skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup. DOVO, the Belgian army's demining service, still retrieves about 200 tons (i.e. 200,000 kg) of shells just from the small area in the northwest of the country where fighting was the heaviest. Accidents happen sometimes with farmers who dig up fosfor- or yperite - here's a picture of someone's hand 24h after touching some yperite (it's not pretty!): http://www.forumeerstewereldoorlog.nl/viewtopic.php?t=2325&#... . The caption says he used a handkerchief to wipe off his hand, which then also burnt his leg.
Prices Falling for Online Ads - Bits Blog
Facebook Music Is Coming
Ummm, that's because it was murder. See the (well written) works of the historian Robert Conquest. By the way, when the Soviet archives were opened up during the Yeltsin era, his estimations of the number of Soviet murders turned out to be almost exactly right (actually, a little on the low side).

I think of this sometimes when I think of my wife. She survived, with years of hunger, Mao's "Great Leap Forward", when 77,000,000 human beings -- men, women, children dying as their mothers held them and watched -- were systematically starved to death.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin, an expert on the subject
Coding Horror: Programming Is Hard, Let's Go Shopping
The real genius in bittorrent does not lie in it's technological superiority, but in it's bravery and simplicity.

This is true of many, if not most gamechanging breakthroughs. Skype wasn't the first IP telephony provide - but they made it simple and were brave.
I don't think it's apples to oranges, personally. Unless you mean "examples where it does work" versus "examples where it doesn't work" as a business model.

I'm no expert here, but these guys seem to believe addon and premium content will be the main business driver for MMOs long-term and try to make that point:
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?pr...
What a completely pointless presentation. And the site it was on looks terrible. I find it disappointing that all of the document-hosting sites have poor design aesthetic. Text needs good aesthetic the most.
The Hexagonal Wheel Paradox
How do I lay people off?
Social Media ABC's - W is for Walled Garden
Exactly my sentiments. Well said. Maybe you will like this video I made to express my sentiments.
http://sanjaydattatri.blogspot.com/2008/10/its-not-all-doom-...
You missed his point.

Preventing buffer overflows is simple and well understood, yet it's still a problem. Preventing SQL injection is not as simple.* He's pointing out that if we have big problems even in the presence of simple solutions, we'll have even worse problems with not as simple solutions.

*Your solution might be "simple," but it's still more complicated that making sure you don't overrun your buffer.
People love to flaunt their upgrades.
Students Best Bill Gates in Solving an Equation
Seeing if people are willing to pay for it is still a great metric. But until (if ever) the advertising bubble actually pops, extremely few web products will be best served by freemium.

I can count web freemiums that made more money than their free counterparts on half a hand.
ah yes, good catch

I misread that
Coffee With An Expert - meet skilled experts over coffee to solve startup problems
4.53% is the accepted ISO standard.
Yeah, that's true. I just wish you could imitate him like an EFT.
There are already goggles that give you a virtual 30" screen. If they can figure out why some people get a headache and solve that, then "big enough for a keyboard" goes out the window.
I see what you are saying about the widespread consumer deception, it is true, and yes - we can agree to disagree.

I simply refuse to do it because others are, and believe that successful market studies can be carried out without deceptive tactics.

This general attitude and outlook on my behalf actually mostly derives more from sheer pride than from any sort of assumed moral superiority - I simply can't sleep at night if I think that I applied or relied on anything other than my own merit to achieve something, and deceptive/slick tactics make me feel as though I cheated because I was unable to do it the hard way . . . that kind of thing.

I will close by conceding that I may be wrong about this, however, I might also just end up identifying more user needs in a highly accurate manner with my approach, which is conducive to even greater profits.
Trying to create a better kind of company.
‘Get in Shape’ #7: Strength & Flexibility - Don’t shirk your core muscles.
I could only find "I buy when other people are selling," but he did apparently make a killing during the Great Depression simply by buying stocks.

