skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spore's specific combination of single and multiplayer content makes it a prime piracy target.

The advantage of highly multiplayer-centric games is that they are easier to protect against piracy; either by requiring an account to play online (which can be terminated) or by preventing identical CD keys from playing simultaneously. This can be circumvented by playing on a LAN or using Hamachi, but both solutions only work well with a specific coordinated group.

Spore's creature sharing multiplayer is easily sidestepped by piracy; it's possible to download all the user-created creatures via torrent post release. As that's the only multiplayer component of the game, there's very little difference in terms of piracy between Spore and any other single-player focused game.
Doug Crockford: 'I want a browser war'
Twiddle thumbs... whistle a bit...

On a more serious note, there was a link here to the "best" 100 Twitter accounts. That might help. Or not. I dunno: I stopped using Twitter.
Ah-ah-ah. It also happens on every last college campus in America.
If he's "proven" wouldn't he be wealthy enough to live off a measly $125k/yr for a couple years at least?
The very first computer I saw Unix on was a minicomputer/workstation in 1985. It had a 68020 processor running at 20 mhz, and had 4mb of RAM. It cost around $75k.
that slinkset.com looks sleek indeed!
Yep. Unix was written on a PDP-7 http://www.linfo.org/pdp-7.html -- probably with 8,000 or 16,000 words of memory (18 bit words), probably running on the order of several thousand instructions per second
Yeah, my first non-commodore computer was a blazing fast 33MHz 386 with 4MB RAM -- 1991 (~$3,400 by the way)

Damn, do I feel spoiled watching a modest app compile in a few seconds today!
Very cool. I have had a similar experience with Mibbit...

Next step, get rid of those threads and use non blocking IO ;)
I really like slinkset. Good execution on their part. I created a niche news site with them and when I'm ready to populate it and promote it I will.
with thin film solar printed on plastics that I'd guess are about as thick as the e-ink itself, why wouldn't you just go solar.
Who tries to look at a magazine in the dark?

Good to see e-ink actually getting out in the market now though.
He may be suggesting that you buy some Dohar Cattle Feed Company stock (that's what I get when I search Google Finance for 'DCF'), but it's probably a reference to discounted cash flow, a very useful tool for evaluating certain business.

The idea of DCF is to split up the value of an investment into chunks of future cash flow, and ask yourself how much you'd pay for each chunk. For a simple example, if you have a business that's sure to pay you $100, once, a year from now, you ask yourself: how much would I have to put in the bank, now, to get $100 on that date? That amount is the present value of that cash flow.

Now consider a business that will pay that same certain $100, but after two years. The principle is the same -- how much would you put into a bank account now to get that same $100 on the same date?

To further complicate things, imagine that you're betting on a coin flip: two years from now, you will get either $100 (heads) or $0 (tails). To figure out the net present value, you'd first determine the average outcome ($50), then decide how much you'd have to put in a risk-free account now to get that amount in two years.*

Put these together, and you can understand the DCF framework. Let's say you have a business that earned $100 last year, and that you expect to earn about 5% more each year thereafter. But in any given year, there's a 10% chance that the business will go under. The discounted future value is that same procedure, repeated for each year: the price you should pay is how much you'd invest in a bank account now for a 90% chance of $105 in a year, plus an 81% chance of $110.25 in two years, etc., or sum(100 * 1.05^n * .9^n * [1 - risk-free interest rate]^n).

So now all you have to do is 1) figure out what the business will earn every year from now until the end of time, and 2) figure out the intrinsic value of a given sum of money to be delivered at a given future date. These are both, of course, impossible. But rough estimates get you pretty close to where you need to be, and it provides a good way to compare two stable-growth businesses in the same industry (how much should you pay for a soft drink company growing at 3% each year, versus an otherwise identical company growing at 5% each year, for example?).

* This assumes you have an infinite tolerance for risk. But a one in a billion chance of one billion dollars is probably not worth a dollar -- or, rather, it's worth more than a dollar if you enjoy gambling, and less than a dollar if you intend to retire on it.

