skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just thinking of a friend I have who has a very successful software product he sells. He is Scottish. He went to the university, got a doctorate in mathematics, found himself completely unemployable. Ended up living in a subsidized flat and on the dole. Kept applying for jobs. Was overqualified for menial labor and his math degree was generally useless for everything else even though the guy is completely brilliant.

On the dole, he started to write software. Over the period of several years he created a number of titles and started distributing them.

Finally his reputation was good enough and income coming in so he was able to get off the dole, buy a house, rent a business location, and hire employees.

There were a few years there he was probably illegal since he was running a business when he was supposed to be unemployed. But once the business paid enough to live on he lived on it and went off the dole.

Based on this, I think that public welfare programs can work to assist startups. The reason is the person is getting living expenses, which is all a developer needs, and there are no requirements or equity lost or regulations or other BS that takes away from focusing on developing a product and building a customer base.
Ask HN: Price-point for niche eBook
I spent five months writing a technical manual that fills a particular niche. I plan to sell the manual and give away the source code.

The book is 280 pages, has many high-quality illustrations (contracted graphics artist), was proof-read by a technical writer (also hired on contract), and describes solutions to business intelligence software problems (namely, prediction).

An electronic instruction manual for the software that my manual references retails for $49.95 USD. A similar manual retails for $44.99 (print) and $31.49 (eBook).

What are your thoughts and experiences on deciding the price-point for a niche technical manual? How do you price electronic versus printed?

Thank you!
This is absurd. I'm almost completely atheist but I still recognize a useful passage when I see one. The bible is a respected piece of literature. Judge the words based on their merit not on their source.
Steam Showers - SRC-1282
I wonder if they're doing anything clever to reduce storage size. For example - an MP3/AAC song purchased from the same service has a small unique header (e.g. where your iTunes account name is stored) and then identical music data.

I imagine the music companies would have a hissy fit and demand streaming payments if that was the case though.
Stripe.com
Surely Amazon didn't want Apple to have any advance notice.
If that's the case, I'd bet it's for license reasons. An AmazonMP3 purchase made after Cloud Drive is launched could be described as having been copied for personal use, at the time of purchase, to your Cloud Drive.

Allowing previously purchased tracks to be streamed without first uploading them looks more like what Lala was doing, and they had to negotiate streaming licenses. Though I'd wonder if there is any real implementation difference in Amazon's case.
Absolutely true and good advice. In particular renting an office is spectacularly bad advice for someone who has no income coming in yet from product and service sales.
I'm uploading a ton of photos to test it out, then I'll delete them all. For free!

PS: Sorry for hogging your upstream Alan.
Mark Zuckerberg from single to in a relationship
Engineering beats evolution, every time.
Exactly. Normal people won't use technology unless it does something they can't, but need to do, or makes something significantly easier. They don't just use tech for its own sake like I do.
I have an idea: Trickle Down Economics!

No, not the type you are probably thinking of -- here is my modest proposal.

That the tax policies and plans of corporations should be made fully public. That is to say that every tax practice, incentive and process used by corporations to lower their taxes should be made known and available to the public for their own personal enjoyment. Individuals should be able to, as public citizens, join forces and consolidate-to-mitigate tax liability.

I, as a person, should be able to utilize the same tax saving maneuvers as GE or any other company.

Unless of course, we truly are saying that coporations are NOT people, and should be treated wholly different than physical people.

If they are "people" and enjoy the same rights as us -- then we should in turn enjoy the same rights as them. and the fees that we pay should be on respective scale as they do for the same rights.
Cute Asin in Saree Photos, Asin in Saree Pics
Cute Asin in Saree: Asin is a new name to the bollywood industry but she worked in many other language films. Asin is very cute and beautiful bollywood actress. Asin worked last in the bollywood in London Dreams but her best film i remember was Ghajini. Asin in saree really looks very cute and beautiful.
Do the one thing you love doing most and that you do best. Don't chase things like prestige or supposed higher salaries.

Some of us are lucky to be intelligent enough to be able to be pretty good at many different professions. That does not mean you should chase the profession that offers the most prestige or supposedly is the best paid. You should do the thing that you are absolutely best at and you love the most (and this is usually the same thing, btw).

Because in the USA we work so hard that your life will be absolutely miserable if you do not do the thing you love. Also, if you are really good at it, you should be successful enough regardless of what various magazines say about the relative prestige or value of various professions.
Yeah I was expecting that. Something that was more or less a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Plus the bonus of streaming with Cloud Player. No doubt Amazon wanted to get it out there in the hands of customers and beat Apple and the WWDC. As long as they keep improving it in the next few months I don't think anyone will remember that they launched with a MVC.
> And, of course, Saul is a alias for Paul.