I thought this quote was terrific and really relevant to HN:

"Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still? "

There are a bunch of great quotes: http://www.linkrap.com/Getty
I was, of course, refering to the agricultural deaths. To some extent those seem similar to the situation in Ireland and possibly China under Mao. To what extent can attribute a failed policy as murder? Is the US responsable for the 1 million or so deaths in Iraq? Probably not.
Reaching an Autistic Teenager
No and BitTorrent doesn't look like a company either.
Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Building a JavaScript table grid application with TaffyDB
Google Chrome Will Make You Smarter
Benefits of Blogging for Scrapbookers
Can you manage without having to borrow?
Good points, I was going to post something along the same lines, but you beat me to the punch.

As long as you have traction and are generating cashflow, the VC will gladly take a sideline to his/her investment.
When people talk about how starting a company will bring you to the best and worst times of your life, this would be in the 'worst' category.
Spend time working your contacts to help them find another job. Your the one that screwed up, not them.

Don't be afraid to say that.
Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs)
In my eyes an important factor is the psychological one where as an entrepreneur the ideas you have and the way you shape them tend to be more realistic in bad times then in hype times. I guess it is something of the survival nature.

Dudu
Why Boston's high-priced Macallen condos are a sorry example of "green" building
Had you followed that advice after the Japanese crash of 1990, you would still be down almost 75%:

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=^N225
Ask YC: What do you think of paying a referal fee per new member?
I'm currently creating a social networking website and to attract users I was thinking of asking university students to advertise for me and pay them for each new member they refer (around 30 cents per new member).

What do you think of this idea? Did anyone try something similar before? What are the caveats? (of course I will check that members are real members who log in more than only one time and I will monitor ip address to prevent the creation of a lot of accounts..)

Thanks...
Revenue 2.0
You obviously haven't read the book since your example in no way relates to its argument...
Freemium in MMOs is different from most freemium implementations that startups have. In the game case you have an extremely low barrier to entry, as well as a social incentive to buy into the premium aspect of the product.

With something like, say, the poll service from the article, there's no social incentive to upgrade, and the cost of doing so is non-trivial (more so than, say, a $1 sword).

There's a difference between "hey, now that you're hooked, buy this $1 thing" and "hey, now that you're hooked, buy a $20/month subscription"
Download Private Practice Episodes
Private Practice is a spin-off of the highly popular ABC series, Greys Anatomy starring Kate Walsh as Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery, a renowned neonatal surgeon.
with kazaa/etc, you share all the files in your library. so if i download one, then unless i remove it from the library folder i share it every time i download anything. so it's kinda different. bittorrent doesn't share old stuff.
Adobe Drops Licensing Fees, Gives Away Flash For Devices
The idea of freemium is to use the free features to hook the users, and then charge them for premium features. The problem with this model is that if your free feature set is too poor, people simply won't get hooked. And if you cover all the "core" features users look for (i.e. get them hooked) people don't want to pay for the premium (lower marginal utility).
The Python source to bittorrent is worth reading as well, even if it doesn't quite follow the best coding practices.

http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/BitT...
There's a difference between iPhone "shareware" games and freemium web businesses. After you beat the 1 or 2 levels on the iPhone game, the utility of those two levels drops of considerably... i.e. you can no longer derive much use replaying these levels.

