skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook. We might have done it if Google did not pull the money.

Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company.

Working with .Net was not an issue, and in some cases it was a benefit.

There were however huge cultural problems with FOX. Here are a few.

Developers used were given one display, not two. Screens were 1280x1024. I bought my own displays and had my manager order a custom computer for me with dual video card support.

Fox was a closed source company, and so when we were working on Open Tech like Oauth and OpenSocial gadget servers, we had to do it as closed source software. We had no peer review. It made it really hard to ship and test something when you don't have linkedin, google, bebo, and twitter reviewing your code. On top of that when those companies found a bug, we had to re-implement that code in .Net. On top of that MySpace and .Net were well designed for strong typing and those types work a bit different than Java.

It didn't take a lot of time to port so, we kept doing it, but you have to think about this, you are at a race with a company like Facebook who had zero profit motive at the time, and billion in funding and a ground up stack. Meanwhile MySpace was just clearing out cold-fusion and we had really old blogging platforms that could not just get ripped out.

We also had management that didn't want to piss off users and so we would have 2 or 3 versions of the site out there, and we required users to upgrade to new versions.

What MySpace had was Cultural Debt, and a fear of destroying what they had. Facebook won because they were Socratic to the core.
Actually, not. LCE's get involved with launches of new products, and have a very long list of requirements & procedures that you have to follow. It's well known that going through this process for a new launch can take weeks. This isn't "agile" for new services that haven't launched before.

Agreed that for google.com search (and AdWords & GMail) there should be a few more procedures in place, but applying those procedures to every new small launch is a huge blocker.
Let me state it more strongly: the definition of faith I gave is not only the historical standard from prior to 140 years ago, it's also the modern standard among religious scholars and in most religious traditions. It's only in the last 140 years, within one particular anti-intellectual religious tradition (and among critics whose primary experience is with that tradition), that "faith" means the other thing. Their usage is decidedly in the minority. As such, I think it's perfectly fair for people to use the more correct definition, and it's unreasonable for those who are ignorant of that definition to cry foul when presented with it.
I expected some photos in your post.
Yeah, sorry for all the Googlisms, but I really wanted to target a Google audience.
I totally agree with you:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367299

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367277

I am not interested in their ability to get a clear picture of my surrounding through the sensors in my phone, or of the phones around me.

It is amazing tech, if they have it -- But I don't need that.
Ask HN: How do you track business expenses?
Hey People,

I was curious to see what other startups are using to track their business expenses, accounting, ect. Is there a service out there like Mint.com that can read your paypal info and chop it up into categories for easy accounting?
Ask HN: Review my pivot, a server uptime monitor
Okie dokie -- Monitor For Me as a home alarm monitoring service was an utter flop, so I let it stagnate while I moved on to other things.

The other day a critical server of mine went down and I only discovered it by chance. "Shazam," I thought, "a pivot is in order!" I reoriented the service, got it live, and then I discovered Pingdom, UptimeRobot, and the several other options (that I somehow missed in my single cursory Google search) that already provide monitoring and notifications.

Not to worry, though, because I still believe I can carve out a piece of the market.

Monitor For Me checks up to 10 websites (or any hostname/IP and port that can be opened) every minute per user for $15/month. It'll also capture and show you response times from (currently) three cities around the US, and I plan to add a 4th in the US and one in London before too long.

Obviously there are a tremendous number of reporting, connection types, and options in general that can be added for value, but I want to start with the MVP -- a simple service to let you know (by SMS or email) when your server goes down.

Any hackers around here mind signing up and trying it out and letting me know what you think? Am I wasting my time (because the product needs more oomph or because there just isn't market share available)?

Edit: Also, if you've used other services like this, what was missing? What was unnecessary?

If you don't mind taking a look, visit http://monitorfor.me (clicky below), and use the access code HNFTW (limited to 15 users, I'll update if it fills up) for a free month of access.

Thanks a million!

- John
Yeah me too, any ideas? Maybe I could have thrown up a web page with the code and linked to it.

Edit: Ok, I threw them in my public dropbox folder and updated the post with a link.
The SF Hacker Loft
It's really the short Demo Day type pitches that require the most design. A Demo Day pitch can't leave obvious questions unanswered, because there is no chance for anyone to ask them. A pitch deck for an hour long VC meeting doesn't have to be so watertight, because if investors have questions they can ask them.
And that's a good point. You've got to take common sense into account.
The facebook chips made me think about things like the ability to tap on a phone and give user information, which would be nifty- to a point.

