skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple.

The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid?

Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves.

What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits.

I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change.

My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit.

However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!
20 years ago, a 40MB hard drive was "standard". I'm sure they'll go the way of the floppy in 20 years.

The storage situation in 2031 would be pretty mind boggling.
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One of the good way to make general users/facebook realize the privacy concerns of auto-sharing, if popular Porn websites install the FB like buttons.
That only works in one browser, on one computer. I have an iPad and there are two iPhones in this household as well. A few lines in the firewall configuration is a much easier and effective solution.

I am working up to doing the same for Google. I might transparently proxy google.com/search to Scroogle just so browser search bars continue to work.
Never seen this on my Nexus One. Also no Facebook account.
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It already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain
Of course, you have to do a little bit more than roll together some snow into the shape of a snowman to infringe (it definitely doesn't cover "snowmen and snowwomen as a whole").

The patent actually covers an internal skeleton of spheres that snow can be layered on top of. The spheres must be lighter than the snow and coated in some sort of adhesive that attracts snow by means of a static electric charge from an attached Van de Graaff generator.

The amount of research the inventor claims to have put into this is absurd, but quite entertaining to read.

Of course, all of the problems of making snow men/women is part of what makes it
fun. Getting a whole group of people around and working together. Being
outside in the snow for hours. And, yes, having a doofy lop-sided snow man
does have some charm. And, even if you don't have enough snow, who cares anyway.

That may be true. But we are living in the 21st century now. We have created the
Internet. China is getting ready to send a person to the moon. And we invented
silly putty, perhaps one of the all-time greatest inventions a big kid
ever invented. Can't somebody build a better snow man?
Why do you use Lisp?
> let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people.

And selling the data to advertisers.
Possibly the worst abuse of
"mobile" web high jacking. Can't even scroll without "paging" over? Boo!
You'll forgive those of us that aren't interested in becoming the digital equivalent of stylite monks, but by all means feel free to conduct your business in the public eye if that's what suits your fancy.
What? I've been running Disconnect for probably over a year now and experienced zero side-effects and I use all of those services (minus Yahoo).
My income's not tied to it, so I'll say it.

Computers reliably interpreting films as the final word is not going to happen in the near future (within this guy's career). Reading films is as much an art as it is a science. I'm sure a lot of advances can be made on it, and we might see nice proofs of concept. But to the point that it actually replaces radiologists?

Even if you assume the technology can be perfected, there are too many non-technological hurdles for that to happen. Liability, trust, etc...

Machine EKG interpretation has been around for a while, but it's not even close to perfect and no one relies on it, and it's a much much much simpler problem.
This was most certainly not the case on the Nexus One that I'm using.

Did gp get it from Google, or elsewhere? The Facebook for Android app was barely even out for most of the time the N1 was on the market, from what I remember...
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Uh. What IS it?
Email Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying To Give Out Over The Phone
Maybe because not everyone lives 10 minutes from each other and is 100% independently mobile? And gee... occasionally even people that you really enjoy spending time with have to move to other areas of the planet.

As much as I'm not a fan of FB re all the privacy stuff (not to mention a history of horribly under/wrongly-documented and semi-broken APIs), it's done wonders for a large generation of web users in terms of allowing them to easily (and consistently) share their lives with a lot of their friends and family. I see that aspect as a good thing.
It's the All-Hands Kool Aid Q&As with Zuck on Friday.
I use Google Reader with Facebook RSS feeds (which are desperately hard to discover) to avoid visiting the website. I am not logged in to Facebook on my primary browser, and every reference to a Facebook domain is adblocked. If I really must visit a status update or shared link, then it'll fire up in a secondary browser, but that only happens a couple of times a month.

So I spend perhaps 5 minutes on average every month, or one hour a year. But it may be multiple times a month.
I recently built a website on wordpress and put in facebook connect plugin. It saves ppl a few minutes to login ect. I was extremely scared about the widget that shows who has been on the site. I do not believe that just logging in gives a website permission to publish that user has been to that website. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is getting out of hand.
In theory you could just not use the app. Also, tell the app owner why you're not using it. However, I'd say that there's generally no consistently way I've seen that FB gives you to give feedback to app owners - certainly ones which you're not actually a user of the app too.