With most freemium websites, the free service is offered perpetually, and thus the utility of keeping the free stuff stays the same as the first time you used it.
the thoughts are very much in synch with what my mind revolves for the past few weeks. Nice indeed.
Tell them Monday that Friday its their last day.
Exactly; that's why I didn't find Yahoo's story very interesting.
Is it Time to Switch to an Apple Laptop?
Number 1 is idiotic. Historically, investors who hold shares for more than 6 months get 9 times the returns of investors who churn on a short term basis. Furthermore, there is no way to predict how stocks will behave in the short term. In the long term, we can be reasonably certain that they will appreciate. In the short term, we have no idea. Furthermore, if you are not an institutional investors, federal income taxes of ~35%, and stockbroker fees will absolutely obliterate you and if you are a institutional investor, you have too much money to be able to day trade. The only people who ever try #1 are the ones who have no clue what they are doing and usually end up broke. They need to read The Intelligent Investor by Graham.
Indeed 800 trillion is a big number. So big that I would check your sources if I were you.
Zuckerberg flirts with record labels, eyes digital music biz
Alerting webmasters to webserver vulnerabilities
I was really hoping there was nothing on that page but a picture and two radio buttons for yes and no. That would have been amazing.
May I also ask a language-related question. Why are you saying "story" in all these posts, when you are talking about a true story? I thought the word "history" was to be used in those cases, but I think there is a subtler difference between story/history than I previously thought (I thought: story=fiction, history=non-fiction). Could anybody please give me a pointer on this?
Reason and WSJ's Solution to the Health Insurance Crisis (Video)
You can't edit a modern document on an iPod touch. Nor can you use it for long periods.
Maximum Business Profit - Marketing, Money and Social Web at BiztechDay.com
Sounds like there is a market demand for amiaceoornot.com...
I don't think it's a bad idea provided you have enough cash on hand and a good system of only accepting registrations that you want. For $0.30 a registration, someone could easily bot it with fake accounts from all over the world (different IPs, would login multiple times - whatever). It sounds like you want only people with .edu email addresses? Facebook did this initially IIRC.
That's nothing, every operating system was used for copyright infrighment too! Bill Gates has clearly contemplated mass-scale music downloading when creating windows, unless he was living under the rock.

Sarcasm aside, universal tools are like that - people use them for many things.
What Will Wright Thinks About Spore's DRM
It's great advice but may as well have been written in hieroglyphics, personally I've never seen it taken (three rounds across two companies + missed payroll during bankruptcy once).

I posit that the reason for this, in tech anyway, is that employees are generally in one of two categories: 1) Sales people with customer connections or 2) Developer/admin types who may have a lot of access to systems. In either of these cases the employer could be concerned that the possibly-terminated employee is going to damage the assets (contacts or code) that the company has.

If I could contribute a pattern from my limited experience it would be this: Companies tend to hire a hatchet-man a few months before layoffs start. It often looks like an incompetent manager "decided to spend more time with his family", or the creation of a new, often highly paid, middle manager position. After the new guy is in his place he lays off the people that he's {decided, been instructed} to, and then moves on, often because he's burnt out from doing all of the dirt work that the managers above him are too weak to do.

In both companies the person who was hired as a hatchet man would have been a far better manager than the one who sailed the ship into the iceberg in the first place. If as an employer you don't see your manager as capable of doing this hard job (layoffs), how do you expect them to do the hard day to day job of managing performance? Just keeping the house clean can save that first round of layoffs that often consists of the low performers, and without the horrible morale crush of pink slips.
What's the point Atwood is trying to make here?
Both are "blockbuster" businesses when viewed from investor's point of view. They either produce 100x return, or they should die.
I'm always amazed how many people buy into that idea- do you really think that Reagan knew all along that it was a ploy to run the Soviet economy into the ground? SDI was a huge wealth transfer to the defense industry. The fall of the Soviet Union (if indeed you see that as a bad thing) had very little to do with a need to increase their military spending to keep par with Reagan.
All respect to Buffet in his success and this op-ed's general message. But its simplicity reminds me of George Bush's call to "go shopping" after 9/11. Do you want to overcome fear and build America's future? Then entrepreneurs lets get building. If you don't have the self-esteem to invest in your own efforts (we need them now more than ever) then follow Buffet's advice and buy a slice of the companies that will rebuild America. If you have the chutzpah though, don't "go shopping," "get building."
Proggit challenge: Find a number N which, when Googled, yields N results
http://utest.com
Along that tangent:

The use of torrent files as a universal link to the downloadable material is also genius. It removes the need for implementing a costly peer-2-peer search mechanism (Gnutella and Kazaa spent quite a lot of resources on search), and a potentially cluttered GUI. Instead, the torrent files can be distributed in any way people find convenient, eg. www, e-mail or RSS.