Edit: replaced a second '$105' with the correct number, $110.25.
First, I hope you weren't using the obscenely slow version of Perl that ships with RedHat.

Second, for more perf analysis, there are some very good unix tools for profiling & optimizing C code. Many of them free.
scumola, this should have been a blog post that you linked to. I'm not saying this because I don't think this is HN-quality material, it's actually an awesome little story to read. But if this was on a company blog somewhere, it would be generating juice for your company in addition to for HN.

This is great news and a great way to spread the word about your service. Don't let that opportunity go to waste!
Video Professor announces Haskell, Scheme, and Smalltalk training
Rest In Peace Van Wastell (1984 - 2008) : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
The marginal cost of walking down the street is nearly zero. Likewise, the marginal cost of reading a book is minimal. But since we're discussing an industry with very high marginal costs (doctors' time is expensive!), not to mention higher depreciation (libraries have plenty of books that are more than fifty years old; hospital equipment ages a little faster).

You're right. Almost nothing is 'free' by those criteria. Economists like to say that "There ain't no such thing as free lunch."
So much misinformation indeed! One reason, out of many, of course, that I stopped reading Slashdot was the amount of misinformation propagated there. I was afraid that I would read something false while in an insufficiently wary frame of mind and believe it. I'd hate to see the same start to happen here.
"Starting to feel growth issues on your back-end?"

I think you'd better get a doctor to look at that.
Do Ruby developers focus to much on beauty?
This is actually very different to those. Slinkset lets you set up a site with your own style, as well as pointing your domain at it. In effect the site isn't a subsection of reddit, it looks like it's your own site.

For something that hasn't cost us anything other than time, the support from the slinkset guys has been amazing btw.
Our Seedcamp 2008 Finalists
I recently met an engineer who drove from Portland to Sunnyvale on a single tank in his converted Jetta.
I can see the issue you're raising but to be honest providing slinkset don't upset their users there won't be a problem. If the worst comes to the worst, we'd migrate to hosting our own implementation, but chances are we'd pay for slinkset to host it providing it wasn't too expensive or we had sufficient return from the site.
LHC launching today 11:30pm Pacific Time
Thanks tptacek ;-) (no offense taken).
Here is a question [sorta on topic in this thread]... awhile ago I wrote a marketing tool that recommends social news sites based on content you provide it. The idea was to help people market stuff better by finding communities that want it. I ran into a problem coming up with a critical mass of sites though. I have about 70 before I got tired of looking.

What would you think of something like this applied to slinkset sites? Anytime a Slinkset site is created this directory could update itself and serve as a way for new people to find these niche communities.

My original prototype is at http://kindling.dashnine.org (I posted it to HN awhile ago)
Open-collaboration list of over 101 SEO Tools
Gottfried Leibniz and the origins of computational theory
> multi-threadded crawler in C

If your crawler is I/O-bound, then just wait till you discover epoll :)

Or, on a more general note, have a look at http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
Thanks :-)

I'll look through the drupal code with your post in mind - sounds like a good learning experience. About javascript: I agreee, it seems that jquery makes a lot of stuff trivial, unfortunately I only discovered it after having (poorly) implemented quite some javascript myself. As for the CSS - I've got that covered pretty well.
Custom fonts thanks to rendering SVG font definitions
Sounds a lot like the VC's and startups we see here, in many cases. (Well, not "here" per se, but say the TC 50, etc)
For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track
Squeak smalltalk port for iPhone/Touch
Did I find a security hole in OS X
Async MySQL Queries with C-API
Motorola A1600 Unlocked
Motorola A1600 is a wonderful 3.15 Megapixel camera which takes pictures in outstanding quality. The autofocus feature attached to the phone makes sure that your photos are in focus so that you don’t miss any detail of the shot.
Suggestions for experiment: Offline Internet entrepreneur
There are three in the slides (Christine Perkett, Kel Kelly and Lois Paul)... That's higher than average than the number of female CEOs in business, especially tech.
Personally I prefer new sales - it means you are still getting it right and not milking your customers.
Seth's Blog: Spin
This is exactly what I thought. This item was meant to be a geeky satire that pokes fun at both candidates.

