skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a very interesting point. How much would people be willing to pay for social networks.

It seems that people would stick with one general site(Facebook) and potentially a few more specialized ones.

Unfortunately, if the price ends up being too high for most people, they will leave and go on to somewhere else, thus making it less worth it for you to have it so you'll end up leaving too.

If a major social network did start charging, a lot of people would probably move to a competitor unless the offering was too good to leave..

Hmm. Very interesting point though.
Yeah, those old developers would think about what their users were doing - for example, moving between fields would happen in a sensible order, NOT just in the order the HTML was laid out in. Those old apps might look clunky to modern eyes but really, they were polished to a degree that rarely happens these days.
That sounds a little like http://amiestreet.com/ as well.
PHP's __autoload Sucks
Which is a better commodity to back a currency?

- Gold, where quantity is dependant on the supply of a single good dug out of the ground.

- Debt, where quantity is dependant on the supply of all goods (including labour).
Can I have one too?
The problem with this is that I want my RAM to run applications on it, not just the OS alone. I want to say to Vista: "fuck off, this is my RAM, for my applications, to solve MY problem, not yours".

We don't buy RAM to run operating systems, we buy RAM to run software, and OS must be our "Santa's little helper", not "Santa's rape-me-in-the-ass hairy inmate".
Yes, relaunching XP as 'Windows Minimal' would be great move. Right now, they are their own enemy.
They didn't turn in their thesis.
I'm no mechanical engineer, but when I pop the hood of my car, I'd rather see something minimal than a "convoluted mess." Likewise, I'd think a user would -- in theory -- like to be able to view source and see clean intelligent-looking code. Today most people seem to know/care more about cars than web sites and it's easier to tell high quality auto parts from high quality code. I suspect that will change in the future though.
MIT's logo is really retro. It looks like something you'd see on East German TV circa 1987.
ASK HN: Is there a free online code repository available for private use ?
I am looking for a free online code repository like github but available for individual private use.
Brevity is overrated. And make sure you send me a link for those shirts! ;)
Good point... except that the number of eyeballs on Earth is limited, so the total amount of profit to be made in the market is presumably also approaching zero.

Or so it would be if "approaching zero" was not just a glib metaphor.
I actually meant relaunching Vista with a new brand (I mean, in many cases each release of OS X - esp the last ~2 releases is essentially aservice pack - updated kernel, some UI tweaks and some extra hangon apps and it works great giving it a new name even though it's officially a minor patch level).

But, come to think of it - XP would work as well. MS is currently rebranding XP as a 'portable' OS ; they're supplying it to companies making mini laptops like OLPC, Asus [eeepc] and Cloudbooks. I think thats as far as they want to go because they're aware they're cannibalizing Vista business by leaving XP in the market. For me, it just means when I install VMWare on my Macs and Linux boxes that that cracked copy of XP is getting a few more years of use ;)
Is quantity of debt dependent on any supply? How does it depend on the supply of labour?
Without comparing the price of 512MB RAM seven years ago with the price of 3GB now the whole comparison is rather pointless. Maybe Microsoft should've better communicated Vista RAM requirements to computer vendors. I know someone who bought a computer with 512MB RAM and Vista on it. Imagine that!
I was thinking "another solid post from reg". Then boom, didn't see that coming. It's too bad it will be his last. Looking forward to seeing what's next. Keep us posted, Reg.
Well, now there can be legitimate competition in the e-learning market, at least (c.f. Blackboard patents)
No reasonable commentary on the lack of IPOs can exclude the increased cost of being a public company. For example, complying with SOX alone costs 1-3 million dollars a year.
First paper-based transistors
Politics and the New Media: Don't Fear Twitter
The CPM might be getting smaller and smaller but it's far from 0 as the numbers of pageviews on facebook applications are usually huge.
A lot of them could use a little dose of reality.

But if the textbook manufacturers don't also get a dose of it (or a swift kick in the teeth, I'm flexible on the matter), it won't solve the entirety of the problem. A few years ago, my girlfriend paid nearly $400 for a single book/CD-ROM/online combo for one class--and the CD-ROM/online service was licensed to disallow resale. That was the most expensive, but many classes require three or four texts at $100+ each. So, even if the schools themselves lower admissions dramatically, there's still a huge swath of costs that lower income folks won't be able to manage. It just seems like the textbook industry has gone mad with power and greed...I managed to make it through school with almost entirely used books from alternate sources (usually prior editions, even, which could be had for pennies on the dollar from local used bookstores), but the textbook manufacturers seem to be figuring out ways to prevent that--more frequent new editions, more dramatic changes between editions to make it harder for students to find their way in older editions, and the associated media licensing tricks to prevent legal used sales entirely.
A Blog for  web and mobile Arab startups 
ArabCrunch is a blog dedicated for profiling and reviewing arab statups and established companies in web and mobile.
Empowering the team: partial budget delegation
For those interested in a tuition-free, high-quality engineering college, consider Olin College.