On top of that, including the tracker-URL transparently in the torrent file is a huge usability improvement. No more searching for lists of super-nodes to enter the network, as was the case with Gnutella.
This was published back in April??

Weird, I hadn't heard of it.
A list of iPhone apps I want, anyone seen any of these? Other Ideas?
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-bu...
I think he said that it is okay to reinvent the wheel if the 'wheel' happens to be central to your business/service.

I think.

Nice Feynman quote in there, though.
Ask HN: Name/address/e-mail/phone parsing?
I have a block of text that contains an address, city, state and zip. I need to break it out into separate fields.

I know this has been done 1000x times before but I can't find a decent library. Anybody know of one? Free is preferable but I'd be happy to buy a component as long as it's royalty-free.

I also need parsers for names, e-mail and phone numbers. Any help is appreciated.
I recall doing this with a bunch of horrible regexs a few years ago when I needed something pretty quickly. Let me know what you find.
Yes, but there was no client when Bram did it. It was a download window like in a browser.
He did not say 'buy an index fund'. In an average investing environment, the argument for buying the index and not individual stocks is sound. However, buying in this market -- and to take advantage of the blood on the street -- is the individual play. Many companies will not make it, or will not make it without massive restructuring, or with much lower market share. But for a value investor, some companies with real moats and real protection have now been priced (by the overall market) into value.
Or, like, somewhere to be at a certain time in the morning?

:)
Uh.... How does what he say prove what he will do? If he were being dishonest here, maybe he would be... I dunno, dishonest?

I personally have no idea what Buffett's really thinking, but maybe you left some points out of your argument there?
Developing entrepreneurs whilst at university / school
what I cannot create, I do not understand
In my opinion, semantic web is way ahead of its time. I'm guessing it's about 5-10 years away from mattering.
Thank God, finally some reason in the room. Run lean + create value + Targeted marketing = Success = MarkTend.com

We were ahead of the curve on this one.

Michael Kassing
MarkTend.com
http://marktend.com
From Skiena, which buy right now:

Skip lists --- These are somewhat of a cult data structure. Their primary benefits seem to be ease of implementation relative to balanced trees. If you are using a canned tree implementation, and thus not coding it yourself, this benefit is eliminated. I wouldn't bother with them.
Buffet is undoubtedly a great investor. But I have a slight feeling that could be doing this more for altruistic reasons rather than personal profit. He might believe that he can inject enough confidence in the system by his reputation then maybe he can help improve things. Not necessarily by enough for his investements to pay off but to avoid a worse fate for the financial system. Remember the guy has committed to giving away most of his fortune already. Anyway it is just a theory, good luck to him either way.
1. No experience on livev, only libevent.
2. libevent is an abstraction layer providing a single API for many event based subsystems. So you can write ANSI/POSIX C code with it portable and at the maximum available event i/o layer.

I doubt any implementation on NPTL or any threading mechanism can get close in performance to this. The overhead of managing threads is big.

About multiple cores, I don't think it is necessary. The CPU work should be minimal. If there is something else you need to do as backend, maybe it can be on a separate process and use fast inter process communication, say sharing memory (rfork is a good start, for example.)
You have to understand how godawful of a rat's nest COM was, and the reams of technical gobbledygook that Don Box churned out while pushing it (and then the same thing all over again with XML and SOAP), to fully appreciate the irony of his discovering the first thing about Lisp in 2005.

Edit: Also, a telltale question: do you think he ever actually built anything with Lisp or Scheme? I'll bet he went straight to "improving" on it.

Edit 2: moved irrelevant bit to a different comment.
Mmmm....supper power
A little tip on reddit: Everything it says/believes - exactly the opposite is true. I've never seen it fail.