Does it require you to login via Damascus?
Yeah account sharing is watched and when detected the suspect account will get flagged for a TOS violation. I can't tell you how quickly the ban hammer may come down as things go, but 2 devices is likely not going to trigger it.
Well, if you are a large player like Dropbox you'll get really good S3 rates because you fall into the higher tiers. If you are in the 5+ PB tier you are only paying $13.2 for 20 GB/year, whereas Amazon is charging $20. If you have enough scale you can probably make the numbers pen out.
watching videos (embedded from other sites), listening to music, uploading photos, and sharing data. Our test site is running so slow now and it only loads 20 activities at a time.
They don't offer an API for this cloud files service and the ToS clearly restricts it to personal use. They may be positioning it as a loss leader (or at least with slimmer margins than S3 normally has) in order to drive sales to Amazon MP3 - or they may be doing deduplication internally to reduce costs. Whatever the case, the fact that Amazon can undercut S3's prices doesn't really say anything bad about S3 itself - it just means you've got to consider if you can beat Amazon Cloud Drive's pricing while still using S3 as a backend.

Oh, and google docs has been offering storage for 25% of the Amazon Cloud Drive pricing for ages now. It's just as inconvenient to use for bulk storage or backups, of course.
They're using a stop-the-world garbage collector. Surely we've come further than that in the past few decades?
With the right choice of filesystem (i.e. One that does block-level deduplication) 'duplicating' the files is as good as free.

If Amazon were small and unknown, lawyers could have a field day on that. I think what is more important here is that Amazon has a good relation with content providers. They bring in money, and help them keep power against the iTunes store.
What happens if your phone is in a poor reception area, or without internet connection? Then you can't listen to music? Can the app manage which songs you'd also like to have stored locally on the phone?

Is this meant to supplement your old ways of syncing music to the phone or replace it?
Thanks for correction, will fix it today ;)
And we have "How was your day?" email, you must receive it at every evening... ok, we will check it too)
You have a point, but it's not all as one sided as you say. If you never grubby your hands in the practical, you won't have practical limitations and insights to help you on your way.

I remember a long time ago I was watching an online forum on riddles. One of the 'riddles' was how many cigarettes (read as: finite regular cylinders) can you arrange such that each one is touching each other one. I watched the thread go for three days as various theorists claim a maximum number according to mathematical theorem A or B or C. It started out with a max number of 3 and took three days of impassioned debate to work up to 6, with theories floating in and out of favour - and each one claiming to be 'the absolute ceiling limit'.

I then took a matchbox down the pub and asked the same task of my drunk friends (telling them to ignore the bulbous heads/square cross-section). Within five minutes, all of them, even the utterly non-scientific ones, had found a solution for six. Most of them found it within 1-2 minutes. Drunk, untrained, undiscplined folks that actually physically played with the items beat out impassioned, educated enthusiasts.

It highlighted the issue for me that theory is all well and good, but it's not useful in a vacuum. Theory and practice need each other to be efficient.

Similarly I went back to visit my old university. I saw a guy there 12 years into his PhD... and still clueless about the practicalities of what he was recording. He'd spent his whole career in the theory of it and had no idea of the realities of recording his subject, something that 3-6 months in industry would have given him in spades.

So no, it's not as clear cut as 'theory done cleanly in practice would win', as the real world is grubbier and has more edge cases. Theory and practice need each other for efficiency. Thinking of it another way - you don't need to test your backups... in theory... :)

Incidentally, on the cigarette question, I've seen a solution for 7, but I don't know of any higher. The guy who showed the solution for 7 was also the first one to say 'this is a solution, but there may be a higher ceiling out there'.
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I think tonight is one of those nights where all cellphones/pagers/beepers/inboxes are going crazy at Dropbox.

Should be interesting to see how they respond in the coming days - if at all.

I hope Dropbox realizes that they can't compete with their supplier on price - so they need to differentiate themselves on value.

These prices are seriously ridiculous. 50% lower across the board. Kinda messed up - but I am in no hurry to leave dropbox any time soon.

Keep doing what you do dropbox. I am rooting for you.
Lets wait until this has some peer-revied tests and they can claim a certain output in KWh for a sunny day in California or some region of Africa.
thanks for link ;)
Not if you host a form. But if the form's POST goes to your server.
Wow. Nostalgia. I'll have to try this out again, after a decade.
There's an option to download music only when on wifi, and you can explicitly tell it to cache specified tracks on the device. You can also tell it to automatically sync new purchases.
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Glad to see the comments flood in for this and see it hit #1 on HN so quickly as I was beginning to wonder when it would ship. I was contracted to work on the Amazon MP3 v2.0 app rearchitecting the download architecture and adding cloud drive download support. It was "very interesting" being the only outside contractor / software architect level dev to be hired by A2Z / Amazon to work on core architecture for Amazon MP3. I finished my involvement mid-Feb. I guess I'm just posting to get an account started here on HN as I'm launching some very compelling Android platform / middleware soon called TyphonRT. I've been bootstrapping for years and this recent Amazon MP3 contract has opened up enough runway for me to launch my tech in the coming months. Hopefully I'll have some more time to post in the future too.
I own a semi-popular fake Facebook thread maker.  How should i monetize it?
Some time back I started a fake Facebook thread tool. It quickly hit reddit and other sites and got popular. I thought the traffic will die out soon, but more than a year later i'm still getting 50K-150K pageviews/month.

