skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! The product is designed with a couple nice little ratchets in mind. People see videos they like, then recognize they can participate. When they participate they invite their friends to watch them - it's instinct. That's the first cycle. The second cycle is that when people don't see a video on a topic they like, they can create one - and invite their friends to contribute. Success is premised on growing the user base through those two cycles, and then selling things like premium editing subscriptions for people who create a lot of content.
Wait...their model is an EC2 instance per customer? The normal limits Amazon imposes are 20 reserved or on-demand instances and 100 spot instances per region. You can request more, but will Amazon really accommodate a one instance per customer model?
We use Posterous for exactly that: http://blog.advection.net/
Is problem solving the worst part of programming?
Climbing Rocks
Exciting idea. I'd jump on board if I was "single" and in the US.

I love the viral nature of the service - you have to tell your friends about it so they will contribute their clips to your movie.

It would be cool if you had some great placeholders and the author of the clip could edit and cut a placeholder full version. That way as each friend drops their clip in they can view the whole and adjust their part.

Making the system modular so you could collaborate on a large movie would also be cool.

You could have an import tool that accepts a script as a text file. It finds definitions of characters, scenes, dialog, direction, etc.

It then breaks the script into acts, scenes, shots and creates the corresponding data-structures on your end to present same.

You then use chunks of dialog as placeholders for the rendered imagery and presto, instant placeholder movie. Author then replaces dialog with storyboards, early renders, then finished content.

It could be truly social, like a movie creation wiki with many users. Each user might have different permissions to edit, add content for (some subset of) scenes, etc.
I'm actually in real movie studios and around that world every day.

I realizes this is a consumer product, not a directorial production. I'm having trouble grasping this concept: 'You provide an outline of topics for each clip you need'... are you suggesting your client (average consumer, I guess?) would be well prepared to have an entire editing session in their mind and prevized the whole montage in their head before they hire your service? Because that's a bit..er far fetched.

I feel I don't understand it - can you explain it a bit more? My first idea when I heard about consumer oriented MSAAS as you call it, was that you would provide them with guidelines about story structure (however simple it may be - because it can be made formulaic), offer them a slew of templates like digital juice and, on top of that, list them required material to be shot for a given project... and in the end you auto-magically comp and edit it with a sound sheet and they take of their product.
There's a lot to DB compression depending on the type of data access. The PFOR approach is amazing and simple for data arranged in columns without much deviation. For serialized trees you usually end up in LZ* land. But with careful organization it can be tolerable.
This is the part that would worry me regarding scaling:

"The pieces get plugged in to the appropriate areas, combined and narrated into beautiful product that you can share on all your favorite outlets"

Who does the combination and narration? The quality of the final movie is going to be a strong driver perception of your product - how do you ensure the quality stays high as you grow?

Is it the users that do the narration? That might make it easier, but then your value proposition drops since they could use iMovie, right?

I think it's a cool idea though; definitely sounds interesting.
Do you have no issues with it on 4? Mine is very buggy, won't open child (or any other) tabs properly, they open non-visible.
The LZO codebase is one of the worse spaghetti code messes I've seen in my life.
A-E Click | What it do | CD Baby
There's an extension called "Menu Editor" that allows you to edit the context menus in Firefox. It works, but it can be confusing to use, because the context menus are... so contextual.

In your case though, you could just swap the places of the "New Window" and "New Tab" menu items.

Edit: here's a link to the extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/menu-editor/
Still stretching the analogy, but the same could be said of their password reuse.
Would you pay $1000/month for the top 100 personal (not business related) sites that you visit in a given month?

If you're using it to help generate income, then it's a tiny price to pay. But the demo video shows "planning a party" as a use case and that can be done almost as effectively for $0 using email.
Amazon is happy to. The limits you cite are merely the point at which you need to have a conversation with Amazon staff. They are quite happy to accomodate _much_ heavier usage from customers.
You suggest it to 4-8 of your peers and then go out of your way to make it happen every 1 or 2 weeks in person or on email/skype.
Ah hah! This is why it is so brilliant. It's easy to assume that's the only way they can reach those figures.

They have already started to diversify their revenue lines: https://www.dropbox.com/team_create

$795/year for a team of 5.

Besides, in a day and age when a social network has 650M users, I don't see why it is conceivable that in 5 - 10 years Dropbox could have 200M paying users.

Apple just announced that it has ~200M credit cards on file. The largest stash anywhere.

In 5 - 10 years, that will look small in comparison to everybody else.