If enough people did that (or started to from now on) the demands for extended app privileges might drop.
it can make it easier to understand people outside of Silicon Valley.

That's part of the value for me, getting small reminders that people exist outside of my urban liberal bubble, and that while I might not agree with those people on a whole host of things, I can at least respect them and their perspective.
Open virtualization: Virtuzlization management platform workshop
I am not yet able to convince myself that the question actually makes logical sense.
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The entire concept, really. It's grotesquely invasive, opt in or no, and it speaks to a culture of blatant disregard for privacy as a concept.

On a more minor note I really don't want to know this much about my acquaintances' collective browsing habits.

Now that there's a viable alternative with google+ all I have to do is scrape my photo galleries and that's a wrap.
Yep, there are a lot of strong opinions on this thread that identify NASA solely with human exploration. This is a mistake, and it's frustrating to see it made by so many bright people.

It's a historical fact that the human side of space exploration has always been subject to great political influence. Consequently, it goes through these unseemly convulsions from time to time.

The political involvement in engineering processes drives rationalists nuts. Even to the extreme of believing that the way to rationalize human space exploration is to put it in the private sector.
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Spammers are targeting HN now? Wow! Comment flagged.
It's not a matter of being adult or not. It's just a matter of being able to be in a place where you don't have social rules, life goals, or "responsibilities", and still have pleasure to be in such conditions and create your things.

Because other than creativity, it has to have a point. Because in the end, you are sitting in front of an imaginary world, which exists only for yourself. Not everyone has the motivation to build something big, just for for themselves.

In a way, (good) Minecraft multiplayer servers are more appealing, according to this. Because people rebuild social communities there, and build things together. They make plans, of how to build the place, they interact. They build little cities, they build monuments. And other people can see it too, and maybe improve their constructions.

If you are not going to export what you did (as a video, for example), or build it in a "persistent" place, shared with others, it can indeed be hard to summon the willpower to build something, without hitting the "what for?" wall.

Minecraft lacks purpose not only because of the almost non-existent rules, but also because at some point, it is really bare, and the "reward" for your creativity is only contained within itself, if you play alone.
Google+ Approaching 50 Million Users
Sometimes I get a feeling that the hivemind of HN is critical of anything that is not associated google. I could be wrong as I am a fairly new user. But that's just what I have observed in last few weeks.
People seem to habitually miss point #3. See, for example, many hypotheticals that ask you to imagine yourself in another person's shoes. (Not sure what a succinct alternative would be, though.)
I remember trying to use Google Apps Scripts to try to build a wikipedia game, by scraping the random page. It would determine whether the page was a person, and if so add it as a character and the rest would later be used as items. Didn't finish it but the idea was fun.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlQOPbxFfjKhdHd...
That's because Metro is supposed to run lean as a tablet experience so they don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry just wrapping their windows apps to run on it. Chrome/Firefox/etc. already have Windows apps so now they have to create an app for Metro. No different if they were to create a Firefox/Chrome for Iphone vs MacOS.
> "What is the probability, across the space of all possible continuations of the world from the dawn of humanity, that the world would end up in a state that includes me?"

Not particularly more or less probable than most particular states that don't include me, I imagine?
I deleted my Facebook account a few months back, but I'm also interested in how their new products work, seeing as how they affect millions of internet users.

I'm biased because I do think Facebook is lame, and that the amount of online profile wish-fulfillment is just creepy. Is this 'anti-FB zealotry'?

If you're going to meta-moderate HN, try to engage in less hyperbole than the 'smear campaign' you disagree with.
define: hustle (in this context).
A good entrepreneur is up "at bat" half a dozen times. I don't think there's enough data.

OTOH, as an angel, I've invested in ~50ish startups. Lots of patterns (YC vs non YC, equity seed vs convertible seed, etc) emerge.
"This extension can access:
Your data on all websites"

is it just me or.. WTF?!
The article might tout the idea of cyberweapons slightly too much, but I think Stuxnet indeed qualifies as one.

