skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cookiecaper is on to something when he says that Netflix needs to offer a white label service - but it goes deeper than that, and there is one very stupid road block to seeing it happen.

In order to obfuscate the entire business model and tie up legal battles, content providers consider streams to an iPhone, an Android device, a PC, a Mac, a PS3, a blu-ray player, and an internet TV to be completely different services - and the content providers want different rates and pricing to each device.

A stream is a stream is a stream is a stream! (...imho)

This is the major reason that Netflix hasn't yet been able provide an open streaming API and the real reason TV hasn't seen the explosive changes that music and mobile phones have seen over the past 15 years.

Almost all video services feel ancient when you're watching them - the user experience is marginally better or improved over what our grandparents were watching 50 years ago.

Where is the bottom line streaming my Twitter lists relative to the genre I'm watching? Where is the onscreen chat with my wife when we're in different cities when our favorite show is on? Where are the annotations on movies from friends, celebrities, and critics? What did my favorite sports writer think of the last play?

Why is the biggest screen in the house so dull? Why can't I buy once and play anywhere?

TV can and should be so much more, but content providers would want $2/user for every incarnation of each feature I described above - because to them, a stream isn't just a stream isn't just a stream isn't just a stream.
Preliminary reports indicate that McCarthy's final words were "Dennis Ritchie still lives!"

So long, John.

What a depressing month. :(
Here on hacker news, we can (and do) argue all day about how to categorize and rank programming languages. I'll readily confess that I do not have enough depth or breadth in the field to be any kind of authority when it comes to that.

The point I wanted to make was, if you are willing to give some benefit of the doubt to Paul Graham's statement in the article (which I quoted) singling out C and Lisp, then the last couple weeks are very significant indeed in terms of the loss to the field of computing.
You can do a MVP to validate pretty much any hypothesis that is key to the success of your startup. Strictly speaking an MVP doesn't have to be a product, just some aspect of your business that you are uncertain about.

Let's say that one of your hypotheses is, "What kind of demand is there for our service?" There are many way to set up an experiment to test this out, but you need a very fast and cheap way of doing this with the minimum of resources.

One approach would be to create a very simple one-page site describing the service. And by simple I mean something something fast and dirty that takes hours to finish and not days. Obviously, the product that you're showcasing doesn't exist at all, you just have some copy, screen shots and a mailing list sign-up form where people can get notified about updates. To market the site, you could use popular approaches such as Google Adwords or just start bloging/tweeting about it.

Based on the data you gather - web statistics, mailing list sign-ups, emails, tweets, blog comments, etc - you should be able to answer the hypothesis with confidence.

So where is the MVP in all of this? Well, it would be everything required to answer the hypothesis, which in this case means setting up the site, mailing list, marketing, gathering data, etc. Once you can answer your hypothesis, the MVP is over and you can start working on a new hypothesis and MVP cycle.

Virtually any question you have can be solved this way. In fact, some people would insist that all fundamental business assumptions must be managed like this because this approach gives you the hard data you need to shape the future of your startup.

Although I have my doubts about the validity of The Lean Startup methodology, I think MVP as a concept is very potent. You should read Eric Reis book if you want to gain a better understanding of the methodology. For a much more practical approach, I recommend The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank [ http://steveblank.com/ ]
Kaching: The future of mobile payments
I vowed never to use Netflix again when I realized they cancel your subscription instantly instead of giving you the month you pay for (a la WoW or any other properly run service). I also take every opportunity to bad mouth them for this awful business practice. Yeah, it's in the terms, but it's shit.
"If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry."

— John McCarthy (speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961).

It's been pointed out that McCarthy used the term "utility" rather than "cloud", but many of us would argue they are one and the same. Indeed Wikipedia defines it as:

"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."

In any case, can anyone think of anyone more deserving of the honour of the title "father of cloud computing" than McCarthy? I certainly can't.
Why big businesses are bad for business
I always liked this poster: http://www.xach.com/img/doing-it-wrong.jpg (from http://xach.livejournal.com/170311.html)
Lisp implemented in Java. Fairly complete set of datatypes and functions, but no objects. Has been available for 10 years. http://jatha.sourceforge.net/
> I've actually wondered why there aren't insurance and licensing requirements. I would be happy paying my fair share of infrastructure maintenance as a cyclist, especially if it helped give a voice and build safer roads for bicyclists.

There are big debates about whether bicycle (rider?) licensing would be effective, but my two concerns are:

1) Added cost gives no incentive to car drivers to start commuting by bike, which would have at least some effect on congestion, pollution and health.

2) How do you enforce it?

