skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Ultimate Wordpress Framework
"Ideas are worthless" means that having some idea about how to make some money is cheap and worthless. It has to be instantiated quite laboriously with a lot of additional effort and lots of other ideas supporting the original core one. You can tell this happens because ten startups may start with the same "idea" but end up with completely different concrete solutions on different platforms with different tradeoffs and each taking ten man-years of work to create. It's in those ten man-years of work that the value lies, not the core idea.

As proof that is where the value lies, many solid businesses exist that have done the work but haven't even hardly got an "idea" the way startup founders think of it, just exploited opportunity. What's the "big idea" behind a graphics design firm, or a plumbing company? On the other hand, try making money with an uninstantiated idea. Where the value comes from is pretty clear.

Now that you've presumably done some of that work, the core original idea remains as useless as ever, but the work done around it to get it some distance down the path to instantiation is not. A new idea would be starting back at square one, and once again be, yes, worthless.

I doubt that he really wants the idea so much as he wants to move forward with the instantiation.

(Ideas with no instantiation effort put into them are worthless because basically supply is effectively infinite.)
Two weeks ago we started migrating servers to Rackspace Cloud from Slicehost and it appears to be equivalent in pricing to slightly less expensive for us. YMMV depending on bandwidth, storage needs, RAM.
Why do they have that requirement?
I honestly want to challenge you to define the term "better." Is "better" measured by the degree of "feasible execution," "profitability," "match to consumer needs" or a combination of those?

Other than that, here are my thoughts

1) Ideas aren't cheap. Not good/executable ideas anyways. Those ideas are sparked by work, experience, time invested into research, fostering a good environment that encourages ideas/competition.

I'm sure you can ask a 5 year old on his ideas on how to end world hunger and compare that of someone who is 30 or 40 something. Both ideas were cheap, but who's is better?

2) As mentioned by someone else here, not all ideas are executable or worth executing.

3) Personality traits. Not everyone find pleasure in thinking, have you had a friend who brushed you off every time you bring up an ideas? In addition there are many internal and external factors that help create or hinder ideas such as level of conformity at the work place, tolerance to risk etc
It's brilliant because it preempts those sharks who would inevitably try to cash in on the popularity of Banksy et al.'s work. They would commercialize, productize, and commoditize it.

Of course that would defeat the purpose of the original. But people would come to associate the forms (spraypaint stencil, physical pranks, etc) with the corporate message, and then anyone who saw the originals would think of the corporate message instead of the subversive one.

The movie invents a character who represents those commercial interests. Mr. Brainwash tries to cash in on the popularity of the art by copying the forms without the meaning. By the end of the movie he is a laughingstock - and the audience has been trained to avoid capitalistic dreck in the form of art. Banksy mentally inoculated the audience against exploitation!
Agreed. I have a reasonable amount of monthly bandwidth use that is unavoidable because that server distributes content to few dozen semi-offline touchscreen kiosks.
Arch Linux review
Please read the sentence (http://www.supremecourt.tas.gov.au/cops/monks_k_m). Here's the judge's own description of her:

"You are 33 years old. You have one conviction for stealing in 2002. I accept it was probably a relatively minor matter because it was dealt with by way of a fine. Your upbringing was unstable in the extreme. You lived in the streets for most of your teenage years and became involved in drinking alcohol and drug taking. You have been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. You are socially isolated and spend long periods at home alone and accessing the Internet. You have no family support being largely estranged from parents and siblings. You are in receipt of a disability pension. You have incurred debts and have difficulty managing money. It is doubtful that you will ever repay the money stolen by your use of the card."

Evidently she spends a lot of time on the Internet, so she is not clueless in that sense, but from this description she doesn't sound very educated either.
SEO Planning & the MoSCoW Method
One of the challenges facing in-house SEO departments is encouraging others to acknowledge the importance of SEO during common business processes — from the conception of ideas to actual fulfillment. Not only must you excite others about the potential benefits but also be able to address why it matters by referencing core SEO approaches and how they influence a project’s success.
Ask HN: Clients schedule online appointments?
Does anyone know of a good product to have clients schedule online? Something that syncs with ical/google cal? Don't like tungle :(
<I>Nobody on earth has a viable long-term strategy for managing waste products today,</i>

IIRC this is not true. There are, however, a strategies that people don't like.