I'm somewhat worried about these things. The problem I see is that we are becoming even more and more leveraged/dependent on technology. And these technologies are increasingly interdependent. A successful attack on one technology can potentially bring down entire systems down in unanticipated ways.

The recent power outage in San Diego and nearby areas serves as a good reminder. You don't actively think about power, it is something you take for granted. Only when the power is lost, then you realize how dependent everything is on it; traffic lights stopped, ATMs didn't work, credit and debit cards didn't work, freezers and fridges stopped, and so forth. From modern times to the dark ages in an eye-blink, instant paralysis.

I don't think nuclear power plants as targets are that interesting. Just turning off traffic light system would be enough to bring down and entire US urban area down to its knees.

New networks of complex dependencies are being created all the time. The smartphone boom is going to create one, and people will start relying on the existence of it. If iPhone and Android keep dominating the market it will create more homogenous mass of devices, providing a more consistent attack surface and more potential for widespread damage. I don't see how smartphones could avoid the same problems PCs were/are experiencing. Waiting for the first smartphone "UNIX worm".

Wireless features are getting added to cars. Yet another potential complex network. War-driving could soon get completely new meanings.
How does Disconnect compare with Chromeblock?

I find it kind of amusing that facebook doesn't display integrated comments at all if you block their cookies. Not to worry, TechCrunch w/out comments ≈ TechCrunch with comments.
Life is fine without Dorkbook. Never used it and hopefully never will, although it is getting harder and harder as my school has started to actively use it for e.g. communication regarding potential jobs for students and graduates in companies and institutions the school cooperates with.
Absence of malicious history/intent doesn't render them incapable of being (directly or indirectly) dangerous. One could easily pose a rational argument for users to take prophylactic measures (e.g., Facebook Disconnect, Ghostery, and the other browser plug-ins) based solely on the increasing number of data breaches.[1][2]

However, this is a relatively weak argument, as it requires making an underlying assumption that the leaked data is dangerous. We have no evidence to support the assertion that leaked information of the kind shared on Facebook would pose any danger to the affected users. This is fundamentally different from the dangers of data breaches concerning health and financial records; these records contain information necessary to steal identities and engage in other nefarious operations. Facebook doesn't collect social security numbers or other extremely sensitive personally identifiable information.

Facebook does, however, collect evidence of our predispositions and predilections. Arguably, this information is far more dangerous than mere personally identifiable information, because rather than identifying us outright, it gets to the heart of what makes each of us unique. We are incapable of imagining the complete set of scenarios where this information could be used nefariously, and as such, its dangers fall within the scope of ``unknown unknowns''

Compare this situation to the case of a breach of financial data: the uses of this data are well-enumerated, and one could argue that the cost of the next health information data breach is a known unknown. Based on historical evidence, we know that another breach will occur, and we know how criminals use the leaked information. With data on Facebook, however, we don't know whether this information could be used maliciously. Moreover, if it could be used maliciously, we don't know how it might be used. Therefore, it deserves as much privacy (if not more) as one's financial and health records.

[1] http://www.idtheftcenter.org/artman2/publish/lib_survey/ITRC...
[2] http://www.privacyrights.org/data-breach
Unfortunately the audio was bad, so couldn't continue listening after a minute. Would be great if the author could fix it.
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20 years ago a 40MB hdd was sufficient. 20 years ago, a 486 was more than capable of running Windows 3.1 or OS2 and playing great games.

20 years on, and nothing's changed. I still need a modern spec machine to run an OS or read a word doc. My drive is still almost full. My machine is still not quie fast enough and my internet is too slow

Expectations change. Sure, in 20 years time the data we're creating now will seem like such a tiny amount, but that amount won't stay constant. The amount of data we produce each year is a proportion of available storage, not of our activity.

What I'm trying to say is that facebook have a lot of data by today's standards, but they'll also have a lot of data in 2031 by 2031's standards.
In my opinion we have seen quiete a positive development on FB in regards to the control and usability of the privacy options recenttly, most likely triggered through the appearence of Google+.

Most, if not all the people I know, have long restricted their profile to a minimum visibility level for non-fiends and non real friends.

