skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even 4000 might not be enough to generate many hits for casual users of the site.
It's not just confusing - which it is - it's not needed.

It doesn't solve a problem for the average user.
This looks really cool. Anybody know about DTrace support for Linux (specifically, Debian)?
I am 28 with a reasonably well paying job and a small investment in the stock market. As the market falls all I can think about is how much I can buy while it's down. What people forget about is the value of a stock or home is only indirectly related to it's price, there are a wide range of companies in great shape that have tanked.

Long term I think the US GDP is limited by our lack of investment in basic infrastructure. But when you look at the "real" economy things are still looking good. It's going to be interesting seeing how many baby boomers retire and how many are going to wait until the market recovers. But, I think people pulling money out of the market is going to help keep the market realistic for the next few years. (Good for me but bad for the old people.)
Perfect...ly average:

http://marcusvorwaller.com/look/The_eyeballing_game-20081016...
Good Day Gentlemen!

I wish to lodge a complaint with regards to this world wide web page turning into trivial entertainment the likes of which can be found on the games.reddit.com as the youth call it.

This shall inevitably attract an unsavory crowd and lead us down the road to ruin.

Kind Regards,

Some old guy
Well, DELL has made much of using supply-chain optimization to make more money on lower net margins. If HP, Acer, and Toshiba are working to differentiate their products from each other, I think they need to work harder.

And I speak as someone whose last PC was a Toshiba.
Google and Yahoo are both obvious successes. Amazon is another. One Google outweighs hundreds or thousands of failures. You can't dismiss them as merely "anomolous" - among the biggest internet companies most of them followed this strategy.

MySpace's acquisition hasn't failed: it's a profitable enterprise for NewsCorp and still growing. It paid back the purchase price in the first year! So that's a success, not a failure.

The jury is still out on YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr as to whether they will be long term businesses, so they are not yet data points one way or another. They are clear success stories for the founders though.
The difference is that if Apple were to do something like this they'd actually ship product and not just release a far-fetched concept.
If they were going to beat this through the legislative process, it would have happened already. It's only a matter of time until the other "free" nations implement the same filtering, using whichever bogeyman is conveniently in vogue.

We need new protocols, designed such that politically unpopular traffic is indistinguishable from "normal use". We need an overlay network that allows entry into the cloud at a myriad of points, defeating network analysis and routing black holes. We need a secure naming system that prevents addresses from being arbitrarily removed by a third party. And we need to make these capabilities seamlessly available to common users who may not even be seeking them out - so that the idea that they're looking at "censored information" doesn't even cross their minds.

Hackers write code that creates internet reality. Get to it!
> Apple won't grow any bigger until Steve Jobs leave.

All of them?
Most countries have far more assets then debt so if you try and balance them it's going to look vary strange. Which is why people just look at the debt and ignore cash on hand.
I find there to be little value in designing without engineering constraints.
Don't you make money in either case?
Perhaps it could do well if college kids got into it, but I think this requires a level of organization that isn't typical of the mainstream social networker.
Then you still have the thought that your job won't be around long term, that you aren't building something that will last forever, that all you would be doing is maintenance on the existing releases as now that R & D is no longer, no new versions will go out. Remember that any code writing is considered to be R & D for tax purposes (SRED), etc, etc.

It would be a pretty demoralizing job.
NASA's Fermi telescope discovers first gamma-ray-only Pulsar
Wikipedia's list of countries by public debt is interesting: I see no correlation between rank and economic strength. Also curious: there are no countries with negative net debt, so why isn't the circular debt resolved?

Most (?) government debt isn't held by other governments, it's held by individuals, in the form of bonds. Hence, all governments can be in debt.

About twelve years ago the Australian government (having just changed hands) embarked on a campaign to pay back government debt, which back then was quite high. Now it's almost all paid back (just 15% of GDP left) but as I understand it they want to maintain some level of debt -- otherwise the whole Australian bond market would cease to exist.
Ask HN: Learning Erlang from scratch
I've been reading a lot about how wonderful Erlang is. So I'd like to learn Erlang properly from scratch.

Any books/websites/docs/whatever is greatly appreciated. I've started reading the official documentation but it's not very friendly. I want something that starts from the basics, through to the syntax through to deployment. I'm sure one resource will cover all this so anything you may have is welcome.

Thanks!
And that's why I bought Apple today!
First BYU Web Startup Group Meeting Oct 23, 7pm
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang

No question. Written by the author of the language.