I didn't go there, and I have the student loans to prove it.
From the article:

Bumper Sticker was an experiment to see how fast the Light Engineering Development (LED) team at LinkedIn could build a Ruby on Rails Facebook application.

Based on that quote, I don't think they had a financial goal with it... although now might be a good time to think of one.
RedCloth 4.0 Released: 40x Faster Textile Rendering
I used to think Gold, but fundamentally I've come to believe that debt is probably the better choice as it promotes growth.

Paraphrasing Neal Stephenson debt based currencies are backed by the ingenuity of the people, which is always growing and improving. Asset backed currency such as gold are backed by a finite amount of gold.

Where gold still has it's value is in it's transparency. No one controls gold, but with say the USD or EUR corruptable entities known as governments can either print more money or take more loans devaluing the currencies. The history is littered with cases of this happening. I'm personally pretty bullish on the dollar, but who knows.

Another problem is that they have government enforced monopolies, which kills competition on the local level.

Just look at the current attacks by the US DOJ on e-gold and on the http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/raidalert_11_27_2007.h... .
I think the difference here is that civil disobedience involves breaking the law in order to uphold some moral standard. Under the current copyright law's safe harbor provisions, no law is being broken by a service provider who is willfully, evenly blind and non-encouraging to the infringements by individual users so long as the provider complies with takedown notices. Knowingly waiting for and responding to the notices is what is required by the law. I choose not to see it as "looking the other way" any more than google or youtube is looking the other way.

The current copyright regime is unsustainable in this digital age. RIAA/MPAA tactics are unconscionable. There must be a better system. I think there are both ethical and business advantages to being part of the solution rather than just shying away from the problem. I think that avoiding developing a promising technology like justin.tv just because users can potentially use it to infringe copyright is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Valley’s Hot New Young Thing
What's the typical caffeinated-beverage consumption for a News.YC reader? I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but I'll down 4-6 cups of tea on a normal weekday.
We believe you.
RubyFringe: Day 2 Notes, Part 3
Disclaimer: I'm a GitHub guy but also a big Rubyforge user (3 years and a handful of gems there).

That said, the technical issues raised in this article could be addressed in other ways: RubyGems could be patched to search for dependencies in all of the gem sources and Rubyforge could add a way to remove gems from the index (no more outdated 'mash').

But why? Why not just keep Rubyforge central? It's worked well so far.

A few reasons.

Foremost is this idea of an "official" RubyGem. What does that word mean? It means that if I disappear, so does my project. If I lose interest, my project dies. With larger projects this doesn't happen so often. It would be hard for Rails or MooTools to just vanish. But for smaller projects, which are legion, this is a constant. People lose interest - often right when you become interested. Let's call it Defunkt's Law.

Defeating Defunkt's Law is one of the primary motivations behind GitHub. Let the Internet decide the 'official' version of smaller projects. If you Google 'mash' and my version comes up before mbleigh's, guess what? Mine is the official version. We have all these tools for deciding what's good content on the web, why not apply them to code?

sr's git-wiki is a great example of this. Google "git-wiki" and al3x's version comes up - a fork with distinct features. The market has spoken.

It's true that within GitHub, finding the "blessed" or "official" or valuable fork is not the easiest thing in the world. But we're working towards this goal - which project in this tree is the most interesting? Which is clearly a feature fork? Which are just impulse forks?

While entropy can seem scary, we believe the future of development is distributed.
Hey, I have a great idea - why don't we take the service of money out of the hands of government and place it in the hands of private citizens on the free market? Then the market will decide which is best.
When the problem is this big, there's generally no single "real problem."
yeah there's little difference between software patent litigation and extortion... I can say the same of business process patents; they might as well allow patents of cooking recipes at this rate

finally a good change of direction for the USPTO
A Secret Society of 30 Million
I like slinkset, it fills a void between the techies (who can use reddit os) and the non-techies.

http://design.slinkset.com/

Enjoying it.
I confirm that it's not enough, mainly because technology startups aren't actually seeing much of that money in the first place.
Most investments are going to construction / real estate projects, while technology ventures have to struggle for cash. Only a handful of VC firms are technology oriented, and even they don't have much projects in their portfolios.

But money isn't the only challenge, there are many more, like internet penetration, immature online advertising market, the environment, ...etc.
She is responsible, but so are we, unfortunately. Because when you get enough of these people making bad decisions, it impacts the economy as a whole.

Figuring out why people are continually making poor decisions regarding debt is not about finding someone other than them to blame. It's about trying to figure out what needs to change in our system so we can avoid hurting the whole.
Tech blogging by people who actually build stuff (like Spolsky or Winer) is often pretty good. You may disagree with a lot of their views, but there's also some good insight too.