What about a system that would let a user know what seats that their friends are sitting in? That would eliminate the stress that finding a friend in a large conference room is.
Clickable: http://monitorfor.me

Invite code: HNFTW (on the registration page)
I read Okasaki's PhD thesis by the same name, which he expanded into the book. Very well written, concise, full of useful theoretical information. The book expands into some data structures not covered in the thesis because the treatment would not have been original.
Is there any explanation for a near-death experience?
Given geotargeted ads, such as Google AdWords, it takes flooding a city, or a district, with ads for an hour to create an impression of high saturation.
Platform fetishism[1] and attempts to throw developers under the bus[2] aside, the comment from Nick Kwiatkowski states a much better reason: developers weren't empowered do their jobs.

The comments state that there was no staging or test environment, no ability to roll back releases, refactoring was a dirty word (engineers wanted to refactor, but couldn't), principal on technical debt was never paid (only the interest in terms of hacks to make the site scale-- again, product organization prioritized new features).

The rest: location, technology choice aren't sufficient to "kill" a company: there are successful companies in LA, there are successful and agile companies using Microsoft stack (where appropriate-- see Loopt and StackOverflow/FogCreek as examples of companies using both FOSS and .NET). On the other hand, they're not optimal either: they aren't what engineers would choose themselves most of the time.

This indicates that the technology and location choice aren't the cause, they're symptoms of company management that doesn't understand building non-trivial Internet applications (what the optimal technology stack for one is; where, when and how to hire developers to build one) and yet maintains authority to make all technical decisions. Contrast this with Facebook, Google et al-- where every process (from corporate IT to production operations to HR and recruiting) is designed with needs of the engineering organization in mind: "Want two 24" monitors? No problem. Want Linux on your laptop? No problem. Want ssh access to production? No problem. Want to fly in a candidate to interview? No problem."

[1] I personally wouldn't touch Windows with a sixty foot pole, but speaking objectively C# >3.0 and (especially) F# are great languages.

[2] "They weren't talented": having interacted with some ex-MySpace engineers, this just isn't -- at least universally -- true. Indeed, here's a secret to hiring in an early (Facebook in 2005) startup: seek out great developers who work for crappy companies, people who have joined "safe bet, resume brand" companies like (post ~2003) Google aren't likely to join you until you've already become a "safe bet, resume brand" company (Facebook in 2008-Present).
Canada's open-data site vs. the World
For what it's worth, I shelled out $10 for a Minecraft "alpha" release. You make the call. :-)
It's not a fallacy to move the goalposts back to where they belong after someone else has misplaced them. It is only a fallacy when the same person places them in one place and then another.
I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. They write code to satisfy the requirement and are quite good at it, but it ends there.

Remember when people used ASP.Net web forms and it was hard to get rid of viewstate in the rendered page, and only the people who knew internals of platform well could fix it. It drove SEO's mad and they started to recommend staying away from web forms.

I agree with you on the staging and testing servers. Not having them is planning for disaster.
Right, this contradiction leads to the realization that Google is, to a certain extent, using "open" selectively as a marketing term without full commitment to the idea.

The thing that makes this so blatant is the succinctness of Rubin's definition of "open".
Does venture capital add real value?
After you read that, here are some papers on purely functional data structures suggested by the Theoretical CS stack exchange:

http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1539/whats-new-i...
Interesting concept, would be better if the front page is more appealing
I think "rewrite" is too gentle. this kind of plagiarism would get you kicked out of school or fired from any reputable media company...
As they say, "A bad workman blames his tools." It's really hard to say that they failed because of Microsoft tools. The fact is that they made bad decisions in how they would implement and use their tools. There's nothing to prove they wouldn't have done the same dumb things with open source tools.
I see! Interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

For curious people, Wikipedia also has related information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
Ask HN: What % of equity is a technical co-founder worth?
At this point I own the idea(worth=$0) and 100% equity. And without a technical partner I have no beta product. He's open to the idea of equity in the company.

I'm a business-minded, action-oriented guy. I feel I'm good at team building, marketing, selling, partnerships & strategy. The real business side of things.

He knows the technical side. What is fair 15%? 45%?
No Comply: Mozilla WebGL demo
I think everyone's overestimating the importance of traction. If they have the technology to monetize a large user base better than anyone else can, and they have the technology to improve a large user base's experience in ways that no one else can, it doesn't matter if they have a largeuser base, because other people do, and those same people have tons of money.
Sure.. maybe it's harder to build a top-notch .NET team than a LAMP one... but I think the point is that you have to know what a top-notch team and set of processes look like in order to build them... on any platform. If anything the tech-choices are symptomatic of a bigger issue.
Yeah. I did, so I got it. (I was technically a SWE but I mostly did product stuff. A bit of it went over my head.)