At the moment I do not see the privacy problem as big as it used to be 12 months ago.
Re: predicting it based on qualities of the founders: pg has said determination is very important - based on data from startups, it turned out much more important than anticipated. Therefore, one would expect an objective measure of determination to have (some) predictive power. Maybe not as much as the present YC process; but it would be hard data, and a new perspective which might be revealing. Certainly, scientific at least!

It sounds like a sloppy thing to measure; but Martin Seligman (learned helplessness/learned optimism) has quizzes to measure optimism/pessimism, which have experimentally demonstrated predictive power (and actually have been used to supplement job interviewing, with measurable success). So measuring determination might be possible. There's even checks to prevent/detect cheating. Of course, extra smart candidates with million dollar (VC) motivation may quickly subvert any a test. Still, it would be interesting, intellectually, to see if it did work.

Might also be interesting to ask one of Seligman's students to assess YC candidates for optimism (his definition means that you bounce back from failure with energy - e.g. a pivot). It seems plausible to me that that would also be predictive of startup success (and also predictive of determination - the ability to keep going).
tough call. i exchanged speed for quantity with my ssd. i sort of suspect most people are going to do the same. I think it depends on how many T of video people want to hang on to.

Sure storage will get bigger and faster, but just like cpus, the transition from quantity & speed to energy efficiency will happen sooner than you're implying.
Does anyone know of an Opera Extension like this?
Your phrasing – “smear campaign”, “hivemind”, etc. – is unhelpful to reasonable discussion, whether or not you have “skin in the game”.
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If the Google+ Like button appeared on anywhere near as many sites as Facebook, I'd be concerned about Google too.

I'm kind of surprised NoScript doesn't have an option of disabling scripts on a site-by-site basis. Ergo, if I have two tabs open, Google+ and some other page containing a Google+ Like button, I should be able to enable Google scripts on only the Google+ page. As it stands, when a script from a domain is enabled, it is enabled for any and all tabs you have open. I think that behavior can be improved.
It does not really matter if you are using hard data like number of previous companies, or soft data like impressions based on personality. In fact, these days I would say success depends more on the VC(s) involved than the founders. Mark Cuban was at least half-right when he compared tech investments to a Ponzi scheme (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/08/15/mark-cuban-th...).

This is, obviously, a generalization -- there are a few companies that stand on their own feet, and have even done so without outside investment. But in the majority of cases it seems like startups are acquired because some kind of "inside" deal is going on. When you think about it, most companies rarely benefit from acquisitions and mergers - instead they slowly die. To list a few: AOL, Bebo, Myspace, Flip, Map Quest, Alta Vista, Netscape, Broadcast.com, Excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Sun Microsystems...

What startups are still going strong post-acquisition? I can think of Youtube off the top of my head...what else? If the parent companies are (generally) not benefiting from acquisitions, why are they happening?
PDF conversion is a difficult problem. To my rudimentary understanding of the format, PDF documents aren't really plain text, they have no semantic information, they are just individual glyphs and figures mapped to absolute coordinates on a fixed-size page. This format is really meant to be as a portable printer-friendly document format, not ereader-friendly dynamically resizable format.

I can't comment on the RFC part of your comment.
Yes.
I read SICP being an experienced C++/imperative engineer.

On the other hand, I wouldn't have that enjoyable mind-shifting experience if I started with SICP in the first place.
Language is dynamic, and words do change definition over time.

Having said that, I still prefer to use it correctly.
I don't see what Google has to do with this. Google gets roasted just as well as any other company around here. I've seen several articles get upvoted about google+ being a ghost town, and other critical articles.

Just try googling site:news.ycombinator.com google

From the first page I see:

6 discussions that are basically neutral

1 positive (Google puts Japan quake tsunami warning on their search page)

1 mix of positive and negative (people arguing both positions) (Goodbye, Google App Engine)

2 negative (Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results, Google to announce "new programming language for structured web programming" )

I've never noticed a leaning towards favoring Google here. If you were arguing that YC funded companies get preferential treatment then you might have a case but I don't think your "I get a feeling that the hivemind of HN is critical of anything that is not associated google" is correct at all.
Gmesick23