There needs to be a big improvement in driver education, and responsible cycling needs to be promoted from a young age. Cutting reds and not signalling is behavioural issue that won't be magically fixed by registration/licensing.
I actually had the exact same scenario! Then I tried installing Ubuntu w/ Wubi and it corrupted my Windows partition. So I wiped it clean and wanted to do something else. Ended up going with Xubuntu. No netflix :(
Catching a falling knife can be dangerous (literally or metaphorically).
I’ll point out what a dozen others are probably typing right now: what works for beginners is not necessarily what’s best for experts.

An analogy: I don’t know how to read sheet music with any proficiency. It would be easier for me if note duration were shown by horizontal length instead of the system of tails and open/filled circles. However, this wouldn’t be as good for experts, who care more about fingering than about being able to see the melody in the most literal way.

I don’t happen to like perl’s syntax, but this study by itself isn’t proof that it’s objectively bad for the people who use it heavily.
It was the grandparent that started singling out bad bikers, all the while ignoring bad car drivers.

Bikes are a problem? Right. Cars kill over 1.4 million people a year, and injure over 50 million people. Anybody arguing about problem cyclists really need a reality check.

I don't care anywhere near as much about dick cyclists who may get themselves killed, compared to problem car drivers who will get me killed.
This is the sad reality of being a cyclist: we are the neglected middle child. In the eyes of the law, we are vehicles. In the eyes of motor vehicles, we are an annoyance that slows them down. So, the motor establishment builds separated bikeways for us and tries to use the law to force us to use them. Then pedestrians find these bikeways convenient and pleasant, and make them so dangerous for cyclists as to be essentially unusable. Then they post to HN (or whatever) and complain about all the bikes using the bikeways and how dangerous this is for their pleasant afternoon walk.

Personally, I don't believe in advocating for bikeways for this reason. Bikes will never get to use them, and if they cross traffic at all, they are death traps (because drivers don't look for objects moving as fast as bicycles on the sidewalk when they are turning). The only exception is the lakefront trail because it has a total of 12 street crossings in 20 miles (4 of them in the last mile of the north side, two that have essentially no traffic, and two in the last mile on the south side). This property makes it safe to use. All it needs is a really nice running path and sidewalk closer to the lake (so that pedestrians won't even want to use it), and finally you have a bicycle expressway, one of the few places anything in Chicago can go 10 miles in 30 minutes. This will never happen, though, because it will cost money and because the recreational cyclists will force the pedestrians off the pedestrian-only part onto the bike-only part. Sigh.

I think the best general solution is what Chicago does: a lot of streets have a picture of a bicycle painted onto the right traffic lane and signs that say "shared lane, yield to bicycles". This lets cars know that bikes are doing the right thing. Then you just need bicycle driver education (I like "Effective Cycling") so that the cyclists stay safe and don't impede the flow of traffic. Unfortunately, I've found that getting on a bicycle seems to mean turning off your brain and doing whatever feels right, which is often wrong.

(And that's why I don't like bike lanes, because they make doing the wrong thing feel like "the law". "There's that stripe, so I must make my left turn from the curb, that line on the road says so." Then they die and everyone whines about how dangerous cycling is.)
You may be in luck. The paper says:

"Given this interesting first result, we plan to test a number of additional languages using the same procedures."

Hopefully they'll use larger sample sizes too. This one involved 18 people across 3 groups.
It's a great example of the excessive control given to rights holders, so excessive that a prominent company like Netflix ($300/share is certainly not something to shirk) and similar hypothetical businesses can be totally gutted at the pleasure of a handful of production companies and/or publishers. The diminution of Netflix is no small matter and will hopefully serve as a very visible demonstration of the cruel absurdity of current copyright law.

Netflix can only offer a relative few movies without the approval of content holders, mostly only those that are older than my grandparents. They don't even have the option of reverting to classics from the 40s, 50s, 60s or 70s.

The hope is that the dramatic demise of Netflix will raise awareness and visibility of these issues, promoting IP reform.
Very poor wording on my part. Yes, you must yield the intersection to the car on your right. But the one on the left is the one that's going to kill you, because once you both try to get through the intersection at the same time, you have no escape route other than a very sharp right turn. If you mistakenly start moving when the driver to your right does, you can stop, turn left, or turn right, giving you three possible ways to avoid a crash.