Call it a bit comic relief for something that is taken so seriously!
DOJ Likely To Litigate To Stop Google-Yahoo Ad Deal
Berlin plans 'e-mobility' electric car network
Google to ‘anonymize’ user IPs after 9 months
This is one reason I like Python so much. Writing hooks into C/C++ is pretty easy. Often they are already there for you. For example, OpenCV is an excellent image processing library in C++, and already has hooks to Python.

Lots of companies take this approach, of Python + C/C++. A few that come to mind are Google, Weta, ILM, iRobot, and Tipjoy.
Schneier on Security: Identity Farming
Paxil Withdrawal Symptoms | SlashBe
"Does this algorithm make my memory footprint look big?"
FIFO Madness (A rant on hardware engineers)
Knight Rider like License Plate Hack
I've used it for similar purposes and had the same experience. Amazing service!

Who are these people doing the work? I turned my mom, a Stanford PHD grad onto it for a project of her's and now she does hits for fun. Sometimes it's not always about the money.
No, six weeks ago was just a guesstimate. You could probably try plotting the frequency of the words "gas prices" and similar phrases showing up in news stories over time to gauge interest (speaking of which, trend picking via time-dependent news analysis is a pretty good startup idea...)

In my opinion, gas prices are one of those things which people are maximally irrational about. Since they vary from day to day people are far more aware of how much they're spending, while other larger expenses are more easily ignored. For a couple of months people were selling their SUVs for cheap and buying new small cars for more than RRP -- I was almost tempted to pick up a cheap used Lincoln Navigator or similar just to take advantage of it.
Ask HN: Apple's "Let's Rock" Event. Where are watching it from? What are you expecting?
I'm going to be watching MacRumors.com liveblog since they always seem to be the fastest. Though the funny liveblog commentary from the guys at Gizmodo (live.gizmodo.com) is usually good too.

Where are you going to watch it?
I much prefer PAIP. For example, AIAMA does not seem to have anything approaching the PAIP chapters on how to optimize code. Some of which is specific to Common Lisp, but much of which is applicable to any programming language.

Anyone have a differing opinion?

EDIT: er, besides the author himself, I mean.
From the Hacker News Guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)
i don't care how efficient your code is, you can't crawl with two boxes
Ubuntu 9.04 to be called Jaunty Jackalope
Harvestman is written in Python.

http://www.harvestmanontheweb.com/
http://harvestman.everythingability.com/
It might be worth getting in touch with the guys at Slinkset and see what they have to say, I reckon they should be able to sort something out.

Nice site by the way!
Caching is also very much not limited in usefulness to I/O-bound operations; a cache hit can save a great deal of CPU time, too, if you have difficult-to-compute values that are sufficiently static to be worth caching.

Even if your whole dataset fits into RAM, you may still have that one O(2^N) algorithm that doesn't need to be run for every request. Voila! A perfect application for caching.
what about using open-source'd reddit?
I agree with being out of debt... it's been very critical in maintaining relative sanity when pushing through the tough times of a startup. Use credit cards to float a month's worth of expense, but always pay in full.

Here's what I've been doing recently, but I'm at a slight advantage since I'm self employed.

When possible, I try and use the time I spend working on client web projects to advance my own projects. For example, I'm researching CMSes for a client and myself. What I learn building their site, I can apply to my site during the evening and visa versa. Makes me much more efficient on both fronts, especially being able to work on both in tandem. And, knowledge retention is generally higher.

I spent about 3 days doing pretty extensive research and testing on TXP, WP, SilverStream, and EE. Selected SilverStream CMS and now a lot farther along in BOTH projects than I had imagined being just a few days ago.
Though, Reddit is open source now, right? So theoretically, if you had the chops you could go the DIY route.
Well one reason would be that the startup needs to be bought by someone in the right position to exploit it before it can become profitable.

So in that case, you could create a startup that in itself cannot be profitable, but when purchased by a larger company can become wildly profitable for them.