Is there any easy way to make 50-100$/month from this site ?
Are there any historical examples of it working?
On a lighter note, this is what Dilbert/Dogbert have to say on new "green" breakthroughs.

http://dilbert.com/fast/2011-03-29/
I have around 60GB of FLACs on my hard drive. At LAME's V0 encoding, that's around 20GB of MP3s. And it's ever increasing. Considering that SDHC has a max of 32GB and SDXC doesn't have much support (much less microSDXC), there's definitely a market for something like this. (Probably very niche, but eh... Amazon seems to be positioning this as kind of a Box.net thing with an emphasis on music storage and playback)
I wonder how many other things about the spill are being held confidential.
I think one thing everybody should have learnt about Amazon is that they have perfected the MVP strategy. This is JUST ground-zero.

In the coming weeks/months, expect to see rapid iterations...i.e. I wouldn't be surprised if they announce a desktop-side client in relatively short order.

How on earth does a large company like Amazon manage to keep pushing out so many innovative products so frequently.
Woops... You are right. When Daniel said "music and movies", I first thought of Sony's hardware, which is used to consume these medias: Sony flat-screen TVs[1], headphones, Blu-Ray players...

But Sony is indeed a major record label / movie producer. I didn't think about it, since I've recently focused on electronic music, mainly listening to free podcasts [2]...

The only album I bought in the last few years was Girl Talk's "Feed The Animals", because I really liked the "pay what you like" model (similar to what Radiohead did with "In Rainbows"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_the_Animals#Release

Anyway, sorry for derailing the thread by talking about hardware. I think it was a good example of a buying decision affected by Sony's unacceptable behavior, but I am aware of the limited alternatives when one wants to buy music or movies produced by Sony. I guess I'd buy anyway if there is an artist I like and I don't have any other option.

[1] : which are supposedly high quality, albeit pricy, TVs... well, I'll still look for alternatives, like I did for my headphones

[2] : I need to find some time to start discovering new artists again (maybe using YC's like.fm?), and to study the various online DRM-free music stores (their pricing, formats, and availability in France), to start buying music again, instead of listening to such podcasts. I also want to give back to all the artists that made these podcasts possible.
Presumably, that would break the ability to stream to your mobile devices.
Yikes! I am going to go bury my head in some nice sandy hole for a while and pretend the world is a nicer place than it really is. :(
No-worry syncing is what distinguishing Dropbox for me. Of course, I'm just one of their free-loaders, and come to think of it I may not find Dropbox as useful in a couple of months when I'm finally done with school assignments forever.
It's a generous program, and John is helpful in every way. The "at least one member needs to be a student requirement" is a mystery and can lead to glued-together teams that are truly mismatched.
Ask HN: Whats the best way to calculate votes on YouTube?
I am working on a interactive film company called PoP where the audience helps create the film as it is being made, they help choice the story, characters, cast, and even make important choices as the film is being made. We have to create a type of voting system by using youtube videos. Right now we are doing it as most likes or views, but we feel there must be a better way to tally votes. Does anyone have any good ideas for this?

Thanks,
Sammy
Classic governments stunt. I was so disappointed when I saw the website, just bunch of links to other websites and useless gifts. Total fail
I think it's bold of Amazon to launch essentially a minimum viable product and beat Apple to the punch. Now they have customers and are getting meaningful feedback to make future improvements. You rarely see this outside of Apple and startups. I'm glad to see Apple running into some real competition.
I've sold 35 page ebooks for $30 before. Make your salesletter / website about the solution. And not about the mode of delivery. And you can charge its correct value.

There are companies that sell special reports on trending to other companies for $10,000. Of course, they don't sell more than 40-50 copies. But thats still a decent revenue. The point is: charge according to what you think the solution is worth.

Unless ofcourse your strategy is not to make money off the ebook. But to build your credibility. So total revenue is not the goal, but total number of copies sold is. In which case, price it at under $10.