I also worked at Yahoo, so I can compare what you said to "big internet companies" as well. The dedicated hardware thing can be a nightmare. Using open source stuff internally can be a nightmare too.

Where did you go after Google?
Focus on What Matters: Building Product and Getting Customers
Thomas Hawk’s $2 Portraits [slideshow]
I have recently re-started the pomodoro technique. There is no doubt at all my productivity is higher with it than with no technique at all. But it's much like exercise, we know we should do it, but for whatever reason, it's hard to maintain it.

I've added a different twist though that so far I am liking. At the beginning of the day I decide how many pomodoros I am going to accomplish today. If I have no meetings or other responsibilities, it's typically 13-15 (25 minute pomodoros with 5 minute breaks). Then my work day isn't done until I've hit that number. It motivates me to get on them and get them done, rather than work late just because I'm being inefficient.
Opening Oregon's Data
Could he do this without you? Could you do this without him?

This is what I ask myself whenever I think of this question.
Yep. If Color was launched earlier (which it didn't) and was a hit (which it's not), I imagine what would have happened in Egypt if the protesters were using it to share their movement. Could President "Richer Than MZ" Mubarak buy the data from Color? If they can actually do what they say they can, this is really a company that can change history. Not in the direction that I want, though.
I should have added, 4. Leave regardless of counteroffer.
How exactly do I contact them?

I could not find an email address or link to do that.
Isn't this a false dilemma? Can't they release the code and control the branding at the same time? Firefox is open source, but you can't call it Firefox if you change it.
Here is some background information:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/03/nocomply/

And here are sources:

https://github.com/cjcliffe/NoComply
Actually, it seems like the reverse, "I'm ready for editors to take a look at my book, but not ready to publish everything."

I get what people are complaining about, and I'm not terribly happy about it either, but it's not like I push every commit to github as soon as I've got it running on my server; frequently there is cleanup to be done first.
Scott Rafer on Color
The launch blocker list is inevitably something from every major failure in the past. It just grows and grows.

Again, Yahoo had this too, and then some. I remember once having a launch shut down three times -- by PR, Paranoids, and Legal.
It's hard to compare tech investors to Warren Buffet. He doesn't do tech because he doesn't know it. He invests in what he knows, which tend to be companies that have a physical deliverable.
Tweeted.
I couldn't have asked for a better answer. Thanks for explaining that. I assumed you wouldn't have gone through all the work without dealing with that issue, and was curious behind the reasoning.
And so the pendulum swings.
Let he who publishes every commit to github immediately cast the first stone.
Finally some sanity. Color, is using a easy entry point of photo sharing. All they need is proof of concept and boom, can any spell licensing!!!
Didn't downvote, but hes not goign to get Mailchimp'ss deliverability doing it himself. And its going to cost him at least $30-$40 for an appropriate server.. so spending an extra few hundred hours to set all that up properly, in exchange for saving $10...blah.
Walking on water: Ars reviews Sword & Sworcery
It costs $99 just to register to sell through Amazon. He'd have to make a lot more sales to be worth it.
I agree that instapaper is fantastic, but the article formatting only works for me about 95% of the time. There seem to be some sites that it occasionally gets wrong in a really annoying way (like including some odd dump of the site's sidebar that requires you to finger-swipe for about 5-10 seconds on an iPod to get to the article contents, which are of course easy to speed by).
Stanford engineers put a damper on 'aeroelastic flutter'
Samsung's Galaxy Tab: questionable specs, questionable fans.
>Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter.

Have you informed them that you work with a high traffic site? Most intranet sites are not high traffic, so if they're spending time pre-optimizing for speed instead of features/development time, they're actually wasting the company's money.

And what has viewstate got to do with SEO? You lost me.

For SEO friendly URLs, all you need a is URL Rewriter. http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=a...

>only the people who knew internals of platform well could fix it

That's true of any platform out there.
We were getting Spam bots on our forum which uses the same registration info as our game. We used Captcha for a bit, but also noticed a big decrease in conversion rate, so then we tweaked the forum software a bit to require that you have gained at least 1 level in the game before you can post to the forum and now no captcha and no Spam.
Isn't the chart on the top of the page misleading? I think just about anyone would think on first glance that Groupon's revenue had ~tripled month-over-month.
I'd say a startup based in LA and on MSFT makes life tougher, but not impossible. Developers in LA are scattered and there's probably less of them than SF. And there is less info and components out there to do complex stuff in the MSFT stack. (I work at a MSFT-based startup in LA, so I speak from experience).

