go, but more than a few miles soon becomes impractical ... while the fuel-roads-and-rules limitations of driving can get you almost anywhere up to halfway across the country within a day in comfort. To say walking is more "free" (aka "open") than driving kinda misses something key.

And, while we're at it, this kid (!) can download the Xcode IDE, write any software he wants (short of obscenity, libel, or flagrant IP violations) and have it distributed with the greatest of ease to every iOS user who wants it. For just $99 and a percentage he can make a profit to boot.

Is something "open" if most people can't get at it?
Before I noticed the age of the author, I was hoping that someone is pulling a Swift on us here.

NB: Imagine you've got an app store + additional ways to install applications. Why would this increase the worries of teenagers? (Their parents & teachers might think otherwise.) I certainly never got depressed in school by swapping around floppy disks of pirated games…
It seems that the jury is still out on domain name value in this new age of panda-monium. If I had a trendy green biz the greenbits one would be nice.

ww.com is the aesthetic winner though.
The digital versions of the German c't magazine (archives and iPad version) have similar visible and possibly some invisible watermarking features. Music downloaded from iTunes has your name in the Metadata. Personally, I'm fine with this, but then I was never going to offer the files on Bittorrent or whatever. I don't think you could have any serious moral qualms with this kind of soft DRM.

I certainly do share music with my girlfriend, which presumably is considered piracy by the RIAA, etc., along with ripping the CDs I bought before DRM-free music was widely available.
You seem to misunderstand lisp programmers greatly, allow me to attempt to exlain:

they don't let anything new in their language.

Common Lisp is a standard, changing it requires tremendous resources, and provide little actual value, if you have some language extension you want added to the language, put it in a library, it will be much cheaper and much more useful that way.

they stick to s-expressions like they are the holy grail.
We stick to s-expressions because they provide tremendous value. They are just more useful than traditional syntax.

they stick to the funny function names as if they were given by god.
Common lisp has over a thousand symbols, and only a handful of them i would consider funny, and you are complaining about them? And you accuse us of nitpicking?

The rest of your rant is more of the same bullshit. How can you say you like lisp, and then continue to talk uninformed ignorant bullshit?
Gitit -- http://gitit.net does most of this except the WYSIWYG part and simple layout.

And you can host gitit on your own servers.

Gitit is based on pandoc, which allows you to covert to and from rst, markdown, latex, .. and a dozen more formats.
Wait until your site gets popular. It'll get fun sooner or later.

The latest thing I'm seeing on my site is a robot that automates real web browsers, jumps between ip addresses, scrapes real user content off the site, then posts it back using some form of Markov generator to make the content look unique. It'll do that on new accounts for weeks before trying to insert any links.

It's amazing the lengths spammers will go to to get their content onto your site. In this case, the crawler is clearly written specifically for my site, even though it's only PR4 and nofollows all its links. It's no wonder 99% of the content on big sites like Blogger is spam.
Of course, but this is printed in Forbes. The more that the non-tech crowed sees that publishers can succeed without customer-screwing DRM, the better chance other publishers will follow suit.
The ability to "favorite" threads would be nice as well.
Users should be able to install what they want, when they want, without asking anyone's permission. You should own the hardware you purchase.

Why, though? "Should" is a strong word that implies a more overarching requirement than just a desire on the part of an individual purchaser.

I understand that you want to be able to do anything you want with your hardware, and I'm very very glad that there exist systems that you can buy to do this on — I'd be extremely concerned too if all systems became walled gardens, but I don't see any reason to think that there's even a chance of this happening since Android is so very successful — but it's hard for me to see why that requirement "should" be a part of every product.

In fact, the idea that this form of openness is some sort of moral imperative (and thus should exist on all systems) ignores the fact that by the same reasoning I should be able to buy a system that trades-off binary-installation freedom for the benefits that come from the closed-down approach.
At this point in time, I regard the Motorola Xoom and other Honeycomb devices as proprietary platforms that should be avoided by those who care about their software freedom.

Agreed. I'm now even more glad that I went with the Nook Color instead, which is currently running a Cyanogen build of 2.3.
Yeah, we also had the same debate on whether we should go with cityscape or first-person street views. I don't think we ever made a final decision, but leaned street view when picking photos.

