skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This analysis is a bit too shallow.

Marco Arment and idlewords (I don't think you mean jakewalker, who is an attorney; you mean idlewords, who runs Pinboard) fit a specific profile:

They've bought dedicated servers before. So there's no learning curve required to buy more dedicated servers.

They're more than capable of serving as their own sysadmins, and in fact I believe they do so. So the economy of scale of, e.g., buying some Heroku dynos and letting one admin team administer your machine along with several thousand nigh-identical machines isn't as much of an issue.

Their services are well established. Neither Pinboard nor Instapaper are going away, at least on a timescale of years. They have a userbase and a revenue model and are well out of the "experimental" stage. They can afford capital equipment and be sure that said equipment will be utilized.

Their services aren't evolving rapidly, on a scale of days or weeks. They don't tend to beta-test features that would require lots of additional hardware if they got popular.

Their services scale fairly predictably. These are paid apps with a steady clientele that isn't just chasing fads. By this point I bet Marco can plot the rate of change of Instapaper's paid userbase on a graph and tell you within, say, 25% how big it is likely to be in six months. The service is unlikely to experience unusual usage spikes unless Marco deliberately creates those spikes by e.g. having a sale or releasing a new version. Even iPhone/iPad releases, which might drive sales, tend to occur on a fairly predictable calendar.

Their services just aren't all that large on the back end. They don't run big server farms, the kind for which you must spend a few hours per week just managing your inventory of spare parts and un-racking and re-racking things.

If your business also fits these criteria, then sure, dedicated servers are easier now than they have ever been, and there are still things you get with dedicated hardware that are harder to find in the cloud. (He's right about the predictable disk I/O.) But my company managers swear that AWS prices, full-freight as they are, are still a bargain relative to the humans and capital required to run our medium-to-large-sized datacenter with dedicated hardware.

[Disclosure: I work at an AWS-based Drupal hosting company and have never owned a dedicated server. ;)]
Sorry to sound blunt but why is it a given that if a person is successful, it is surprising that he/she is doing "lesser" things? I never understood that notion.

If I was successful/rich/etc, I will still be coding on my free time. Heck, I will be washing my own dishes, buying my own groceries, driving myself and so on. And I know many other "rich/successful/etc" people who are exactly like that.
Has Kinect made Microsoft cool?
The Steve Jobs effect in chart format
Mulberry handbags sale
Mulberry handbags
It looks pretty good and it rather snappy UI.

I don't fully understand what makes this better/different then DailyBurn.

I would be interested to know what kind of conversion rate you have at 10 dollars a month. A lot of fitness tracking / and calorie counters have turned into a commodity to users I feel like. Selling things to gym and trainers seems like it is very hard from what experienced for a few reasons (most notably, they make little money and they are not interested upselling their customers unless it somehow directly results in them getting leads for doing more personal training sessions).

A couple quick notes / suggestions:

1) Adding connections to Facebook / Twitter / or internal social networkings will only result in a win for you. We see this very clearly with Lose It! (the product I work on)

2) When clicking on top level nav items that only have one subsection (Notes and Program) it should auto-select (ie. navigate) to the subsection. Otherwise it is just 2 steps to get everywhere.

3) The visualizations are not that compelling which I think is a combination of 2 factors. First, they are simply line graphs of numbers the user has manually entered. There is no depth / substance to the graphs. Moreover, in the demo there is so few data points it really amplies how shallow they are.

4) Ont he goals tab there is a lot of data and I don't really follow what is showing. Perhaps since I am not a avid weight lifter myself. There is also switching between different date formatting in that chart and there looks like there is some kind of escaping bug where it says \"Christine\"

5) Under Strength tab when you click into the textbox for "Reps Until Failure" the text from "Click to Enter" does not clear. Seems like that is would get very annoying.

6) If you are going to expect users to enter so much data manually I suggest also adding a data export feature and also create nice looking printable summaries of their progress.

Anyways, it looks good. Excellent work on launching, thats always the hardest part. I wish you the best luck and welcome to the health and fitness industry.
If I understand you correctly -- and I'm not sure that I do -- you could be positioning yourself to be at the forefront of the computer industry as it gradually shifts into a more virtualized state.

1: I don't think you're clear yet on what you're imagining. Have you tried drawing it out, writing it down, mocking it up? Written any actual code yet?

2: There are likely a huge number of challenges you haven't fully considered yet, from scalability to document compatibility to organization to UI ... and on and on. This would be a large undertaking to execute well. How would you handle the huge number of people with poor/nonexistent "broadband" in the U.S.?