The more internet connected devices come out, is the more Dropbox's value proposition increases.
i put in 70% of the capital, he put in 30%.
Makes sense. Rob was never a bus driver, that I could tell. Andrew and Eric are, and have been, at the reins.
Hmm. There are about 2 billion internet users, and Dropbox's cheapest paying plan is $99/year. Assuming 50% profit or so, and that no one buys the more expensive plan, it would take a billion paying customers to hit $100B/year, 50% of everyone with internet access. It would definitely be a gradual progression, but probably doable, especially if they branch out into other areas - though I can't think of anything obvious, other than licensing the technology to big businesses for internal stuff. Of course, they can certainly afford to experiment.
Rate my résumé, I think it's quite good.
We (LearnBoost) were the ones that put it up about a year ago after about an hour of work - it's a simple but powerful concept, in theory [1].

We ended up taking it down a month or two ago because it never really grew into anything significant.

Hopefully this new version works out better!

[1] Post about our version: http://blog.learnboost.com/blog/hackernews-for-education/
Microsoft Excel Course Written Inside Excel
Easy. Using the Standard Q2 2011 Bubble Valuation Form:

Start with $500k.

Application Factors:
If it has anything to do with "social", multiply by 5.
If it's written in a functional language, multiply by 2.
If it ends with -ify or has a .ly TLD, multiply by 3.

Personal Factors:
If you live in silicon valley and hang out at hipster bars, multiply by 2.
If you're far better at name-dropping than you are at producing actual value, multiply by 4.

If none of the above are applicable and you have an actual product or service that people actually use, figure 12x annual earnings, plus a premium for growth expectations.
Abstract problem solving the interesting part. Trying to fix or work around poorly implemented/documented operations/semantics is the worst part.
Care to elaborate? (Assuming it's not sarcasm.)
Facebook Pages: Get More Likes With Livestream For Facebook
The social media giant, Facebook, is a great choice for businesses who want to incorporate social media as a way to market their brand. Facebook not only has over 500 million users to potentially reach out to, it also gives companies the ability to create a Business Page ,which is useful in showcasing products and services while marketing to a target audience.
You don't hear about the 99% of the attempts that were successfully foiled by good coding practices/security audits, so given that we are hearing about a security breach at a competent firm, the likelyhood of it being a black swan event is probably fairly high.
Yeah but the problem with 'things planned for the near future' is that they have a tendency to stay in the future until something like this happens.
I suspect that this might be part of the problem, he has mentioned that he would like to re-negotiate the equity split. However, I feel like giving him a larger proportion of the company to solve a motivation issue is not the right thing to do.
You know, I have stayed away from the "MSAAS" tag in any consumer facing concepts because I feel like that will scare away the average user. The right level of complexity to consider is a wedding tribute video. Ten friends of the couple speak on a topic each: when they were young, how they met, why they're good for each other, etc. We then take those clips and put them together with great transitions, overlays, and copy, and what you have is something that is not fully scripted but far more linear and story-like than, say, an Animoto project. We'll be doing these on all kinds of topics, of course - the wedding thing just gives you a sense for the structure.
Is this the part where someone reassures me HN isn't turning into Reddit?
Not sure if you have played around with the movie trailer functionality in iMovie 2011, but I believe the original poster's vision is similar to this.

Essentially iMovie provides an outline of the "production"; it requires you to fill in the actor names and makes suggestions for the different types of shots needed "Add a two second action shot here", "add a 3 second romantic shot here". Even the generic segway text is already in (but editable by the user).

The videos that the user chooses are perfectly synched with a pre-chosen orchestra background track. E.g. as the music tempo picks up, one of your action shots are chosen.

It really makes for a compelling end production; definitely check it out.
>That's interesting. I'm from Germany myself, and I'm convinced it's the most unfriendly "western" country ever.

Unfriendly doesn't mean racist.
This sounds an awful lot like the business model in "Be Kind, Rewind". That said, it's also a lot more promising.

Good luck finding a partner and growing the business, I've been saying for years that the movie industry needs some disruption. Just make sure that if you sell, you sell for enough to make yourself not feel bad when the studios inevitably kill your product.
Miss Grundy was Fired Today
I didn't know it was down; I got a login screen and wondered what kind of idiot expected someone to log in to read a blog post.
Well, that settles it then. Nothing to see here, folks. Absolutely no chance that Rob was pushed. Wallabe (HN'er for 1 day) says so.