(I looked this up in the Illinois driver manual, and it gets a size-negative-a-million one-bullet-point mention. No wonder nobody can use stop signs.)
That's true. I just think someone of them are terribly juvenile:
Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it
Sheep on Meth
;) yes, you are right, and It hurts, Internet can scale it, in some cases, if not - then can be spread, modified and parallelized (or even better, if it is copy-left...)
+1. Why can't the figure out a pricing point? Shouldn't the marginal cost per user be going down as they scale? What's wrong with their infrastructure that it's going up? Or are they just trying to price it for demand? That doesn't make much sense to me if they're pricing away customers in the middle of the growth stage.
http://gu.com/p/32zpk
Why Google? Why Won't You Show us What People Are Searching for Anymore?
literally just wrote this last night and pushed it live this morning before hearing the news. I had just changed my gmail status to "season of the lisp" as I go through a seasonal fixation w/ lisp every year starting in october - when an old colleague messaged me to inform me of his passing.

https://github.com/ORDER-OF-NO/scphpeme

(CONS (QUOTE R) (LIST (QUOTE I) (QUOTE P)))
> In reality, it is government which creates markets.

This seems like a obviously false statement. The norm is for people to trade. Just watch children play: it's extremely common to see them trade toys with each other.

The "black markets" enabled the soviet union and the communist-block countries to survive as long as they did.

The reality is that it is governments are the destroyer of trade and markets through taxation, embargoes, price controls, and trade restrictions.

A significant portion of America's prison population are drug offenders: essentially people who tried to operate in an illegal market.

If governments were necessary for markets, why are there all these markets existing despite governments' attempt to stamp them out?
Thanks staunch!
Thanks abbasmehdi!
Then you have your head in the sand.

Read ww520 comment, he mentions drivers taking cyclists seriously. This is a typical bias, and the implication is clear. He is a driver, he already takes drivers seriously, because he is one.

Whatever it means to 'take someone seriously', I am hoping he does not mean avoid running of the road.
I wonder what "confidential trade secrets" they took along with them considering that Groupon's product is more of a market risk than a tech risk and so easily cloned. I don't think that Groupon is going to win this one because the Valley's laws has very favorable towards employee mobility. Many engineers here have Google, Facebook etc on their resumes hiring is so competitive here and Groupon better get it and focus their energy on employee retention schemes instead of futile law suits.
Although I am against most regulation I would strongly support a law that required unsubscribe/cancelations to be processed in the same manner as subscriptions. If I can subscribe/expand my service online I should be able to cancel online as well.
Port of Peter Norvig's Lispy to CoffeScript: https://github.com/bradjasper/lispy.coffee/
Google TV was an unsuccessful imitation of Apple TV. Google has made its profession to just copy existing products. Anything that meets their eye.
Ask HN: MSPA could use scaling help
This webcomic: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

Is launching a big thing: http://mspandrew.tumblr.com/post/11881428494/the-lowdown-on-10-25

And they don't know what to do to support the very large load and traffic they're expecting without it costing too much. HN seems like the place to ask for solutions.
Clickables:

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

http://mspandrew.tumblr.com/post/11881428494/the-lowdown-on-...
I think Forrester has some stats that show riding in a bike lane is more dangerous than sharing the road with traffic. But one could argue that bike lanes attract cyclists who haven't learned or thought about safe cycling, whereas the unmarked street scares that demographic away.

The problem city planners are having is that they want to be "bike friendly" in every way except educating road users. Some stripes on the road don't make cycling safe. Cyclists that think carefully and act predictably do, and no stripe on the road is ever going to do that.

We need drivers education classes that cover driving from the perspective of a cyclist. This will ensure that when drivers want to ride their bike, they do it safely, and it will ensure that drivers know to share the road with bicycles. (I would take it a step further and require licensing for bicycle-only drivers, but that is too unpopular to ever happen.)
People who work as developers for the adult industry have to be competent. Thus, don't worry about future employers because people just care about what you can do.
Thank you John McCarthy. For your work, for your relentless curiosity, and inventiveness that helped us all. Without knowing, you set the path for many of us.
Looking forward to the article! Some questions I would ask:

How about how you formed your founding team?
How long it took you to release the product?
Did you seek out advisors?
Video Games Teach Personal Finance
Is it really fair to compare Zuckerberg to Knuth? Zuckerberg made a PHP site for people to stalk their classmates. Knuth wrote TeX, hundreds of papers, and a series of books considered among the 100 most important scientific works of the 20th century.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-boo...

Zuckerberg is definitely a successful dude that one can look up to. But in terms of advancing the field of computing, he hasn't done a whole lot yet.
And that's overpriced for the crap that's available to stream. Wouldn't it make more sense to increase the price of the streaming after the supposed improvement to streaming quality which will result from their hugely increased payment to content providers?
for me the circled finger means hold and the arc on finger means click.

was shocked to read the lables and find out it's nothing like that.

swipe should have movement dashes, not an arch. something like: =A (swipe right)
Ahead Of IPO, Groupon Consolidates By Suing Ex-employees, Pitching New Version
I worked for a company with a similar policy - no employee could provide a reference, and all requests had to be passed on to HR. However, some of my co-workers were contractors and they were happy to provide personal references.
Looks like someone has been doing "original research" on Wikipedia again.
$10,000 in cash or at a bank is the same. If you tried to move $10,000 into bitcoins you would move the market a substantial amount just to try and convert your money/bitcoins.