Tech blogging by people like Scoble or Arrington, on the other hand, is even worse than mainstream media. Over the years they've proven to be at least as susceptible to hype ("Silverlight will reboot the Web") with far lower ethical standards and general journalistic professionalism of MSM.
Dude, That Is So Fringe
Now if only BlueCloth would follow suit. I was forced to ditch it entirely for RDiscount due to speed and incomplete implementation of Markdown.
It used to be that way in the US and to some very watered down extent still in Scotland.

These were all privatly issued USD notes from the 19th century:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/05/bank-notes-from-fre...
Most of the applications are so clustered with ads, so that everbody is probably ignoring them.

I do however sometimes find the facebook ads (the main site) highligy targeted (I even clicked twice on those). I bet they charge more than a few cents per 1000 impressions.
I would order the "restricted asian edition" textbooks on-line for about a quarter of the normal price. The quality is not as good, but the content is certainly there. I never exactly understood the legality of doing this, but it's certainly a testament to the growing problem that is the college textbooks market.
It's incredible how quickly HN has transformed into reddit.
I usually stay away from caffeine entirely (occasionally a Coca-Cola but that's it) except when I really go into crunch mode, when I'll drink 2-3 Bawls or Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso cans to get through an all-night-and-into-the-morning marathon.
On the other side of the coin, no reasonable commentary on the lack of IPOs can exclude the decreased barriers of entry for building a lifestyle business.

If a couple of guys can build a seven or eight figure revenue business with nothing more than sweat equity, savings, a little debt, and maybe an angel, they may not be in such a rush to cash out.
First the Yahoo deal, now this - seems like Microsoft is just running out of ideas.

Macs aren't selling because of Apple's cute ads or clever slogans. They are selling because Windows' much larger desktop software range doesn't make as much difference now that users do most of their stuff online - so customers pick the OS which they judge as easier to use and more stable.

On the corporate market, I doubt all the IT managers who refuse to upgrade their company to Vista will change their mind once they see a picture of a ship.
Nobody is talking about the campaign...

I have a hard time believing they are going to gain ground by trying to "logic" their way into position. Nobody cares about logic, they work off emotion.

I can tell you all night long that the software I just wrote is super-compliant with the OZBOG standard and uses 18.3 jigahertz to mitigate the resonance specification, but you just won't care.

But if you see John Mayer and Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg all use Vista and they "love it to bits and pieces" and because you want to be just like them, now I have a tiny wedge I can pound on.
OK... there's a bit of comparing apples and oranges here. Macintosh is a proprietary hardware platform and MacOS X requires it to run. You can run Windows and Linux on the same hardware because both of them support it and VM software easily uses hardware facilities through virtualization. VMWare and Parallels do not emulate everything.

So it makes sense that you can't run MacOS X on non-Apple hardware since it was never meant to do that. On the other hand, Apple supports Windows XP and Vista on its hardware and have written a ton of drivers to do just that. Linux folks have done the same and they have written drivers for Mac hardware. Sure, there are such things as Hackintoshes but they have a ton of issues (sometimes fans don't work. graphics doesn't work, drivers missing etc).

For Apple to do what you want, they'd have to license VMWare and other VM vendors internal Mac specs so that VMWare can emulate those on a machine that doesn't have them. And this is not beneficial to Apple at all.
>Asset backed currency such as gold are backed by a finite amount of gold.

Currency units are somewhat arbitrary. If you don't believe that the market needs a central technician for it to run properly (I don't, but I'm in the minority), then I'm pretty sure a modern economy could be run on currency backed by almost any commodity.

What most people fear and distrust about fiat currency is putting one legal monopoly in charge of such an important part of the economy. It's too much power. A gold-backed currency takes that power out of the hands of any one man.

I advocate that we should use whatever currency the market chooses. I want the market to have the legal rights to make that choice. Historically this was the case until legal currency monopolies were created to fund wars.
I will be amazed (and applaud them) if they can pull this off as fast as he anticipates. I am no expert on hardware design, but I did manage the development of a touch-enabled control panel and electrical system for a home appliance, and it required a hell-load of work from a few dedicated staff over 3-4 months (and that was just to get a decent prototype -- refinements took additional months).

Mind you, we had a couple of things going against us -- (1) a brand new cross-cultural team, which meant learning curves and inefficient communication; (2) we did it in China, where something as simple as renting an apartment can turn into a full-time job for two weeks due to their culture of distrust and inefficiency... (doing it in the U.S. must make things a lot smoother), (3) we didn't have the benefit of being able to take advantage of a lot of existing software, so as to avoid doing a lot of custom coding, and (4) we had trouble finding proper parts which could both do the job right & pass electrical inspections for european/US markets, whereas I'd imagine that their supply chain company should be able to find good parts quickly and easily.