It has lots of great practical examples and walks you through everything from start to finish.

http://www.trapexit.org also has some really nice tutorials and discussion.
We only had friend and HN veteran upvotes as far as I know. :(
It's a classic case of sounds awesome & amazing to techies but utterly worthless to Johnny Q. Public.
Helium leak the cuplrit in Collider's closure
Why would someone want to use your site over the better established sites that do the same thing (Craigslist in the US, Gumtree in the UK)?
I guess I'm alone here. I'm pretty tired of 30+ login names and passwords. If I use the same one for all, then any single breach hits all 30+ sites.

They should just give it a better name, like Internet-Wide Identity. OpenID is an implementation (centered) name, not a user (centered) name.
>In My opinion, it can be easier for businesses to reach the tipping point of paying customers (i.e. break even) vs. the tipping point of users (???, profitability?, acquisition?). I think MM touched on this.

Completely agree, but the possible payoff in the latter case tends to be quite higher.

>Myspace hasn't show itself to be a real business yet and either has Youtube. I still can't think of user based acquisitions that have quantifiably proved themselves to be a wise decision, though I think Youtube will.

I think that's hard to say. Take hotmail for example, while it might have not generated a $100 mil in revenues yet (or maybe it has?), I would doubt that the purchase was a strategic decision they regret over at Redmond. I think the same could be said for Youtube. If NewsCorp has regrets over the MySpace purchase, they are quite likely much more due to FB´s growth than to MySpace's current revenue.

If all these companies decided to grow users before revenue when they where a startup, it makes little sense to try to squeeze revenues quickly out of them, at the expense of user growth, once they've been acquired by a company with much larger pockets. I think the logical thing to do, in those cases, would be to continue the same growth strategy for a few years while calmly exploring ways to monetize them.

Startups that don´t get acquired are obviously more pressed to find a way to monetize quickly.
Domestication: Not so dumb animals
Agreed, that's where the beauty is always found.
After seeing it referenced a lot on HN, I've also been really interested in learning Erlang.

What projects have you fellow hackers used/are using Erlang for? Are you glad you did?
How to respond to a crash in confidence
Concept phones are really fun to dream about, but they aren't real.
I don't know Erlang and I haven't read this, so I can't vouch for it, but I came across this book:

http://www.erlang.org/download/erlang-book-part1.pdf
I'll have to disagree with the rest of the commenters here.

These concept devices are useful the same way (as they essentially are) science fiction is. Inspiration and a focus on new ideas instead of implementation. Too much focus on the latter can distract engineers from solving higher-level user problems.

You just have to look at them more as sci-fi than vaporware.
E-mail confirmation gives you uniqueness of e-mail addresses, not of users.
There's a lot of debate about its license CDDL, versus the GPL.

Either way there's a port being developed currently: http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/blog/index.html
It's all about risk minimization. Assume for a second that you don't read the news and all you see are numbers. (This kind of scenario is kind fairly accurate for most investors because most investors don't beat the index, so they might as well be news agnostic anyways.) Right now, in our hypothetical, you want to invest in the market. You saw that it fell 30 odd % since the top and that if you compare that % to previous great depressions and recessions, it's on par with the bottom of those analogous situations. If you buy in at one single point, you have a high risk that the stock market will drop and you'll lose a lot of money. But if you averaged in, you'll minimize the risk of catching the exact bottom of the stock market, and overall, should increase the average buy-in price.

The main reason why this works as opposed to just reading the news and choosing based on logic is because more than 50% of professional investors fail to out-invest the index. That means that you have a much better chance of catching the lowest buy-in to the stock market than if you were to use "logic".

It's pretty counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you just come to the realization that we're not that good investing.
If I had a good chemist, programmer and doctor, I'd use them to design rational drug design software.
(Why) don't you use captchas?
An Interview with Vinod Khosla
I said they have $4 B of liquid assets on their balance sheet.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yhoo

(Oh yeah, MS rumors to buy Yahoo, I called it before it happened! haha)
I think you should narrow your focus. Didn't craigslist start out with just one area? Why do you call it social classifieds? Is there a social network tied in somehow?
Amazon had a business model from day 1. I don't think they really apply to this conversation. They weren't profitably early on, but that's way different from not having business model.

"Among the biggest internet companies, most of them followed this strategy."

You could be right, but I honestly have no idea. What sources are you using? How are you measuring this?

"It paid back the purchase price in the first year!"

Wait, what? Revenue or profit? Revenue > Acquisition Cost != success.

"They are clear success stories for the founders though."

Definitely, which is probably the most important thing of all.
I'm referring to the company size -- which has some direct influence in how big of a market share Apple can have. My pet theory is that Apple is only as big as Steve Jobs can handle from a management standpoint.

The company is pretty constrained in terms of growth. Engineering team are making do with taking more projects while undermanned and understaffed. There's also a hiring freeze that's been thawing since last year. Also, half of the company size are retail workers.