Our landing page photo changes based on the visitor's IP and host, so most of our effort went into getting the right photos.

On a friendly note, the guy who signed up as no@no.no (seemingly in response to the question "was it worth it?"), probably didn't "no" that.
They are working on that and I think it's a terrible solution. Here is why: consumer's want life to be easier. Remembering the name of every company and then adding .com is hard enough. Now I have to remember companyname.companyextension? There have been plenty of TLDs launched which all just failed. .biz anyone? .info?

The scarcity isn't artificial, it's the limited amount of recall a consumer has for information.
well have you called your target to verify? No joke. THey seem to severely be out of stock as is everywhere

11am is the key it seems. Yesterday I noticed all my stores had them in town. I went to buy one and there was a line!
That's why you hire a student - students who are really good will often take on a project just because it, say, hones a skill they're looking to improve, or because it fits in nicely with a class assignment they need to do anyway. Or maybe your game project is part of how they'll get that full-time job they're seeking out at Blizzard?

They say in tech recruiting that "the best people will almost never be looking for jobs" - it's true in creative fields too. In terms of trading off cost and talent, I can't think of a resource as undertapped as art and design students.
Filet-o-Fish invented to keep Catholics coming to burger joints during Lent
I think you have liquidation and expiring wrong. Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers.

Why? I am not really sure, but I would hypothesize that the demand is most highly concentrated at the major drop sites. They also facilitate transactions more smoothly and uniformly. Big players don't have to muddle around with lots of individuals, they deal with one company who takes giant checks from them and are assured the domain and no drama every time.
Obvious in retrospect. Thanks!
That's scary, considering that "average" is skewed by the multi-million-dollar end.

What's the _median_ iOS app annual revenue?
It directly impacts those using CyanogenMod, which would not exist were the OS not open source.
Would You Consider Car Sharing?
The Anatomy of a Y Combinator Demo Day Pitch
I know, I guess I was just pointing out that this was hardly news for hackers, and potentially saving others the time of reading all of it, looking for the newsworthy bits.
Here's what it looks like if you come from a small selection of elsewheres:

Cities:

http://loudly.com?rloc=miami
http://loudly.com?rloc=los%20angeles
http://loudly.com?rloc=boston

Campus networks:

http://loudly.com?rhost=bu.edu
http://loudly.com?rhost=mit.edu
http://loudly.com?rhost=caltech.edu
It's just a stunt at this point, yes, but it's very pretty.
Since several commenters have been asking for an explanation of honeypots and timestamps, here's a link[1] I happened to run across just recently and a quick explanation.

- Honeypots: Add a field to your form that is styled to be invisible to normal human users, such as being located off the screen, sized to 1 pixel, or placed behind/under images on the page. Bots examine a page through HTML rather than through eyesight and will not distinguish these fields. Reject submissions which have entered text in the honeypot fields.
- Timestamps: Some spambots operate by 'playback' - a human fills the form out correctly once, then copy-and-pastes the form output into a script that replaces the comment text/etc. with desired spam links. Place a hidden field in your form that contains a timestamp (possibly hashed or combined with other form output). Reject submissions which contain a timestamp far in the past, indicating a bot which is 'playing back' an old submission.

The idea with defeating spam is not to be 100% accurate with unbeatable security, since no matter your system, a bot tailored to your site can defeat it. However, putting several simple techniques together can defeat general-purpose bots that shotgun spam across many sites. This reduces spam to levels that are manageable by hand.

[1]http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html
That's getting dangerously close to xkcd's gold standard of spambots that actually make well-written, useful contributions to the discussion.
It does work, check out this screen shot. If you are near Rancho Cordova they have the 16gb Wifi Black

http://6colors.net/ipad_check/instock.png
Terrible generalization of polynomials is useful for demonstrating overfitting (I've done it myself in tutorials). However, responsible tutorials should mention that the other obvious lesson is that the polynomials (1, x, x², x³, etc) are a terrible set of basis functions for regression. Don't just watch for overfitting, but use a sensible regression model! For complicated fits some methods to consider are: local regression, splines, various artificial neural nets, or Gaussian processes.
The author barely acknowledges the difference between the value of a device to you the consumer as software is added, and the value of the device in the marketplace. Consumer electronics might increase in perceived value to the consumer with added software functionality, but until the limits of semiconductors are met they will not increase in value in the marketplace. Even then taking a new cell phone home will be just like driving a new car off the lot: instant depreciation.
Cannabilization of Entrepreneurship – caused by the Financial sector?
Could this new book kill the Kindle?
3 or 7.
There's a Redditor called Sure_Ill_Draw_That who sums up the whole karma thing quite succinctly:

http://i.imgur.com/7gNZW.png
I'm really gratified that the guy who once wrote, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy" has built his business successfully on this same principle.
Here's a good article: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html
A Brave New World indeed, now to make sure everybody finishes Huxley's book, and does not just think about how cool the the first few chapters are.
So Honeycomb is not "open" because you can't download it, I guess you're saying?

It would help if your comment was more than just a quoted tweet.
Comments, although disappointingly I always seem to get a big karma spike for throwaway one-liners, and what I consider my more contributing/interesting comments tend to be ignored. I know I'm not the only one, but it can be frustrating.
I wonder if there's any legal precedent for a friend being the jerk in a scenario like this. "Friend" uploads ebook/music track/magazine I bought and "lent" him/her to file sharing site or whatever. It's my name in there, so I'm going to be the one who's going to be sued.
I think part of the reason that dropbox's video works so well is it shows you how dropbox solves a problem, if they just had a technical demo of how their stuff synchronises files then techies would see it and realise how it was useful, but a person on the street probably wouldn't.

I can see where your app would be good, but I'm a developer and I have friends with English as a second language. If you had a video that showed someone catching up with a person they'd met on a holiday in another country or something similar then I think it'd put the problem you're solving in context better than the demo.
I'm in exactly that spot right now. So the question is, does it make sense to front the money and start advertising early, when the product is still not as featureful as you want it to be?
Network Devices Tutorial - Routers - Hubs - Switches - Gateway
Get introduction of network devices which includes Network Interface card adapters (NIC), routers, hubs, switches, modems, communication cables, LAN/WAN routers, gateway and other important networking
You're correct. I should (I think we can agree on this one :) have mentioned that the last section was my personal opinion and what I mean when I say the iPad being not "open" is a bad thing. The argument that you're making here is the argument that I'd like to see, because it's acknowledging the "not open" side's actual opinion, and challenging it. Thank you.

As for an answer, I mostly take offense at the fact that iOS does not allow for installing apps outside of the closed down market. I'm actually absolutely fine with Apple censoring the App Store, it's the lack of an advanced option to install non-market apps that I dislike. I don't think their method adds much security (you could jailbreak the thing through a web page for a while), but it does close off a lot of opportunity.

Edit: and to expand on why I feel its necessary to argue against iOS when I'm happily on Android, it's because I feel that it's a lot easier to convince people to give up freedom for security than it is to get freedom back in exchange for some risk. If the iOS model becomes the norm, I might not have an option like Android's sideloading, and it's not easy to get that back. I think a compromise between the two would be the best, but I've never felt like installing apps on Android is risky. Generally the popularity of an app/program is somewhat indicative of its safety.
This is a cute read, and as others have stated, it's well-written for a 14 year old.

The idea that the iPad is opening up more people to technology than other products though is quite naive. It might get the most press, fan-fair, and attention with an exclusive event to debut it every year, but that doesn't make it any friendlier to non-tech-savvy users than its competitors. Has the author even touched another tablet-like device on the market?

The iPad might be "open" in the sense that it is making technology accessible to regular users. But more "open" than the rest? That's the product of good marketing. Sure, the device itself has to stand on its own, but so do its competitors. The media loves to give Apple plenty of attention, and combined with aggressive advertisement its products are now household names.
You can get frequent flyer points even if you're not the one in the seat? I always thought that points weren't transferrable.
"Blocking referrers from Google that have the phrase "post a comment below" made a dent)"

Can you elaborate? I haven't heard this technique (I don't personally have a lot of need for spam fighting), and I'm very curious as to what you mean.
A point made in the comments of the post is that blind users using screenreaders may notice and interact with the honeypot fields.
Marketing Strategies for the New Facebook Fan Pages