skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mentioned it in a comment to his article, but I'll repost here - "Markdown" is not a StackOverflow core competency. People don't go to StackOverflow to write Markdown. They go to get their questions answered or to answer others' questions. I don't think his "core competency" argument floats.

His "I couldn't find libraries for C#" on the other hand may well be valid.
That sounds like an argument to change how to make freemium more successful-- it doesn't sound like a counter-argument against the fact that they can be.

Why don't more freemium services allow one-shot addon purchases instead of subscriptions?

I know one of our sites is going to help soothe the pain of purchases by buying "credits" in batches that can be spent in different ways rather than requiring a CC# every single time they want to buy something.
Or don't do this, and:

1) Don't get IP blocked from Google

2) Get some real work done instead
Same goes for Audiogalaxy. (Doesn't AudioGalaxy's founder occasionally show up on this board?) It was a web page where you could see what music people were sharing, search for it, and then download it. When you downloaded a file, it would download a small stub (via the browser's mechanism), which would then be opened by the AudioGalaxy service on the client, which would queue up the file for later downloading.

I remember arriving at college, where each person had their own pet ways of downloading MP3s. Within a week, my whole dorm had basically standardized on AudioGalaxy.
Interesting article: Your are absolutely correct about “the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way"---I personally believed that starting up a company in today's economy is an advantage because as you mentioned in your essay there are less competitors in the market place-which makes it easier to growth a business!! Ultimately, before you go into a business –it is necessary to do your research about the market and your competitors, such as, marketplace trends, problems with product and services, how problems can be corrected, get ideas for new products and applications-submit your own questions to discussion groups to get valuable feedbacks- it is up to the business owner to be successful.
Again, Thak you for your article www.empresademercadeo.com
The title should have been: "Freemium might not be a good business model for most consumer applications". That title would have made sense...
As someone who has been laid off from tech companies twice, I care about one and only one thing: the size of the severance package. I don't need compassion, I don't need understanding, I don't need the people who ran the company into the ground to "help" me find a new job. Just show me the money.

Heh, both times in fact those who got the chop counted themselves - and were viewed by former cow-orkers - as the lucky ones.
Working With Video From Ruby
My curiosity is because every other P2P filesharing tool written before BitTorrent was used for copyright infringement. Bill Gates is a different situation, because there were no PCs before he wrote Altair Basic. There were plenty of P2P filesharing services before BitTorrent, though.

You can't predict the future, but you ought to have a pretty good idea what's happening in the present.
I find it hard to believe that HTML sanitization is central to the Stack Overflow site. (At least, not central in the "worth-reinventing-the-wheel" sense. Note that Atwood is depending on Markdown rather than inventing his own markup syntax and implementing a library for translating it into HTML.) Does the quality or efficiency of HTML sanitization make such a difference in the overall performance of the site?
Totally unrelated, and I'm not really criticizing the article (it's pretty good) but I was reminded of a recent doonesbury, which also had 4 points: smoke, fire, hose, shovel.

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full...
The intriguing side of the article is not so much about BitTorrent, but about Asperger syndrome.
Yeah, I think the Tesla example yesterday was how not to do it.

On the other hand, I think these things are relevant right now if there are people reading them that are venture backed and things look less rosy in their outlook.

I have much more respect for an employer that plans ahead and lets their employees know what's up significantly before they can't make the next month's payroll.

"Here's the deal. It's going to be hard to raise the next round. We've got to cut back. You've got jobs for another month and severance for a month after that. Let's sit down and talk about what you'd like to find for your next job and I'll push every contact I've got to help you find that."
This is NOT a Nokia concept phone. This is a 'just a sketch' design by Mac Funamizu. You can see the originals on his blog here: http://petitinvention.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/just-a-sketch... , where he links to the Nokia Aeon video on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5jPtUym7oc . Altogether, a nice phone but not connected to Nokia in any way as far as I can tell.
Can we please stop talking about monetization?
Free Sms Section. Funny, Sad, Love and Flirty Sms
Thanks for your answer...
So I guess I should put some limits on how much one referal fees for a month and pay only accounts that stay active more than a month...

I hadn't thought about limiting to student email addresses... but that should limit the possibility of fraud. I'm also limiting customers to only one country too (malaysia)...
Why does a mediocre pep talk get so many karma points? Who is this Paul Graham?
An All New Rails Security Guide
I've been thinking about this lately. I suppose because similar to Adam, my start-up is music focused so music is a big part of my life. And because HearWhere.com (my start-up) is focused on connecting people with live music, I see and hear the enormous volume of musicians trying to make it.