I've interviewed Rob. He's awesome. But he doesn't strike me as someone who voluntarily passes on a wild IPO ride, just because "he doesn't like Chicago anyway."
At this early stage of a startup before we have scaled, the leaving of a co-founder is likely a bad signal that would scare away any investors.
How to Set Prices: Pricing Strategy
How do you have a 70/30 split with no contract?
I've always assumed that the limits are there to make sure that no one can order 1000 instances and pay with a bad/stolen credit card. In other words, if the customer does a dine and dash, how much are we willing to lose?
I just addressed this with Keyframe. The shining light on a hill is a full toolbox that could be used to create a full on movie. We'll start simple - but my sense is that people will be able to take it quite far within the constraints we establish. All of the above will make awesome premium features...great feedback!
You might be right although I think many local people like to help out travellers who are visiting and peering at maps on street corners in confused manner.
I've been following the iMovie templates closely! Two things for me are that 1) Few people like using iMovie, and; 2) it isn't social. Those are two of my strongest hooks - this is something that doesn't require learning a tool, and you do it with your friends - it's participatory.
I haven't played with it myself, but I've seen a video of a presentation of it - and that's something I had in my mind when I wrote that... I thought op was trying to do something similar, but online. A brave task with lots of work, but might be explosive if done right IMO.
Wow, I seemed to have touched a nerve.

Dishonest and illegal behavior on the part of politically motivated climate scientists does reduce my belief in their impartiality, yes.
pinboard, usenet, and occasionally small community forums.
soon picasa web albums, rhapsody, and a vpn provider.

I'll pay for anything that saves me a lot time, has a great interface, and/or replaces something I already use.

I'd consider paying for a very usable todo-list app that synced over dropbox instead of charging me a monthly fee (i.e. remember the milk), and had an amazing user interface over the free google task apps.

I'd also love to pay for mint if it similarly just worked over something more secure/local, and had an open backend (I had accounts that didn't sync at all correctly on mint). Maybe wesabe should be revisited.

not counting vps'es or anything as that's more of a hobby/entrepreneurship thing.
You know, my major motivation for doing this isn't so much about the disruption, though I can see that - it's about enabling group creativity. I am not creative myself, but I the idea that you can get awesome social art by making the tools so simple...gets me very stoked indeed!
I worked on a similar startup back in 2000 in San Fran called Red Zeppelin, so I can say definitively that movie studio as an online service is not an original idea. That project even had local news anchor Stan Bunger as a founder. However, the cost of developing this kind of platform today is easily 20 times cheaper, with powerful UI tools that didn't exist in 2000, and there is now a broad mass social market that didn't exist in 2000.

Good luck!
http://www.internetnews.com/government/article.php/3839831/M...
I had my reservations before we started about the remote arrangement, but started anyway.

The thing is that he is good at his chosen field of technical expertise(with years of experience in big companies), but I am finding out that if he needs to learn new technologies quickly, it is a huge struggle.
Not all Americans can afford $50 USD / month for a luxury service. There are also wide swaths of the US that don't have any better options since telecoms refuse to build more infrastructure.
Sure. Freenode and EFNet tend to have significant concentrations of talented developers and developer/managers.

I think many people would be surprised at the caliber of people who idle( usually as ops )on the various programming-related IRC channels. Of course, these channels also attract droves of newbies looking for help, often with elementary homework projects. But if you use a decent vetting process, sorting signal from noise can be fairly trivial.
I pitched my idea to my gf and she said it was dumb :( I started working on it anyway (heh) and since I have seen funding given to a similar idea on a TV program and have seen a similar idea get a lot of attention on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349587).

So I would recommend trying more than one person anyway and don't let it get you down if the few people you try don't give you a good response.
True, I don't know what percentage of contributions to PHP are made while in employee of a corporation funding said contributions, but there are commercial supporters of PHP out there. I'm surprised how few people don't know that Zend exists.

The original comment just struck me oddly because I've come to assume that a large portion of the software that I use regularly was originally developed as an amateur project, or by amateurs.
"Narrated" might have been an inexact choice of words. Most of this will be webcam and mobile footage - what will drive much of the quality will be the words that are said and how they are arranged in sequence, both before and after production. So - narrative just means that unlike a shared photo or video album, or slideshow, there's people talking and it makes sense...
Netflix website and ability to instantly watch movies both unavailable.
Although I personally can appreciate what Google was trying to do here, even if it was self serving, I have to say that I agree with the judge. Hopefully, this setback will make Google come up with a better plan.
I like Meetup a lot and I've had a couple active Meetups for a couple years.

The thing I don't like is that the feature they've been seem to be copied from Facebook rather than being specific to Meetup - especially, it would be nice to have to calendar and event oriented and less chat-oriented (especially, it's annoying getting extra-info about event I already decided not to go to).

But the valued offered by Meetup is in many ways better than the Facebook equation; Meet people you don't already know face-to-face rather than chatting online with people you've known forever anyway.
If you're not already swearing at your screen, you're clearly not programming, motherfucker.
this has been a great set of blog posts.

since your covering all the bases. you should look at the bloom filters.

something like this could work and be created on the server.

http://dren.ch/js-bloom-filter/

(not the newest post has a compatible perl and ruby impl)

Ilya Grigorik has a couple of relevant posts

http://www.igvita.com/2008/12/27/scalable-datasets-bloom-fil...

and

a ruby + redis backend.

https://github.com/igrigorik/bloomfilter

here are some of the memory footprints that Ilya got

* 1.0% error rate for 1M items, 10 bits/item: 2.5 mb
* 1.0% error rate for 150M items, 10 bits per item: 358.52 mb
* 0.1% error rate for 150M items, 15 bits per item: 537.33 mb
Well, personally I'd never start a partnership with someone that wasn't even. If they're not worth half they're not worth partnering with.