Doesn't mean they're not viable.
I'm not defending cops; I'm defending logic. I'm simply proposing an alternative logical explanation. Without the additional information you just provided, my explanation was equally plausible. Talk to me in a less public forum and I'll tell you exactly what I think about cops shooting pets.
That's the paradoxical effect. It happens, sadly, with most psychiatric medicines. No one really knows why, but a small percentage of people end up getting worse. That could have been at play with your wife. Or it could have been a nocebo (negative placebo) effect, or just the course of the attack. For example, the worst panic attacks tend to come on suddenly with a defined liminal point (not an upward creep of anxiety throughout the day) and peak 3-7 minutes afterward. If she took the Xanax at the liminal point and felt worse 5 minutes later, that's not because of the drug, but the panic attack's initial upward swing.

The truth is that benzodiazepines don't really abort a panic attack-- at least not in the short (<5 minutes) term. Nothing really can. What benzos are great for is recovering from a panic attack and preventing it from rolling into another one. If your wife felt shitty for 5 minutes, but great at T=30 minutes, then it's not the drug's fault because the drug worked.

SSRIs also have a paradoxical effect. I think SSRIs are somewhat like a less risky version of electroconvulsive therapy: they induce a change of state in the brain, and the brain's response gets it out of a depressive cycle, but it's not clear why one state change ("shock") works and another doesn't. To make it weirder, when people are on SSRIs for a while there's a tendency for the drug to stop working ("poop out"). No surprise: this sounds like tolerance. However, at this point both raising and lowering the doses can work. So it seems like any change in this state variable is what can cause the improvement, but no one really knows. (That said, never hard taper on an SSRI, and definitely don't reduce dosage without talking to a doctor.)
I don't put much value in "designers" personally. I'm only interested in people that can do all the front-end work: Javascript/HTML/CSS and graphical elements (logo, UI elements, etc).

A really good one is worth just as much as a good developer in my experience.

Here's a quite broad range: $60k-$120k salary and 0.25% - 2.00% equity (with vesting) in a company that has raised some money. Heavier on salary and lighter on equity as the company progresses.
Dependency Injection in Scala: Beyond the Cake Pattern
As much as I agree with you about 'disposable computing', he's not really advocating disposing of the computer - he's selling it to somebody else. In the process, he's allowing somebody who couldn't otherwise afford it to buy a long-lasting machine like yours.

It may even be true that he's helping the environment by allowing more people to buy longer lasting machines.
I understand why you chose not to use Google Analytics, but doesn't Mixpanel solve the exact problem you're attempting to solve?
Does anyone else get really irritated when they see social-sharing type link buttons nowadays? It just feels like a blatant attempt to exploit my social graph.

I think this is cool, but not cool enough for $25 and definitely not cool enough for me to trust you after you over-hyped it so much.

There was a time when you could actually use myspace to meet interesting (real) new people. Then all of a sudden the signal-to-noise ratio imploded and the service became worthless. The value of the social graph is increasingly being coopted as people figure out how to exploit it.
A startup is like a science experiment because its product design is a hypothesis about its market and its product is the experiment to test that hypothesis. And you the entrepreneur are the scientist conducting an experiment.
I like to think if it as a multiplier:

idea * execution = outcome

idea * 0 = 0. "Ideas are worthless without execution"

1 * execution = execution. "with hard work, any decent idea can succeed"

100 * execution = something amazing. "great ideas can change the world"
Yes, I got this e-mail today and was most impressed that it went on for so long without providing any information useful to me, the customer. None of the links in it go to anything that is useful to me, either. It's nice that they agonized over their business decision but now that they've made it surely the important thing is to tell us how exactly it is going to affect us and what we need to do. None of that is mentioned. Makes me feel like they really are not taking any customer concerns seriously.
What is the possible use for this? Protecting children from mere profanity doesn't do a thing for protecting them from actually potentially offensive content, which if anything is what you should be more concerned about.
Hi orijing, I cover this in more detail elsewhere but the happiness is found through the ANEW dataset. This dataset scores a few thousand English words with sentiment values from 1 (very unhappy) to 9 (very happy). I find the happiness value for each word in a tweet and then average that value by the amount of words in a tweet to get the happiness value for each tweet.
You don't understand. Ideas are cheap the way DNA is cheap. It is extremely inexpensive to generate one million different strands of DNA. What is expensive is to test them all and figure out which one, if any, might code for something worth having.

If you think for a while, you'll very likely think of a better idea. The problem is that you'll also think of 100 or 1000 not-so-good ideas at the same time, and you have to decide which ideas to keep and which to throw away, and you'll probably guess wrong. It's the testing that is not cheap, and that we wish to make as cheap as possible.
The Register is a tech tabloid, not a broadsheet.
Very good interview. No matter if you use c# or not, Anders' view on programming topics is always interesting and fun to watch.
Startup Founder Lessons: Scott Dunlap On Raising Series A Mistakes
It might be related, but from the release schedule it seems pretty clear that at most Slicehost prompted Linode to release this feature a few months earlier than planned.
If that is correct, it follows that one should seek out the best people to work with, no matter whether one is more of an engineer or a visionary.
Not a college student? Find someone who is. – beware of financial plans predicated on fraud.
Art today is all about this kind of ultra-committed theatre and manufactured image. Authenticity is dead and doubting it is no longer cool. Is it a hoax? Just don't even ask.