3: There are also likely already a number of people already working on this. (My company is working on something similar, though not as advanced as what you seem to be proposing.) So, you'll have to get moving! Early bird gets the worm! :-)

4: Don't be afraid to reinvent the wheel. If my extensive experience with computer-using novices has taught me anything, it's that there is a huge opportunity to throw out everything about current UI and start over with something much more "human". For example: get rid of folders entirely. They're a horrible idea, always were; they're a holdover from a simpler time. People have a terrible time with folders. They download pictures from their camera and have no idea where they've gone; they accidentally open up "My Computer" and get lost immediately; they misplace documents all the time; they can't organize them at all. How would you handle this differently?

I'd love to see something cool like this.
I don't like headlines line this. They misrepresent the problem.

The civil court system is supposed to allow for remedies of all kinds of wrongs. Thus, basically anyone needs to be able to sue anyone else for just about anything. And that's fine. It is then the responsibility of the courts to ensure that lawsuits cannot be used as tools for bullying and extortion.

Assuming this article presents the facts completely and accurately, the court system failed in its duty here. More to the point, RealNetworks did not "crush" this guy; the Dutch courts did, at their request.

So if you have a problem with this case, don't blame RealNetworks, blame the court. Blame the judge who ruled that servers should be confiscated without giving their owner the opportunity to answer the accusations beforehand. Furthermore, the way to fix the problem is to fix the civil court system, not talk about how lousy RN is.
I'm really happy that you have addressed this problem. My question comes down to, in the rating process, I rated a fairly limited amount of places, in terms of categorical scope. Then when I moved into the main application, there were many many more categories available, like ice-cream and bbq. I found myself not finding restaurants that I liked loading in the initial 10 choices, so I kept skipping a lot. You might consider a continuous scroll feature for this initial rating set. Otherwise, integrate with open table, and this will rank as the best vertical search/discovery app I've ever come across.
Show HN: See if someone reads your emails
Interesting, Google shutting down new services like photovine (just launched last week!) this fast. To me Slide seemed quite sucessfull in trying to get some startup speed back into google.
Suprising move..
Savemarriageplease
There does come a point where you make more money hiring someone else to do your laundry and focusing on your job, so as I understand it rich people sometimes only do select mundane things they like doing.
Aim Bigger: The Importance of the Entrepreneurial Spririt
Tickets are sold out already.
I'm currently in the process of setting up a web start-up in Germany. I therefore know it from my own experience that - especially from a legal perspective - there are big differences between setting up a start-up in the US or in Germany. And trust me, this how-to list is not 1-to-1 applicable to how it's done in Germany.

There has been coverage about German business clones of successful US start-ups. Also there have been complaints that some start-ups "don't think big" and expand their market coverage only in regional boundaries (airbnb vs. wimdu/9flats). Probably they would do better overseas if from early on such lists wouldn't be so focused.
Social Media Marketing: 5 Best Strategies to Enhance Your Twitter Profile
BlackBerry to See Android Apps in 2012
Normally I'd be squeamish about talking down a credential that many of my clients might view as instrumental to their careers. But in this job market (and by "this market", for security pros, I mean the last 3 years), it's simply unnecessary. It should be possible to get a job in infosec at any level of your career in 2011.

It is actively harmful to hold a CISSP in the field of software security (which is where we work), but we're all a bunch of douches.
SoftLayer has the nicely formatted table. The prices on it seem quite reasonable - except they charge up the wazoo for RAM.
Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person?

I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.
It sounds rather cool, but this Englishman-visiting-New-York can't download it because it is only in the US App Store... and there are more restaurants than you can shake a stick at within a couple of block of here, that I'd love recommendations on.

But more seriously, this could be a very good app for when you're visiting a new city, and I can think of a dozen people right now who would love to download it but can't...
... on the other hand, since PCI QSA status only helps you if you work for a company that does PCI audits, getting that test might be a ticket to a pretty miserable job. It's not like a CISSP, which might help you (but won't) in a variety of different companies.
On Losing Your Marbles
one thing...he mentions there is not an apple store close by, so if applecare was going to fix your computer you'd have to send it away...geeksquad may be more, but its also just a drive to best buy. I wouldnt buy either, but this is just an observation from his rant. Sometimes to people time having their computer from them is worth more than some extra dollars. But I did enjoy the breakdown on the value/$ Thanks!
Eagles singer Don Henley: EFF, Google "aid and abet" criminals
"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." - Lyndon B. Johnson

Seems like an apt quote; from Apple's point of view, it's much, much better to have Comex helping them increase their security and make it harder for their devices to be jailbroken than for him to be trying to circumvent their security, especially as he's shown himself to be quite effective at circumventing it. Admittedly, we don't don't what he's going to be working on, and his subsequent tweets show an expectation that future versions of iOS will still be jailbroken, so perhaps he's not going to be involved with security (or, just as likely, recognizes that perfect security is impossible).
Desktop Vs Web Based Project Management Software
Your APT can be a Botnet, and vice versa
Tech Bubble? Not Anymore.
Why StopBadware.org is a good thing
Very cool. I see a tangential relationship to MS Surface (which I am sad did not "take off" in relation to its potential, re: costs). This may be the type of App where demonstrations of trivial to the complex of its uses "explains" the App in better terms. I mean this in the sense that friends with iPhones, Smart Phones don't necessarily "see" the value (which I do) in the App.
Wow, that is an awesome contribution. Many thanks!
> Web development is a solved thing, it seems like. That doesn't interest me.