There are exceptions: if I invested in the company I might end up with more equity based on that investment, but it would still start at 50/50 on day one.

No one feels bad if you put in $500k to get an extra 20%. But just arbitrarily deciding one guy gets an extra 20%? That's going to gnaw at you later.

You said you put in 70% of the money and he put in 30%. Is he willing to match your contribution to get himself up to 50%?
Yes, of course. Wedding, anniversaries, birthdays.. There are A LOT of template companies out there (like digital juice), comping/editing for a user is a challenging task (and might be fun to make :)), but IMO if you could provide them with a layout tool for story structure, it would be a killer. Like that imovie thing mentioned. I purposely called it a layout tool, since you need only a basic structure to hold it through, not a full blown script (at least not for initial kickoff). I'm sure you've sen Syd Field's workshops and stuff like that.

If you could hook up with some template guys (to cut down costs of making them yourself - both money and time wise), maybe hook up with guys like dramatica to devise a simpler version of structure process, and you do the tech part for comp/editing... you'd have something that nobody currently has, and online... I bet youtube guys would be interested if you lose interest in the business along the road. Of course, you could do all the steps without partnerships, but it would take a long time. Just my 2cs.
Would love to talk to you about the experience - can we go offline?
Here's an interesting tweet from one of their developers.

http://twitter.com/ReinH/status/50348989366796288

> Your password in the database is SHA512 encrypted, but we're not taking chances.

I hope he knows what he's talking about and is just tired from the past few days.
I think the same argument can be made with regard to iPhone apps running on iPad. iPhone apps on the iPad are not very pleasant but if you absolutely must have that iPhone app on your iPad then you can put up with a suboptimal experience just to have the functionality.

I think the same thing occurs on the desktop. Many times I use iPad applications and wish they were available on the desktop. iPad applications especially I think can work very well on the desktop due to the large display.

But don't take my work for it. Have a look at the streamtome app on the mac app store. The interface mimics that of the iPad. I am not sure if it uses chameleon but there's a good chance I would guess.

http://itunes.apple.com/app/streamtome/id405892506?mt=12
Also - and obviously - let me know if your "single" status changes :-)
Thanks so much. From the consensus it definitely seems like python might be best to get my feet wet, although I've heard ruby is a bit cleaner. I'll dive into python and see how it goes. Thanks for all the help!
Well, the answer is obviously "yes". I'm not sure what kind of elaboration you're looking for, here.

To be fair, though, we're a few too many years in to really be called a startup any longer.
They might still have a security hole big enough to drive a freight train through, but that specific attack will never happen again given that they've shut down the shared failover server.
My friend Billy worked on the app. They gave Cappuccino a try but eventually went with custom JS.
Trolls in the Christian Science Monitor?
This doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu, at least not for me.
Sounds like an awesome idea...definitely tech/infrastructure heavy. I can see you easily burning through a ton of cash on this.

If done properly, could be an awesome service...but it seems so easy to mess it up and end up flaming out.

Don't mean to be a downer, just encouraging you to be cautious and make sure the product is extremely easy/straight-forward to use for the consumer.

Done right, and priced right, I would definitely use this.
NYC judge calls off plans for Google library
Not yet, but we have been thinking about ways to expose filtering. Certainly, at the very least, we'd want people to be able to filter easily by tags they care about, gender, location, etc. Just tough to get the level of control in there without an abortion of a UI. We'll keep thinking about it though!
When I asked for a raise to my limit they denied me, on the basis that my usage was insufficient. Of course, my usage was low because I hadn't launched my product fully because I didn't have enough instances to serve a lot of customers ... catch 22.

So I had to build out a rather convoluted architecture that used the loophole of deploying to multiple regions and failing over to whichever region would give me an instance ... which gives me up to about 80 instances ... just barely enough for me to get going with a trial beta program.

Which is all just to say, it is slightly more than just a "conversation" that you need to have to get a higher limit.
Agreed. My company's offering opened my eyes to two things:

1. Many people, even in the States, have sloooow connections at home.
2. Many people have very poor cell/GSM/GPRS coverage. We still have to provide a POTS modem for our handheld data collection devices[1].

[1] We just released a new device (smartphone) that supports a POTS modem. Think of that! A cellphone that transfers data via a dial up modem.
Definitely - baby steps, but there is a TON of simplification/guiding that can be done for users around story.