But start-ups do/should have groupies. You just don't get to actually SEE them. But I (and I assume other start-ups) regularly get e-mails of support from users. That's fan-mail! Those are your groupies.
Better than just telling you how great you are (like band groupies do), e-groupies (or start-up groupies) give you ideas on how to improve. They tell you what they would like to see. They tell you what works, and what doesn't. They are the dedicated fan base.

If you don't have them, find them. Make sure there is a way for them to contact you. If after a few months, you find that they truly don't exist, then maybe (just maybe) you are the equivalent of a hobo with a harmonica thinking he's a rock star!
The danger in the freemium business model is understanding just what features are worth paying for and which ones are not.

About 12 years ago there was a circuit-board layout program (PADS-PCB) that followed this model. The paid version started at about $900 (and went up to about $5,000 IIRC depending on features you wanted) and the free version was limited to small circuit boards and 70 components. I downloaded the free version to use in my "basement business" and never needed to upgrade: 70 components was plenty for me. Talking to a salesperson a few years later, I found out that the company lost money hand-over-foot because only relatively few companies needed to build boards larger than the freeware version could handle: the market was changing and electronic component integration was increasing so a single part could now do what a couple years before would have required 5-10 parts. Most of the companies that were happy with the free version would have had no problem paying the $900 had the free version not been available. The software was excellent and even the free version would have been worth the $900, but obviously if it did what you needed, there was no reason to pay.
Are advertisers rational?
Honesty + generous severance please.
This was really what took him out. Nobody at the time thought to use a file to share all the meta information. It was always about urls or ip addresses or so on. He did not try to reinvent the world, he just took things that worked and put them together.
For example, Scheme defines only one conditional in its base: the if special form.

Hmm? cond appears to exist in R5RS also.

Also, these two forms are not equivalent:

(define s (lambda (y) (+ y 1)))

Converter<int,int> s = delegate(int y){ return y + 1; };

Notice that Scheme doesn't require y to be an integer.
Sorry, story is used in British English (from my experience) to mean a description of an event or a sequence of events, fictional or not.
Heh, both times in fact those who got the chop counted themselves - and were viewed by former cow-orkers - as the lucky ones.

A pretty sad state of affairs... it's not like you can't leave by yourself and go do something more worthwhile, if you're that unhappy...
MAMA: Key findings
Except for the up-front $10, the Somethingawful Forums do this. A few bucks for an avatar, a few bucks to change your avatar subtitle, etc.. It's all a la carte and all one-time purchases.

They have the advantage, though, of having a huge community and thus a good deal of peer pressure incentive to get the extra bling. That, and your avatar is a "stupid newbie" picture until you buy your own.
Skip lists seem to be a powerful way of thinking about the problem, anyway. Note that they lead nicely to the very nifty multidimensional generalization, skip quadtrees, www.ics.uci.edu/~goodrich/pubs/skip.pdf .

And, FWIW, they also lead to my algorithms for hash-consing digraphs, which I put up as rough preprints and and prototype code at http://www.wryttyndyffyryntly.com/preprint/. Those algorithms are unreviewed, and I made a bad mistake in an early version, so who knows? (I sent email about them to other people who had cited the Mauborgne papers that I cited, and got no response. I don't know whether it's worth trying to bang them into shape for submission to a journal, and whether or not it's worth it in principle, in practice last year I was too tired of working on them to consider it very objectively.)
From the article:

Study	Date	Total	Passed Percentage
Parnas	Dec 2001	2,034,788	14,563	0.71%
Saarsoo	Jun 2006	1,002,350	25,890	2.58%
MAMA	Jan 2008	3,509,180	145,009	4.13%

Markup validation studies
Your comment got me thinking. I think the issue is not that MS are slow - they used to be pretty quick at some things. Rather, it's that they've always been willfully ignorant of the larger computing culture. They never had any interest in connecting with or learning from the richest programming traditions or the best ideas or the hacker communities. They just created their own technological anti-utopia, a sort of Greenspunland in which myriads of half-baked, wildly complicated things conflict with each other. Entire armies of programmers grow up there and never leave.

I know this sounds cranky. It's because I started my professional programming life in this dark forest and it took years to find my way out. And I think it's a shame that they dominated the industry for as long as they did, because they wrought such damage on the level of ideas.

There's a certain type of smart-but-ignorant programmer who is infatuated with his own IQ, doesn't want to learn from anybody who knows more, and just cranks out reams of code (often filled with pseudo-abstractions that make it a lot worse than plain old bad code). I think of MS as the corporate equivalent of this type.

Edit: I should add that not everybody at MS is like this, of course. But the exceptions are people who grew up outside that culture.
Somebody on the thread did it, via shell script, and didn't get IP blocked. Point #2 is a good one, though.
Entertaining article on the fail meme.