I was in the exact same boat as you when I started out. After a few years of web development, I was getting closer to a sinking suspicion that I was nearing the end of the rope, so to speak...

And then the rabbit hole opened up to me. Trust me when I say: the web development stack is very, very deceptive. It would take at least a decade, if not more to fully master every aspect of it. And it hasn't even been around that long (comparatively), which makes finding true experts for our "hard problems" quite difficult.

The knowledge that I have to go into work knowing inside and out every day? Domain registration, sysops, provisioning a server from scratch, chef/puppet for configuration management, bash scripting, server security, firewall rules, DDOS prevention, nginx/apache hosting software usage and configurations, the dozen and a half different fucking flavors of wsgi servers and how to properly reverse proxy into them, redundant load balancing with HAProxy and heartbeat, postgres/mysql/nosql database software usage and configuration, database sharding and connection pooling, master/slave and master/master setup advantages and disadvantages, proper schema creation/indexing/querying efficiently, proper static and media file headers/caching/expiration, python/ruby, django/rails, process management ala supervisord/runit/upstart/initd, semantic HTML, flexible CSS through a separate tool like SASS/LESS, javascript and what used to be the giant clusterfuck of front-end engineering, ajax, comet/long-polling/buzzwordsgalore, getting SSL to properly work with all of the above, Solr search engine usage/configuration, caching with varnish and memcached, queuing all over the place with rabbitmq, lightweight key/value stats with redis, proper version control, continuous integration, project management, one-click builds and deploys with fabric/capistrano, and the 1001 insecurities built in to naive web development and how to properly protect against them. The list goes on and on and on. I'm sure I'm forgetting to mention a lot more.

Now I know how silly I was back then to believe that I was "done" with web development after a short amount of time setting up toy websites. I still consider myself a novice, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what it takes to make a web site/service scale to massive amounts of traffic.

The parent comment from a Facebook dev is somewhat spot-on though: for the hard Computer Science problems, you have to get into the low-end systems level programming. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I deal with problems at the macro level. Computer Science, while extremely helpful in some cases, in no way, shape, or form prepared me for the bottomless pit of knowledge required for modern web development.

To each their own, but both sides are deluding themselves if they believe that they somehow have the "tougher job" when it comes to programming. The only difference is that a CS degree better prepares you for one over the other, due to the nature of the work involved.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Recent blog post by, by moi.

Any haters, try not to be harsh. I'm not a phenomenal writer.
I remember watching "Pirates of the Silicon Valley" some time ago. It was nice to see the battles between Gates and Jobs in the beginning of the PC era. That movie ended even before Apple's re-birth.
Facebook had 1 trillion page views in June, according to Google
There's a general list of common mistakes here:

http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Clean package management? Right, like no one ever winds up in RPM Hell on Linux. :-)

The very concept of Linux-style package management is somewhat foreign to OS X, where, to a first approximation, apps are expected to carry their dependencies along with them in the application bundle. It made sense to worry about the overhead of an extra copy of a library 20 years ago, much less so now. In most cases the inconvenience to the end user vastly outweighs the trivial overhead of having multiple copies of a library hanging around. I like being able to "uninstall" an application by simply dragging it to the trash, or "installing" it by just putting it in the Applications folder (or any other folder, for that matter -- want to run your application on another machine? Just drag it to a network-accessible folder and run the sucker).

This is an odd criticism, to say the least -- it's like saying that Linux sucks because getting Windows apps to (sort of) run in WINE is a little dodgy. Yes, it's nice that you can use things like fink and MacPorts to do a cheap port of software that was originally written for Linux, but it's still a nasty hack that's not the way things are normally handled on the platform.
The feedback via email thing is slick but confusing. Do I need to provide the details of the restaurant again? If not, it's unclear.
I hack a fair amount in it, less on it. I'd hoped to release a new version of News soon, and thus also a new version of Arc. But I am pretty busy with YC.
this is the dumbest thing in the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Earths-five-mass-extinction-...

Then theorize on the older civilizations which we have little record outside of temples of engineering which can baffle the mind, and, perhaps, at the apex of planet-lift off, a Caldera blows.