Pop music is the best example this, but shockingly it was pro wrestling that blazed the trail.
The Angry Birds Theory of Success
The real breakthrough wasn't github, but patch by Larry Wall,
http://groups.google.com/group/mod.sources/browse_thread/thr... together with UUCP.

In the grand picture, github is just a nice frontend to patch that also replaces UUCP with something more modern.
Interesting. You're right, it happens in all vocations, students retention of material varies in direct proportion to the perceived importance of the topic. Not many people will work on constitutional law (not much money there, I guess); however, just by such reasoning the Internet Law course should be a hit, because cases involving technology are skyrocketing and will only increase.

Hmm, it seems Stanford Law school has tons of courses in 2nd/3rd year dealing with this, e.g. http://www.law.stanford.edu/program/courses/details/481/Comm.... I guess other law schools have it, too. So maybe we just have to wait until the tech savvy judges filter through the system.
Not sure if access to the market is much of a leverage. I think most players in the mobile game seek to establish their own markets anyway. The phone makers certainly do.
present it as an alternative to her textbooks, during designated study time.
No kidding? I've been dying for a good Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Tell me how?
WhisperMonitor for Android Released - Dynamic egress filtering Firewall
"Warning! Our billing systems have detected that you may have inadvertently removed the SIM card from your power meter and plugged it into your mobile device. Please be aware that Enhanced Roaming Charges may apply to further usage."
Here's a good analogy:

NYC Cabs charge $2 per mile while their driving. So a 20 mile trip costs $40. But you're arguing that since the car gets 20 miles per gallon of gas, it should only cost $4.
An idea is a direction. If he wants to move forward with the instantiation he's moving forward in the same direction. That's like saying paraphrasing isn't plagiarism. It's not the same if it's different.

You can tell this happens because ten startups may start with the same "idea" but end up with completely different concrete solutions

Airbnb is an idea. If you do it a little bit different it's still the same idea. The value lies in what the customer receives, not the man-years. If you've built something with large customer benefit then you've done something. But the customer benefit comes from the direction the original idea took.

Now that you've presumably done some of that work, the core original idea remains as useless as ever

If the idea has changed completely then yes, but that's probably a different idea. Google search is still Google search even though they've added countless man-years to it.

He wants the idea because he wants to solve the same customer problem in the same way. Especially if the original idea unveiled a problem that was ignored. An idea can often identify a problem. No amount of implementation can do that.
Critical Customisation Cost of Software
> It’s not obvious where to start.

This is coming up again and again; this blog post is another data point I read recently, about a couple of projects dedicating time specifically to get potential new contributors up and running:

http://blog.lydiapintscher.de/2011/04/18/how-vidalia-and-gim...
Apple makes it VERY easy to migrate your entire system across machines, thus lubricating this entire process.

That combined with resale make this kit very attractive to their customer base who can instantly choose to be in your camp or the author's camp.

On the other hand, the market probably doesn't value modifications or add-ons as well, so re-selling my year-old MBP with optical replaced by SSD, 750GB 7200RPM rust platter, and 8GB RAM would probably not be "cost effective".
The cost of data on cell-phone plans has most certainly been an issue in the past. There are simply too many cases to cite. My service provider in the UK limits my data to £40/month and texts me to let me know that it is is over £20 when abroad. The same thing can be done in every service provider in the EU as far as I know. I don't for a minute think that Australia's telcos wrote all their own backend software and I don't believe that this would be a high technical cost. Everything that I ever read about service plans in Oz say that the telcos there are particularly bastardly and this story resonantes with that quite precisely.

As part of the fine, the telco should be made good on damage accrued, i.e. the actual cost incurred. I certainly don't expect the court to allow them to profit on the crime. The contract was between the power company and the telco. Since the data was not used by the power company, I don't see that the contract is a valid point of reference at all. If I cut through a mains water pipe and spill 20,000 gallons of water, should I be charged at $10 per 200ml as I may be charged that somewhere else in the country? No, that's ridiculous - it's the same argument that record labels use to calculate 'damage' from file-sharers.

"As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation."

I agree with you! But saying that the telco will be made less than whole if they aren't paid according to a contract that she didn't know about (which gives unfeasibly high weighting to data charges on a plan she didn't know about and which has no relation to the cost of the data transfer) is absurd.