I sometimes wonder how "normal" people perceive this mass of variously geeky people on the net who practically speak a different language by now. I sometimes wonder how my parents would react if I sent them an email declaring that "I pwn3d some n00bs".
I'm skeptical of how much credit Box and the ex-COM crowd deserve for the good things (the functional programming things) in C# 3.0. These people's hallmark for 15 years has been their gift for taking simple things and making them complicated. The functional extensions to C# aren't like that. I suspect that the FP people that MS hired (Erik Meijer et.al.) had more to do with it - and most importantly, the leadership of Heijlsberg, who matured intellectually long before he entered MS and who has little in common with MS culture.
I'm having core issues now that my legs are stronger from biking. I bike faster and harder but now it's my abs and lats (oddly enough, not my lower back) that feel it at the end of a ride.
The greatest defunct web sites and dotcom disasters
The Flash Player is still proprietary, and Gnash is far from being a full replacement. Hopefully, HTML 5 video and faster DOM graphics will replace Flash soon.
Mygazines.com closes shop weeks after settling copyright suit
Doing regular pullups will probably help.
yeah but he is putting ALL of that billions into stocks (100%!), that is pretty damn aggressive for someone especially at his age. This is a huge aggressive move on his part, and if Warren Buffet - the richest guy in the world - is buying and thinks stocks are cheap, I personally would find it hard to sleep at night if I didn't do the same.
The Blogging Scholarship - $10k to be won
Things got improved recently...I tend to like the new Visual Studio 2008 + .NET + C# combo.

Despite the numerous critique I partially agree with, Microsoft showed the continuous commitment to improve their software, and I personally still think that staying with them, as a profesional developer, is not a bad choice.
Dude - Buffet didn't become the richest person in the WORLD by being altruistic. Think about it.
Very, very, interesting! Is it only about making money though? Sure that is essential, but what about the journey we take along the way? That is where the wealth lies.
Don't forget that Buffett now has billions of dollars riding on the recovery of American stocks. His motives for releasing this aren't all patriotic, are they?
Can you obtain the ability to create something without actually creating it?

I think you can.
Don't love it, don't hate it. Wish people would stop coming up with ad-hoc Rails security guides, because you have to read all of them to catch the collected wisdom now. For instance, this document is the first formal doc that talks about Redcloth injection --- something you're not going to care about until you happen to use Redcloth for Textile rendering.

Generally I think this particular guide is satisfactory on details but very poor on structure. For instance, it starts the section on SQL Injection off by saying that Rails is mostly immune to it, due to clever design choices. Nonsense. The same corner cases that cause all modern apps to still have SQLi apply to Rails as well --- sort columns on tables, query builders, and everything else that requires you to concatenate SQL expression tokens instead of using stored procedures. If you con yourself into believing Rails protects you from this, you're the dev who's going to wind up with the Rails SQLi vulns.

Not a particularly big fan of their coverage of session security, either: a passing mention of httpOnly, just enough to give people the impression that it does something that it doesn't do, but a total miss on something that is going to cause Rails devs to fail PCI audits: poor domain scoping on cookies and lack of the "secure" flag.
Agreed.

Let me know if I got this straight, Markdown doesn't have it's own HTML sanitation mechanism, so Stack Overflow is rolling their own general HTML sanitation solution?

Why use Markdown in the first place? Is this a time when Markdown doesn't solve the problem Stack Overflow has? Look for another markup language?
Peter,

Out of curiosity, what kind of biking?

Bikers (myself including when I was riding pretty religiously) are notorious for getting great workouts, but never hitting the core muscles (something about being hunched over, I guess, doesn't improve core muscles. :) )

While I'm not why your Lats are feeling it (honestly that sounds more like a bike fit issue) -- perhaps you've been doing a lot of climbing and pull hard?

Anyways, try the 8min ab workout or some variation. Easy way to pack in core fairly quickly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWjTnBmCHTY
Placing bets on the mobile web
Powerlifters are probably not the best people to go to for form, especially not as a newbie, they tend to have a "whatever works" philosophy. You do what they do, you'll get hurt. Some will have great form of course, but as as newbie, how would you know? Also powerlifters tend to have very unbalanced physiques. You might see some dude who can bench 500lbs but can't do chin-ups. He's well-adapted for his sport, he's not an all-round athlete (nor does he want to be).

Bodybuilders do tend to have good form, but probably aren't doing the exercises that you want to do. A lot of gym equipment is specifically for bodybuilders. They use leg extensions and cable crossovers specifically to build symmetry and definition, for example. Bodybuilders typically aren't interested in "functional strength" (e.g. they are training for bodybuilding, not to be better at some other sport). Again they are not, nor are they interested in being, all-round athletes.