I don't think that's an unusual case.
A stock buyback only increases the fundamental value of the company if it results in an increase in dividends per share. A company that buys back stock instead of paying dividends, and also has no intention of ever paying dividends, would only be valuable in the way a baseball card is valuable.
Congrats. I'm sure that's a good feeling.
Er, Johnathan Schwartz has 12 updates (says 11 in the article) and we're supposed to think he's an actual Twitter user?

Some of the inclusions in the article seemed like kind of a stretch. A few of the people on this list are only barely "on Twitter."
Virtual worlds filled with real-world biases
You don't have complete information, so the market may know something about the stock that you don't. Even if you're right, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So you do need to know the market.
Mibbit is written in C? So you run it at home? How do you pay for the bandwidth?
It's a hell of a lot cheaper than the US in any event, and is something you never have to worry about.
Find things to do at work that will teach you things you need to learn for your startup.

For example, you need to choose between two ways of doing something on a screen and aren't sure which way users would like more. Instead of deciding yourself (we all know how well that often turns out), find a way to implement both ways at work and see how those users respond.

You've done good work for your employer and its users, you got paid for it, you've learned something invaluable for your startup, and you don't have to worry about IP issues (it's just an idea, right?)

Sometimes, if you change your thinking, you can turn what appears to be a liability into an asset. Although a day job sucks your time, it's a great way to get experience you need. Think of its as someone else paying you to do R & D.
What I don't understand is why everyone who praises Ferriss feels compelled to trash him in the same breath -- Merlin and yourself included.

It's like admitting that you like him or his ideas in front of the cool kids means you're some kind of sucker.

"Epic dbag" because he recommends auto-responders . . .?
Note to self: Never accept a mixtape from tdavis...

+1 for a rare LOL on hn. Thank you, SwellJoe!
Heh, no. I'm an SE @ 23andMe.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/016/160
i used an implementation of cilk when i crawled ~1000000 htmls from a social network in 2 hours (can't disclose -- the site went into maintenance during/after my experiments ... just to exercise my curiosity)

had to be root to raise the user's maxproc-max (previous experiments locked me out --- "sh can't fork" messages ... can't even ssh in)

it's done in a 100mbps amd2000+ 256 mb 40 GB IDE OpenBSD colo ... but i don't think the hardware matters that much (the cilk is really the key)
I'm not the one who modded you down, but... I'm having trouble seeing how this would work. What do you do if the code isn't up to par? Are you willing to basically pay - with both cash and time - for the privilege of educating the programmers you're using until they're up to your standards? Or to throw away their work and look for better programmers, possibly ad infinitum? Rewrite parts of the code yourself?

I haven't outsourced any projects so far. I have, however, worked on a project launched with an off-the-shelf script - it definitely saved time and effort upfront, but the code is far from great, so it's been more frustrating over time. I still haven't decided whether the tradeoff was worth it.

Have you actually used this strategy yourself, and if so, how did you make it work?
"Page is not available", is it just me :(
Given it only just got published, I imagine there's no public reference implementation yet? A quick search turned up empty, but I'd love to play with this. In particular, the conclusion drawn from slide 37 is important to me.
This may have been a fun and interesting project for you (and a great way to learn the unix utils), but I wouldn't recommend that other startups follow this path.

Rewriting something in C should be the last thing you do, not the first. The first thing you should do is find out why it's slow. In your case, it sounds as though you were fetching one url at a time (blocking). Switching to async io all could have fixed this.

Btw, if you're using the Gnu utilities, it's unlikely that they were written in the 60's and 70's (also, people were processing much smaller amounts of data back then).
Great post!

Please, HN, change the color of text in posts like the above. There is very little contrast between #828282 (copy) and #F6F6EF (background), and I for one am sick of having to fix this with Firebug.
I have been doing it now for about 8 months straight. Here's what I've been laboring on: http://clovercontent.com

- Use every spare moment you can find to work on your startup.

- If you're married, don't neglect your wife/husband. Make time for what's truly important.