This doesn't mean that market growth isn't important to Apple/Jobs, but from what I gathered it's not his primary concern or motivation.
I'm not sure what kind of stupidity you're trying to point out. Leaves? Grammar? Oh boo hoo.
it is possible that Apple sold as many (or almost as many) personal machines as Dell, and more than any other manufacturer

Indeed. This article

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/14/technology/moritz_apple_anno...

says they now have 17.6% retail market share.
I can't imagine Zizek playing C&C
good question. We are trying to be more of a social classifieds site where for example users can chat online with the seller or private message them. Sellers can also upload a profile so buyers may feel more comfortable with them.

Also, we are aggregating other sites such as cars.com on the us site and other local classifieds data, so it's easier to find stuff in one place.

But definitely that where the challenge lies.
The "Content" API
It's an amazing book, a rare example of well balanced content. Highly recommended.
True for things like games you may not care, but for furniture, cars, and personals you probably do care.
I think we will probably just show a map in the future and you can pick which region/town you in from there.
Telerupted: Africa, the Last Infotech Frontier
AdMob: By ad request count, the iPhone is now ranked 4th worldwide
And what exactly would be said "brand new products"?
I think that's probably true.

If I wanted to try to monetize it, and invest money in a toy, I'd probably buy a list of websites, from http://www.alexa.com/site/sales or such, then ask Turk users to give comments on each of those..

That said, I think that where it would be more useful is on a more user-driven system.. If images start making the rounds in email, someone might upload it, find that there was no comment, and enter one, such that the next person would find it.
The problem(s) with OpenID

http://idcorner.org/2007/08/22/the-problems-with-openid/
I wonder who bob@bob.com is, he's been getting my signup emails for over a decade now...
Also, it's a friggin HOVERCRAFT! And it shoots LASERS!

Guys, I think I should be a concept phone designer. I especially like how you get to talk about imaginary phones like they're real. ("So naturally, the whole surface is a touchscreen.")
True, I've had some interest from some regional car dealers so definitely going narrower is an option. To really use the social features you have to be logged in and have a profile in mylistbite, but still want to expand the social network part. Also, trying to include it in facebook as an app which hopefully will give some traction.
This is why my crack lobbying team is working the state legislatures so that unemployment insurance covers cell phones for job seekers. I have major cellular carriers on board as partners.

//state legislators are cheap
It's not too hard to pick a unique username, and for a password, just start with a base password that you memorize and then apply your own "hash" based on the domain you're visiting.

Example: Your base password is "fun" and you're visiting Gmail -- if your hash is taking the first and last letters of the domain then your password is "funGl".

BAM! Single breach problem solved! Picking a unique username is up to you.
Google's Q3 revenue rises 31%
It's a joke, take it easy man...
Liveblogging Google Third Quarter Conference Call
Valentine 1.03 : Act Naturally
Tucker Blumsack (Ryan Devlin) runs a struggling theater in Los Angeles. His world is turned upside down when celebutante movie star Vivi Langdon (Holly Valance) crashes into his life literally.
programming erlang is a very good book!
I agree. Startups that start now and are able to come out strong after the recession would have proved their mettle and hence will be successful. Also, this is the right time to form a strong team, coz most of the good hackers are looking for something interesting to work on (less competition).
True Blood 1.07: Burning House of Love
When vampire enters the territory of human, the air becomes tense. In the new episode of “True Blood“, the two worlds collide in a bar, leading to a brawl that can turn out really dangerous for both.
They came from Exchange but migrated everything to Google Apps.

I think that migration's case it's online. I've readed about it.
"... The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy ..."

In September on "Software Freedom Day" which I attended, I happened to catch the tail-end of a talk by Colin Jacobs ~ http://www.efa.org.au/about/board/colin-jacobs/ and Dale Clapperton of "Electronic Frontier Australia" discussing the "Clean feed" testing mentioned in the article ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-72157607... The description of the filtering tests was along the lines of - "500 odd test sites, on an internal network (effectively at Ethernet speed)" didn't inspire confidence in the testing of the proposed approach. Access speed will be a real issue. I'm not sure this implementation will be workable.

You can read a description of the blocking in the report, "Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan" here ~ http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/
Yes, OpenID is too confusing.

This was a huge complaint I had during the stackoverflow beta. Those that are believers in OpenID are zealots. They won't change their opinions no matter how much the general populace hates on it. They likely are public figures (with URL related to their personas - like a website or blog). In this case OpenIDs work beautifully. It's the rest of us that have trouble.