"The unforeseen cost of her action is quite high. That's unfortunate. But, at the end of the day: if you commit a crime against another person or entity, you _are_ culpable for the results. If she did not want to be held responsible for the results of stealing another's property, she shouldn't have stolen it."

You're not charging her cost. You're charging her almost pure profit.
I think what they mean is that the initial idea is cheap.

The idea after much execution is expensive.
...when did it become acceptable to use "pwn" in a headline without quotes?

The Register is sort of an IT tabloid, so one could expect them to be on the leading edge of using IT slang in headlines and articles.
Probabilistic electoral methods [pdf]
The difference is, if you control all of the other variables in an experiment, you can always predict the outcome after you've proven the hypothesis in a science experiment. However, market behaviors change over time and so the experiment can never control enough variables to be right 100% of the time. That's why I like the business world. Change is fun!
Publicly available, yes, but real time? Really?

<picks up phone> hey skip, looks like a cruiser is on its way to you, yeah about 5 minutes away, burn the evidence.
I think all three of those criteria are good. I'd rank them by:

customer needs>feasibility>profitability

Agreed on your other thoughts as well.
Are they really protips? When I started out on eBay I just looked at what the most succesful auctions did and the above points were all included. Granted someone with not a lot of time might find these useful. A nice line I like to drop at the end of the text is:"all fun-bidders will hear from my lawyer" (this is translated from German so it might not work as well in English)

This shows that you're serious and has raised the price people are willing to go for to about 90% of what I originally paid, which is pretty impressive when you consider that it's used.
>Younger people (<30) have a drastically different ethical valuation of copyright related issues. Older people (>45-50) who still make up a large number of the judges who field these cases and executives who feel strongly about being infringed upon, have a different valuation.

In theory judges cast their judgement based on the statute. Whilst I think you have a point that there is a probably a general generational divide on public perception of copyright issues it is irrelevant to the position of the judge. Unless the law is changed their judgement should not change.

Judges are not (usually, in a democratic country) there to judge the zeitgeist and modify the law accordingly, that's partially what your administration is in power for.

>the idea that posting someone else's picture on your blog is worthy of a lawsuit will become laughable

Maybe. This won't happen until all news becomes free-gratis.

For example if that picture is a scoop on alien life, that might have cost a lot to obtain, then it creates a great commercial harm to the source to print the image without a license.

Of course you may believe that the right to commercial control of information should not exist. I could live with that, I think, but it would take many decades (probably several generations) to transform the world in to such a place IMO.
Nikon Image Authentication System Cracked
I can't provide the answer you're looking for because I've never used VPS.net, but I do want to gush about Linode for a minute:

I have to deal with tech companies all the time. I hate most of them. A lot. They always seem to blow it on customer service, core technology, or pricing.

But not Linode. The prices are really good, their technology is really really good (and they're constantly working on improving it), and their support...? Well, I've submitted a few support tickets (once was even along the lines of, "My backup server is acting strange, the disk isn't full and it can write to existing files but it can't create any new ones. I've been staring at it for about an hour now and I have no clue what's going on.") I've never had a response take more than 7 minutes. They've always been fast, friendly, and knowledgeable.

I really can't say enough good things about them.

They've occasionally had outages, including a couple of ugly ones in Fremont (not directly their fault). How many companies can you think of that are so awesome that, when that happened, it still doesn't tarnish their reputation in your mind?

One of my servers went from using only a little bandwidth to using 25Mb/s almost overnight (customer's website got featured on a radio show). The server never stumbled; I never got a notice along the lines of "hey, you're using a lot of bandwidth there, buddy", I never got throttled, it just worked.

If another VPS provider showed up tomorrow and offered almost everything Linode's offering, feature-wise, but for half the price, I'd stick with Linode.

I could bore you to death with crap like this for probably an hour. All it comes down to is, Linode is one of the few Really Great Companies out there right now, doing business with them is a joy, and I'd love to see them just completely own the VPS market.

edit: oh, and I've been with them since October 2009, which has given them plenty of time to annoy me. They haven't, not even once.
Quick way to share files between your computer(s) and Android Phone
The person who rips the SIM card out of their smart meter and uses to download stuff off the Internet isn't a consumer.
Also discussed by Bruce Schneier here:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/nikon_image_au...
Shame shame for not preloading their mouseover images too.
For perspective: IANA instructs RIRs to allocate no less than a /32 to each customer. That leaves 32 bits for those customers to resell smaller subnets, usually /64. 32 bits is as much as the entire IPv4 Internet, so they can sell as many /64 subnets as there are individual computers on the IPv4 Internet. So even if Linode only bought 1 of these /64 subnets, they would have 64 bits of address space to allocate to their customers. I think they can spare more than one :)