Maybe all of their advantages will result in a stellar timeline. Or maybe not. (When we began, we also thought we could get it done in a month or two.)
I owned a TabletPC. I argue they did try it, and did a decent job of it. However, the big roadblock was the fact that they are at the mercy of their hardware vendors.

Consider multi-touch. When Apple decided that multi-touch is the future, they simply started building it into their laptops. If Microsoft decides multi-touch is the future, they build an API and some of the vendors offer a few models with multi-touch and the market decides whether it wants to pay a premium for multi-touch or not.

Meanwhile app vendors sit on the sidelines while everyone plays chicken and egg. This is why tablets went nowhere... the market refused to pay a premium for tablets, so the vendors only made a few, which kept prices high, which kept sales low, and so forth...
In somewhat more surprising news, a man actually notices and cares about the appearance of his running shoes.
same amount of tea for me. About 2 coffees per week.
How about choice number three: "Whatever commodity, or commodities, the market chooses?"
"Giles Bowket - Fuck the man, fuck the mainstream. Programming is a tool to do your art. His art is music, his tool is Ruby, and the result is Arcaeopteryx. (Giles stole the show with this talk. He ran like twice as long as his alloted time but we were all so into it that no one minded.)"

This seems to be his style -- his talk at the San Diego Ruby user group was like an hour (most talks are 10-25 minus) and no one really minded.
My negative bias comes from having attempted a hardware development project in the past, with similarly ambitious and optimistic time frames, only to have reality kick in and demoralize the team by having the project drag on and on far beyond our projections (but well within industry norms).

I think it's an awesome, exciting project that the world wants to happen. But if it turns out that the original timeline is skewed heavily toward irrational optimism, it may be demoralizing to those involved to have their expectations repeatedly quashed. However I may be wrong here, because if the supply chain company that's involved is being realistic and has experience, I may be the one who is off-base about the timeline.

(I posted more details of my experience on the main thread).

I agree with you that a lot of comments on here are negative without adding any value, ie. no new data / insights, just content-less, emotional pessimism.
Three Hot Mixtape Services That Are Remaking the Art Form
Twitter Hello-World: that was easy
eGold was a remarkable financial institution in that it focused so much on providing a service to their customers. They were a servant, not of the government, not of the regulatory powers that be, but of their customers. This is rare. Try to make a payment to an online poker site from your bank account if you want to see how your bank's commitment to their customers stacks up against eGold.

Sadly, eGold was shut down. It was too dangerous to the authority's power for it to be allowed to exist. Epiphyte corp. can only exist in a fictional universe outside of the watchful gaze of Uncle Sam.
Portuguese team makes first paper based transistor
Olin's in my neck of the woods (literally) and I have a friend that's going there. A good school, a great price (only pay room/board.)
Some Facebook Apps Are Actually More Equal Than Others
Facebook's COO Sandberg: Growth before monetization
Not so fast. "Everybody" does not live like that. In fact, even before the credit crunch it was common to hear about folks who got in over their heads with debt. (The ads for "credit counseling" and "debt relieft" are commonplace.)

The US culture gave them more opportunities to succeed. Those same opportunities can let them fail. If they can't handle the opportunities....
Behind the Code: interviews with some of Microsoft’s most influential technical employees
If you are interested in time and multitasking, look at some of anthropologist Edward Hall's stuff.

Monochronism and Polychronism have been co-opted to apply to individuals but they were coined by Hall to describe patterns of culture. A highly monochronic culture would be Germany; things happen one at a time, from start to finish, where a new thing starts. A highly polychronic culture would be a lot of latin cultures, where whatever is most important that second takes precedence, no matter when you started it (this is usually determined socially; family>customer, for example).

Most cultures are more complex than that, though. Japanese business tends to be highly polychronic in the planning stages, where a consensus must be reached and all the time in the world is taken to reach it. However, once the decision has been made, the implementation is not only wicked fast but highly monochronic.

He's worth looking into if you really want to make the leap from how multi-tasking affects individuals to how it affects complex systems.
Numeracy isn't enough. (If it was, it's unlikely that debt would be a problem.) Psychology matters.

Any adequate plan that you'll execute is better than the best plan that you won't execute.
Ask YC: Are you religous?
I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor given how important religion is for lots of people. One hypothesis is that few hackers are religious. Maybe the YC community can confirm/offer a counter-explanation.
Agreed. And if you stay long enough you may witness a message meltdown. Living in Seattle since '82, I remember my first impression was that it reminded me of Minneapolis, but with better geography. Flash forward 25 years and the vacuity of chasing status/money is deafening. I often wonder what life here would be like if Bill had stayed in Albuquerque. It wasn't until the late 90's I had to admit finally that what I considered ambition, wasn't.
The Most Public Index a.k.a MostPublic individuals in New York