- Stay up late, but don't forgo sleep.

- Slim down your feature set and only do what's absolutely necessary.

- Lock yourself away in a private area so you can get into the zone.

- DON'T USE CREDIT. If you can't afford something (hosting, etc.) wait until you can. Start your company without debt.

- Get friends and family to test your software. There's no better QA department than your spouse. Who could be more critical than the person you married.

- Sometimes you won't be able to work on your project for weeks. Don't sweat it. Wait it out and keep focused. Come back to it.

- Stay focused on completing the software, no matter what problems come up. You can complete it. You will mentally fight your own self telling you to quite. That's the hardest part.

- The question "why am I doing this?" will come up in your internal monolgue at least 5 times a day. You have to really want it to combat your own doubt.
Hoping to hear from everyone about this idea.
I'm not going to watch it, I'm going to work. The continual obsession with new releases is generally unhealthy.

When everyone is out buying brand new versions that will break, I'll pick up the stable release from the last announcement. :-)
Not quite, Mibbit is in Java. I took "c" to mean "currently unpopular non-hyped language". Much like Java is...
Mibbit runs on pretty much a single server at the moment so it's been a similar scaling exercise.

I'd definitely agree though with the OP... having limitations forces you to look at better ways to do stuff, and ways to squeeze every last drop out of the hardware/resources.
New Honda Hybrid to be Called 'Insight', Priced Around $19K
Thus the core of the problem: if you don't "get" Facebook/Twitter, it doesn't help to read about other people who do.

The article explains how it works -- ambient awareness and all that -- but it doesn't explain why I'd want that, if I'm not one who already "gets it". Why do I want 1000 asymmetric "weak ties"?

I have noticed that the people who use twit/book the most are those with cell phones. If you don't have a Blackberry welded to your hip, tweeting "I'm making a sandwich" has way too much overhead.
I think the biggest risk is "death by fizzling out". Startups are fun... at first. Eventually, they hit a point where they (hopefully only briefly) aren't remotely fun and are instead hard freakin' work that you'd love to avoid. So spend some time engineering a "system" where you can't slack off (have a co-founder who depends on you and have recurring scheduled work days to avoid the "Meh, I'm pretty slammed this week-- I'll get back to things next week" state.

The second biggest risk is failure to pull the trigger (or inability to do so). Know what your target is for jumping into it full-time (and make sure co-founders are on board with this target). Be sure you have the financial means to jump when the time comes-- start saving now. PROFIT generally comes a long time after REVENUE.

I wrote a guest post on VentureHacks on this exact topic (http://venturehacks.com/articles/half-assed ). As is often the case, some of the comments are really valuable.
I wonder what the result would be if you ... wrote the code that's now in C, in Python instead. I suspect the speed would be very similar.

Is that a joke?
IIRC, my first unix machine was a 16 MHz 68020 with about a megabyte of RAM and about 200 MB of fixed disk storage.

It served around 40 terminals.
I just posted some tips here: http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2008-09-09

o Assess yourself
o Assess your market
o Assess your day job
o Use Lisp
o Prioritize continually
These two books look interesting, too:
http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/ http://www.spinellis.gr/codequality/

As for your suggestion on reading Understanding the Linux Kernel, is it readable even if I haven't taken a course on Operating Systems or something equivalent?
The first one I saw (not used - the first one I used was a 680x0 box) was a Z-80 based Cromemco monster running Cromix on less than 512K.

Unix can be really small, if we sacrifice some stuff.
obama is the clear choice for the future
Well crap. That's a lot of student loans :-(
I can't find a source saying how they measure in either direction. Link? Thanks!
The Big Ideas of Computer Science, Part 1
unfortunately I only discovered it after having (poorly) implemented quite some javascript myself.

That's only unfortunate if your poorly-implemented JS is live on a popular site and you have to maintain it. :) Otherwise it's a great educational experience!

You don't realize how great your tools are until you try to live life without them.
Steve Jobs says nothing is wrong with his health ...
But investors are still skeptical !!!! and wonder who after Steve Jobs?