At any rate, you can still make it work. Google has an office with developers in Santa Monica (west LA). And StackExchange is a great example of making the MSFT stack work.

By the way, any MySpacers here that got laid off or looking to jump ship?

I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. And we're hiring developers right now! I've interviewed several MySpacers already and extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :)

Send me your resume, if interested. Good luck.

Bill Paetzke: bpaetzke@leads360.com
Flux: Better Lighting for Your Mac
It's not a "semantic game" to present the correct definition of a word when someone else has misused it.

It is, however, a fallacy to poison the well by suggesting that the person who has presented the correct definition is about to engage in the "typical next step" of making an erroneous claim that the person hasn't actually made.
Apple reportedly working on music locker launch
The speaker put the transcript for his talk on Github: https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02.
That's interesting too - there's now no time in the YC program for pitching actual demos to investors, at least in inital group pitch format.
Something about the colors (orange/gray) for the name makes it harder to read, though if it was just a single color it would actually be easier to understand (for me). Maybe the orange is too bright?

NO facebook login please! I've noticed a growing trend with people using only FB logins. Is it because it's easier to implement? Please at least allow for an alternative login system that isn't linked to existing accounts.
Yep. It's good too. Consider it more of an alternative to Hutton than Real World Haskell.
The chart at the top of the article is just obnoxiously bad. I don't even understand what they are trying to accomplish with it, except make up for their prior error somehow.
Ask HN: What ideas/business models/companies did well after the 2000 bubble?
I'm wondering how we should prepare for growth in the next year or so.
If you're going to give this submission that title, surely you should have linked to their actual library of apps, rather than their blog posts?

http://inpulsewatch.com/watchapps.asp
Could anything "off-the-shelf" have managed that load?
There's always Terrorist, Vagrant, or Dilettante. In my view the latter is usually the most accurate for the self-claimed "Ninjas" out there.
Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company.

Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?
They could make deals to pre-install the app on handsets, perhaps.
Are there any websites that face similar load problems to Facebook's that are addressing it with an unmodified stack?
I'm not sure what you're talking about.

With "invisible" JS form validation of any sort:

1. you run your existing spambot software through phantomjs.

2. your unmodified bot fills in all the visible fields without changing a single line of code, and the webkit backend transparently computes your hashes and other automated javascript "human" tests.

3. again, your existing "stupid" spambot code submits your form, and your site is now overrun by spam.

With Captcha, you get an image and a unique ID that is validated at the server. Sure, you could run it through mechanical turk, but I'm guessing that a few CPU cycles to load a webkit backend is still vastly cheaper than farming work out to MechTurk.

My point is that you wouldn't even have to change your spambot software to defeat these "new" validations, and they can be trivially overcome, as opposed to MechTurk+reCaptcha. Add to that the benefits of targeting sites that are relatively spam-free, and you have a real incentive for spammers to simply plug-in phantomjs instead of using WWW::Mechanize or what have you.
"whom"

Yeah, that made me cringe too.
The theme of the other comments on this thread seem to be ".NET? newbs!" or "Facebook worked even though they used PHP!". Keep in mind that at the time MySpace and Facebook were created, .NET was by far the best option out there for a scalable framework, they converted their Cold Fusion infrastructure over to it. It also may be hard for the Rails kids to believe, but PHP was the Rails of that time.
The Death of WiMAX: A Lesson on Recent History.
The Economist on Amazon vs. Lendle
There is always Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/video%20games...
Aedificatoria: Layered Weak Links
To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network.

Why would you do that?

This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your most-loaded page.
Samsung lies about new Galaxy Tab thinness
It's a little strange that, with a name ending in 'ly', they don't have the .ly domain name.
50% no questions.

You need him or else you do not have a product. No product means no company.

No reasonable developer would take anything less than this...If they're going to be putting their energy into developing your product for the next 1-3 years (minimum) then you need to split the equity with them equally.
I want the ability to run an arbitrary operating system on hardware that has as effective production and quality control as Motorola's hardware, with the same form-factors. If I can't get that sort of hardware without a locked bootloader for something resembling the same price as Motorola's line, the openness of the code is basically meaningless to me.
On the one hand, Google doesn't need to make any money from these moats. They can all be loss-leaders defending search. (Eventually this will raise antitrust issues but usually only long after the damage is done.)

On the other, perhaps once the 'scorched earth' field is cleared by Google's search-revenue subsidized entries, Google's remaining entries will turn out to be capable of becoming giant profitable businesses on their own.

So there's two ways for Google to win: defending search, or discovering the next bonanza in a field where all scalable competition was decimated by search-subsidies.