I currently have 4+ OpenIDs and I can never remember URLs or usernames. It inevitably involves me going to my second gmail account and searching for OpenID. Then I choose randomly one of the OpenIDs that show up in the search and use it. That or I end up creating yet another OpenID. So now I spend my time managing OpenIDs instead of user accounts. To me an even bigger waste of time. Meta-account management. And god forbid you start forwarding or attaching one OpenID to another one... that'll REALLY hose things with whichever account you are logging in as. Sites rarely allow the user to tie all those IDs together to a single account - which would at least simplify things a bit. To me this is wayyyy too complicated for average end users. Maybe if it were designed into everyone's web-email accounts and things could be managed there. I've attempted using the Yahoo OpenID and always run into problems with that too.

When I've asked my tech-savvy non-developer friends - none of them even know what it is. I've rarely heard positive feedback outside of people in the tech industry. But then again I haven't gone looking for it.

The compromise between being decentralized and centralized in my opinion is what causes so many problems. There is no one place to go get an openid (try explaining that to the average user). There is no standardized way to get one (every third party site is a little different). And it adds an extra level of indirection - with no perceived benefits to the end user. There are a lot of benefits but none that the end user readily cares about.

An interesting article on OpenID from Jeff Atwood:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001121.html

I attempted to find the uservoice thread about OpenID in stackoverflow but it's been deleted:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.685860....
Another obvious but useful site is
http://www.erlang.org/doc

I especially tend to spend a lot of time on the pages at
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man
" Take hotmail for example, while it might have not generated a $100 mil in revenues yet"

I'd bet it's way more than that due to volume, brand recognition and since it directly circulates hotmail users to microsoft properties. But similar to you, I don't know either. However, I think that's a great example of a user acquisition that has worked so far - thank you - I was having problems thinking of examples.

Not to sounds too 37signally, but what about the freemium model?
There is debate about the impact of reward on motivation. Motivation is a complex thing.
http://www.physorg.com/news4126.html

"George Lucas"

I think that George Lucas has very aptly demonstrated that he is not a great artist. He got lucky with Star Wars. With his next two movies he had the sense to let someone else direct. Then he let the success go to his head.
For Security Purposes, Of Course
"... Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent ..."

Shouldn't that be Welcome to the "Orwellian" continent? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
Interesting: only 25% of our debt is held by other nations [1]. Still, the point stands: Japan owns a half-trillion in US bonds, but has a massive national debt of their own. Essentially, they're buying US bonds by selling their own bonds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Forei...
I've seen Chemistry PhDs try to store the rational numbers in a database.

Yes that meant that 99% of the database entries were Null.

No they didn't know what a "one to many" relationship is.
No they didn't realize or care that anything compared with Null is neither True nor False but Null.

Sure there was a way to get what they wanted with no Nulls and a database the fraction of the size, but they didn't care, they had PhDs.
Feel free to read up on what a Straw Man Argument is at your leisure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Steve Jobs describes Netbooks as a "nascent market"
Dreamhost, install is manual, but works fine for me.

Hosting is dirt cheap and there are all sorts of deals out there for them.

Customer service and the way they run the place seems to have gotten better lately, too.
I was referring to this line from your post:
> $1B in profit, every quarter.
The 4 Billion comes from the $1B you specify in each quarter x 4:)

No worries:)
Online advertising rates drop sharply
Is it possible to access this information reasonably inexpensively without digging into SEC filings?
We just removed ours.

The only benefit I can name is that it confirms your ability to communicate to the user if they lose a password, etc.

And, it probably incrementally adds to the value of your company (presumably a company would rather have 500,000 confirmed email addresses than 500,000 unconfirmed ones... Of course, given drop-off...)
Major Shakeup At Twitter
Yep, they are trying to cheapen the yet and make the US $ more expensive so that Japan can export more to the US.

China is doing the same thing.

Canada used to keep its interest rate just below the US rate, until US rates got so low that it became impossible.
It's not so much as a debate as the maintainers and legal people saying "hell no, their code is incompatible. you'll have to do a clean-room implementation for it to land", and some people saying "but we really want it." Plus, there are the usual "GPL is bad" trolls.
"What I need is a market that allows me to invest little bits of money into new ventures."...I would also like it.

So here is my shot at it.

1.- Set up a fund where you can buy shares.

2.- Invite start-ups to apply for our fund.

3.- The shareholders of the fund get to vote.

4.- The fund invests money in the chosen start-ups.

5.- The share holders (as individuals) try to help the start-ups (testing, word-of-mouth, ideas, etc.) It will be more like VC 2.0 ;-)

Edit: formatting.
I go through periodically and delete fake accounts. If a person can't put in good information they are a waste of space in the database. Anyone who has a web based application I imagine must do the same.