Basically, what I'm saying is, if you want gym advice, first you have to find people with the same goals as you. If it's just "get fit" you'll need to be more specific in order to ask the right people the right questions.
There's a wonderful quote from Brian Eno about the conservative force that comes from having people who like your work:

"I'm afraid to say that admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism, for consolidation. Of course it's really wonderful to be acclaimed for things you've done - in fact it's the only serious reward, because it makes you think "it worked! I'm not isolated!" or something like that, and it makes you feel gratefully connected to your own culture. But on the other hand, there's a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can't do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me ( - this isn't so much a question of artistic nobility or high ideals: I just get too bloody bored), but at the same time I do feel guilt for 'deserting my audience' by not doing the things they apparently wanted. I'd rather not feel this guilt, actually, so I avoid finding out about situations that could cause it. The problem is that people nearly always prefer what I was doing a few years earlier - this has always been true. The other problem is that so, often, do I! Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results don't at first compare well with the glossy and lauded works of the past. You have to keep reminding yourself that they went through that as well, otherwise they become frighteningly accomplished. That's another problem with being made to think about your own past - you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe towards your earlier self: "How did I do it? Wherever did these ideas come from?". Now, the workaday everyday now, always looks relatively less glamorous than the rose-tinted then (except for those magic hours when your finger is right on the pulse, and those times only happen when you've abandoned the lifeline of your own history)."
1) generate random 10000<n<100000

2) check number of results-- n > results?

3) submit comment to a recent reddit post, which will be updated on Google within 10 seconds, containing n repeated (n - results) times.
My stock answer is that public bureaucracies are bad at innovation. Perhaps there is some sort of supplement to school that a hacker could work on for children interested in topics either outside or more advanced than the curriculum.

Reforming the actual schools, though, is equivalent to reforming city hall.
Why would you if you knew there was a payoff on the cards?
What accounts for the difference here? Why can't K-12 institutions select by aptitude?
Arithmetic Is Hard—To Get Right
Clearly he wrote the essay to be altruistic. But I doubt very much that he's buying the stock to be. Buffett would never be so arrogant as to think that one person can affect the markets. The whole thing is infused with the sort of fatalism about markets that any successful investor learns to have.
A ‘Dose of Nature’ for Attention Problems
Ask HN: Are you Autistic?
Just curious to know.
Agreed, and I think Markdown's inclusion of HTML makes it a bad choice for this application* as well - why put yourself in the position of being in an arms race with spammers and scammers, when there are other valid choices (WikiText being the most obvious example.)

(* This is not a slam on Markdown, which I quite like, but John Gruber created it for himself and his uses as a writer with complete ownership over his servers.)
If N employees voluntarily cut off their salaries by 50% they can prevent N/2 lay offs.
Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and Good Luck
Original request for test porn downloads: http://www.ntk.net/2002/07/26/

I believe this is the first mention of Bittorrent when still under development.
I believe Buffett is always competing with Himself.
I second it.
[citation needed] - he wasn't a crooked thief. There is a surprising lack of scandal surrounding him (i'm not one to care what consenting adults do in privacy.) He is a substantial philanthropist and value-based investor.
I'd say they're the ones that realize there's now future tilling Microsoft's fields.
I don't see how creating a school system flexible enough to accommodate diverse abilities and interests would create an evil bias in society. What is so bad about letting parents choose the educational product that is best for their child? We already do this for college.
As someone who quit my job 4 months ago to co-found my first startup (not funded yet), this essay is chicken soup.

Thanks PG.
I made a similar comment on the Buffet story on the front page, but Atwood's argument is good fodder to extend my argument.

Atwood says: If it's core to your business, don't go shopping, do the hard work and make it yourself.

Buffet says: America's seen worse and prospered in response. Go buy some America today.

It's debatable if Atwood's example is core to his business (I think it might be since it's the freakin' user interface for making comments), and the comments provide some helpful follow-up to Buffet's argument. Here's my synthesis of the two:

As a patriotic, peace-loving American I want to do the hard work and bring my passion and vision to a business that will make our economy more efficient and save folks money. I'll do that in the area of my expertise, technology. Everywhere else, where I have the money I'll invest in the companies that can and will rebuild America.

That's the investment criteria, personal and financial, that I believe Atwood and Buffet are driving at. Of course, it doesn't just apply to Americans, it's probably just more obvious to those folks living outside of our parochial bubble ;)
It surely must be a sign of the apocalypse when we start seeing coverage of 4chan memes in mainstream media.
It feels like my abs get a good workout, but for my lats it's mainly a tweak I keep getting between my left shoulder blade and spine. Also, my core muscles get a lot tighter after riding than my legs do. I don't have great bike posture because my big ol' belly pulls my back straight instead of properly arched up.

I bike 3.25 miles on city streets to my commuter train stop. There's one hill that's short and steep on the way up and long and gradual on the way down, with the rest being mostly flat. I usually bike pretty hard because I'm running late.