And yes - if you're unsure about the pricing - then start low. And continuously increase prices by 10% every other week. Until you see a drop in conversion rates.
Yet another CSS feature IE9 didn't implement to spec ...
Your site appears to be down for me. Unexpected spike in traffic? :)
MySQL.com hacked via... SQL injection vuln
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That's classified.
The one where you searched from your browser and then opened some small hash file into the client which did the sharing, right? Not unlike the later BitTorrent.
Amazon introduces cloud storage
I don't care about those two either. But when administrating my office computers internally and externally, I find it helpful. Likewise when I'm working on a device that is underpowered to the point where it has to use IP addresses because it can't handle DNS, I need IP addresses. When I want to use my friend's servers for network testing, I prefer to use IP addresses rather than names.

Names introduce an extra layer of complexity that makes troubleshooting more difficult at times. The world exists beyond facebook and google. You may not care about that, but I do.
On the one hand, playing like that can give you insight. On the other hand, it can make you lose lots of time chasing an almost solution. Are you sure that arrangement of 6 was really a solution and did not require some minute bending or deformation?

For infinitely long cigarettes, it is at most 24: http://library.msri.org/books/Book52/files/07bezd.pdf

Is eight attainable? http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1450373
Everything looks fine on my end. Shoot me an email (see my profile) and we'll figure it out. YC doesn't hit quite as hard as LifeHacker did last year. :)
Does Braintree eliminate the need for a merchant account, with all the complexity that entails? Do they offer a developer API that's super-friendly to write for, allowing for weird use cases like processing payments from native BlackBerry apps without exposing you to PCI requirements or risks of publicly exposing your API keys by shipping them in apps?[1] And most importantly, is it a piece of cake to communicate directly with Braintree's founders?

'Cause that's what I've seen so far from Stripe. They're incredibly responsive and helpful. They even changed their SSL cert provider for me because older BlackBerries had a rough time with their prior cert provider.

Not to rag on Braintree, they've sounded like a good choice for a long time, but Stripe's changing some of the rules of the game. Killing the need for a merchant account is a really big deal and I'm happy to pay their rate.

[1] This isn't a rhetorical question, actually. I'd be interested in whether you can do this with Braintree.
Against School - John Taylor Gatto
Free persistent storage of Amazon digital downloads is the big feature here (to me). I've always thought it was insane how Steam lets you download dozens of gigabytes of video games ad infinitum, yet Apple's and Amazon's music stores require you to backup your digital purchases.
Any plans to also stream video or photos? That would be flat out awesome.
Actually, that's not what he's talking about. He's saying that they only do something about lack of process or messy code or whatever when it starts to hurt them. It's strictly internal.
I think there are two really interesting things about this:

• This is the first time Amazon has pulled together the two major branches of their business, retail and cloud infrastructure, into something (dare I say it?) synergetic.

• Amazon is taking the first steps into the non-retail consumer web, where, if successful, they'll probably give a good scare to a handful of startups as they sweep across segments (and without the Google / Facebook-like startup shopping).
> In some cultures (Asian I think, anyone have a reference? ) laughter and smiling can be a sign of fear.

I remember Australians were outraged when one of the Bali bombers was shown in court laughing and smiling as the charges were read out. Later, various commentators said that, for Javanese, smiling in public didn't necessarily mean someone was happy or joyous, but was nervous or stressed.

I don't know how widespread that is in the rest of Asia, though.
Thanks! This is exactly the advice I needed! I'm majoring in business, but I realized I actually really love computer science; however, I think if I majored in it then I wouldn't really love it anymore.

Starting on HTML!
Ran into a lot of problems with Neo4J and rewrote it later using Sphinx

Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
No -- we want to focus on making the best music experience possible right now.
I suspect this is causing some disturbed sleep patterns at Dropbox, but you're right - without the "mounts as a folder and auto-syncs" behaviour that Dropbox has done so well, this isn't going to cut into their profit margins yet.

Right now, this is not super useful - those of us who always early-adopt stuff like this probably already have Zumodrive and Dropbox accounts, as well as our own S3 accounts. In it's current form, this is not quite as useful as Zumodrive, which I've stopped using because Dropbox works so much more nicely.

If I were the Dropbox people, I'd be busy keeping the development moving forward to make it even easier for non technical people to understand what they are and use it, to ensure Amazon are still behind when they finally catch up.

(I'd also consider seeing whether I could match Amazons "mp3's purchased thru Amazon are stored free" offer - I'll bet Amazon are doing that with some smart de-duping filesystem magic which means they only have to store one copy of the mp3 file. I wonder if Dropbox are big enough to be able to gain major wins from that too...)
since when does Apple launch minimum viable products? that is the opposite of what Apple does.
yeah I have been working on it, I think it is a great niche product. I like the name "continuous investor" but I can't think of a play off of that, that would make a reasonable domain name.
This worked for me too.

But when I tried to install the Android player it said it wasn't available on my carrier (Optus)