It's become the cesspit of the internet.

There are sites that have more nonsense (4chan for example), but they know it's all jokes. Reddit actually takes itself seriously, and has no idea just how full of nonsense it actually is.
It's worth mentioning, while we're talking about the "real genius of BitTorrent" --- and fine, it's better work than I've done, but ---

BitTorrent is an implementation of an idea (group delivery of content using FEC) that was quite popular at the time. There was already an open-source C language startup doing it, and more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain, which Michael Luby started during the tail end of the boom. The Fountain guys even tried to standardize it, as a protocol called FLID-DL.

The relationship between BitTorrent and the kernel of its idea seems to be approximately the same as the relationship between Napster and IRC XDCC, or between WinAmp and MP3 players. I think that's a compliment, by the way.
I like how when PG writes an article, there about about double or triple the comments on hackernews compared to any other random submission.

The line I found most valuable, is the reason I first decided to start a company. 'Markets don't "reduce headcount."' the most security you can have is working for yourself... or the government... but I think most of the "startup types" dread the idea of the bureaucracy. We like the freedom to rise or fall based on our own abilities, the freedom to make something that is going to change the world. The majority of hackers I know are revolutionaries, not reformers.
From what I recall of the last analysis on this subject, I don't think he has 'a few billion' in his non-Berkshire holdings. The non-Berkshire holdings are basically the money he has accumulated since personally buying Berkshire Hathaway, with his fairly modest salary. He has often described that he could (and does) beat Berkshire's ROI as a small investor, which is why his non-Berkshire holdings are in the millions.

His billions, from where his net worth for Fortune are calculated, is the 30+% ownership of Berkshire Hathaway (market cap today, 180B). The rest is almost a rounding error -- except that's where all of his lifestyle expenses come from, beyond his $100K salary and misc. payments, as he doesn't sell (as far as I know) any of his BH and it does not yield a dividend.
How serious are you about your rock band(s)? Is it a casual pursuit (i.e., a "side project") or a full-fledged venture?
That's the first Erlang book, and is very good. Unfortunately, it's out of print, or was the last time I checked, but might be available used. It's very good for wrapping your head around programming with pattern matching, single assignment, and message passing concurrency, but light on the OTP, since, I believe, it was written before much of today's OTP was written. Think of it as the book the writers of OTP must have used to learn how to write OTP.

If you can find a used copy, grab it. I bought mine when it was still in print, and wouldn't part with it.
Extrapolating to the future based on one datapoint will never work.
YC applicants: Today is the last day to submit your application. 
Today is the last day to submit your application.
> cross from Canada

That did not happen.
Start by not asking for sympathy, or writing blog posts encouraging people to fawn over you for your perseverance and wisdom during hard times.

Next, stop taking a salary, or recognize that you're accepting six figures while throwing people you recruited out into the worst economy in 50 years.

Finally, move your ass to find those people jobs. Carve out time to write real, personal recommendations for each of them. Introduce them to every company you have a relationship with. Sell.

God help you if you write, "it saddens me that we have to let these people go, because most of them were solid performers". If you kept dead wood in your company, likely to the detriment of the whole team, and couldn't muster up the courage to deal with them until the economy gave you an excuse, it's all on you, asshole.

Yeah, I sound like even more of a dick here than I normally do, but I don't think I'm the only one noticing the valley patting itself on the back for fucking people over.

[edit I'm not super happy with this comment, but I'm not deleting it either; might as well be honest about what I think. We have employees too. Maybe I'll be a total douche if something bad happens to us? Tell me you told me so.]
Freemium Isn’t A Business Model, It’s A Marketing And Trust Strategy
Online Search can Strengthen your Aging Brain?
Qwitter:  Un-follow notifications for Twitter
Thanks for a very good post.
RKlophaus: Your stitcho.com site needs to tell the reader more about why they need Stitcho -- on the first page.