Just a thought.
Bill Gross: A Devotion to New Ideas [video - entire talk]
I know little of the way medical schools operate, why and to what degree does Harvard Med require disproportionately large funding from the endowment?

The cost of attendance for all of Northeastern's undergraduate students for one year is 137% of its endowment, while for Harvard, it's cost of attendance for all of its undergraduate students for one year is, rounding up, 2% of its endowment [1].

It's completely unfeasible for NU to give out free tuition, they'd be in the whole for 100s of millions of dollars. Harvard, on the other hand, could take 2% of its endowment to pay for its students and still have 9% [2] of growth (that's nearly 2.5 billion dollars) to spend. Even if we assume the dismal 5 year average return (which includes 2008-2009's economic shitfest) Harvard would still have 3% or about 700 million dollars of growth to spend (which is to say, their growth is equivalent to Northeastern's endowment).

I could not find any figure on the amount of money which disappears into Harvard Medical school, but if you could dig up those statistics, then we'd be able to see what sort of growth Harvard's endowment would need to maintain.

That said, Northeastern's endowment is hopelessly small, while, with Harvard's endowment, it seems feasible to pay for undergrads, unless Harvard Med's net losses are more than 2.5 billion dollars (or, more reasonably 1 billion dollars).

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(harvard+tuition+*+harv...

[2] http://cdn.wds.harvard.edu/hmc/2010_endowment_report_10_15_2...

edit: add "137% of endowment" to 2nd P, remove obviously "It's obviously completely" from 3rd P, note that NU's endowment is about equal to Harvard's growth over a really bad five years, and formatting
Thanks! That's a pretty amazingly quick response and makes it way easier to find.
That is surprising to me, because I've personally heard developers complain that they weren't allowed to release free DLC. I apologize for the misinformation... I guess policies have changed?
Update: AeroFS now preserves modification times across devices :)
From this it looks like he bought a series of Preferred stock created especially for this deal. This is not what you or I could buy.
You can always try to negotiate the sticker price if you want. Even if there's no sales staff there's someone who should have the authority to offer you a discount, though in a market like shared hosting that's probably not going to happen much.
Did you clear it up with him?
Hacker News: why no target="_blank" on post links?
I understand some people may hate it, but on a news aggregator website, it should be expected. Is this a page view issue?
I think this answers your question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2926948 : "I think the implication is that pg would be too busy running YC to code. Even if it doesn't happen to him, it happens to a lot of founders."

To me, the implication was, "Lots of somewhat famous / successful people become too 'busy' to do the thing that made them famous / successful," with code being one of them. (Or think of all the actors who are famous but now appear in maybe one movie every three years: what are they doing with their time?).
The more posts like this I read, the more they sound like obituaries. The man might be sick, but he's not dead! He just stepped down from being CEO, that's all.
Yeah, that was possibly the best site ever. Back when it went downhill all the people jumpt over to hulver.com but I left around that time. People talk about community, but that site was a _real_ community. Anyone remember the year we did a secret santa gift exchange?
This should come as no surprise. Writing code is a medium of expression like writing english or drawing or using a piece of software via a GUI.

Like most of us I imagine Paul would do all of these on a daily basis.
Hm, business history of NeXT as gleaned from Wikipedia:

1985: Founded by Steve Jobs using a bunch of his own money.

1987: "[Ross Perot] invested $20 million in exchange for 16% of NeXT's stock, valuing the company at $125 million."

1989: "Canon invested US$100 million in NeXT, giving it a 16.67% stake, making NeXT worth almost $600 million." [editor's note: on paper]

1992: "The company reported sales of $140 million in 1992, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat."

1996: "Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs."

So, please tell me where the business failure is. What I see here is a company that appears to have turned $150 million in venture funding (plus an unknown amount of Steve Jobs' cash) into a valuable operating system platform, $429 million in cash, 1.5 million shares of Apple Computer, and complete control of Apple Computer itself, which as we all know proved to be an extremely valuable commodity in the hands of the former employees of NeXT.

But Wikipedia is not a balance sheet, and I suppose it's possible that this account I've pieced together leaves out something like half a billion dollars in investments by otherwise unknown and unremarked parties. Can anyone out there show me a history of NeXT that is substantially different than the one above? Because until then I must conclude that the people who think of the story of NeXT as a "business failure" don't know how to count money.

EDIT: Excellent, I found a contemporary account of the Canon investment in the NYT to spell it all out for us:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-1...

The Canon investment will dilute Mr. Jobs's ownership of Next to 50 percent. He started the company with $7 million of his own and later invested another $5 million. Next employees own 20 percent. H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who invested $20 million in 1987, owns 12.5 percent, and Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, which have invested a total of $1.3 million, have a combined stake of less than 1 percent.

Please, tell me again what a terrible, terrible failure this was.