Volatility matters in a greater sense, because you cannot simply say it's only for wealth transfer since it is trying to act as a pseudo currency as well. The characteristics that make it suitable (in your mind) for wealth transfer are because it's being used as a pseudo currency. By utilizing it to transfer wealth, you are also affecting the currency side - which matters. If it became only a method to transfer wealth (no wealth stored), then there should be no demand for it. At most the interest in it would be the difference of transferring money in regular currency. But it's not used that way currently, but its market is so small that people who try to use it to transfer wealth could/do in fact manipulate its value even in real time.
No, unfortunately.

I'm close to 40, dinosaurish by HN/Reddit standards, but I learned Fortran mostly because back in the late 80s and early 90s essentially all numeric processing code was written either in Assembly or Fortran; and at a later stage, because I was the only one proficient in Fortran, I inherited lots of legacy code at work.

Most people my age, even if they've been programming since age 9, haven't seen any Fortran unless they're doing physics or using LAPACK.
Newgrounds.com was made for this.
I'm sort of in a similar situation, but now I've gotten a very strong technical co-founder onboard. Although I haven't coded in years, I've been in the IT industry for a long time now. Having read a ton of blogs about founding teams and finding co-founders, the one common denominator I see is that you'll have a better time of it if you try learn some coding yourself.
Thanks to 37 Signals publishing their split test results for Highrise's landing page, we learned that adding a picture of individuals will in fact increase conversions [1].

If you're interested in learning about the importance of personality in branding and marketing, check this book out - Personality Not Included [2]

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Personality-Not-Included-Companies-Aut...
FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers
How I Got Screwed by my Lack of Patience
A lack of patience can have a huge effect on your finances. A lack of patience can even drive you to make terrible financial choices.
It might have been Funny Or Die
Mine, uh, has the distinction of being the only one implemented entirely while riding the bus: https://github.com/technomancy/bus-scheme
Meanwhile, it is illegal to lie to the US Government even in matters not relating to crimes:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/we-ban-lies-to-officia...
How do you moderate/manage the community? How do you handle abuse and conflicts?
I guess 1channel.ch. I watch on average one movie per day and I can tell you those Putlocker links work just as well as DVDs.
I would be terrified if patches of the same quality as my toy lisp were actually applied to a project like sbcl or clojure.
There aren't many industries where you are going to get constant challenges everyday. Adult websites are always pushing new ground, leading to scaling or efficiency problems. Where I currently work, we get super-high traffic numbers every 3-4 months when a new game is released, but other than that it's super dead (traffic-wise).

Whatever you learn from that job, you can export elsewhere. Unless you go to Twitter, Zynga, or any other high-traffic company, every other company is going to be a cake-walk for you.
Yeah, I can't believe the nerve these software developers have, they don't accept a $0.99 for all their apps. Let's make them lose their copyright and make sure app stores can dictate pricing freely, without having to negotiate with developers.
It's the nickel and diming of modern services. Every service is just a buck, just a fiver, just a tenner. I used to get usenet with my ISP, now I pay for it. I used to get luggage for free with my flight, now I don't.

We've literally turned pricing around: even $1.99 seem like too much for an iphone game... when you realize that too many $1.99s will turn into $20 or more dollars.

But I agree, money for services online feels very different from money for product, whether a good deal or not.
Posicionamiento en buscadores - Posicionamiento web buscadores
I have to disagree with you. Whats the point of an IP if you have no control of who uses it.

The problem is that the content holders don't realize who their friends and enemies are. They worry about the web, but when a solution to a lot of their issues arises, they want to charge them right out of business.

my 2 cents...
Georgia Tech is a great entrepreneurial hub in the South. I would highly recommend looking them up and also checking out their affiliate program, ATDC: http://atdc.org/

I know they run incubator-like programs specifically for undergraduates, so that's pretty cool.

I live in Atlanta right now, so feel free to contact me if you're curious about anything. Also, I graduated from the University of Michigan a few months back, so I know a bit about their tech/entrepreneurial culture as well.
Common x Cocaine 80's - Ghost Lady (EP)
If you have any, I'd be interested in hearing some useful tidbits being a long term lisper now grounded in ruby may have brought forth.
UK construction industry ‘won’t grow’ until 2014
Assuming you know what you're doing or have a sense for what you believe the payout profile to be like, here's some metrics of the payout for N deals.

If you're at all risk averse, you probably want a percentile more like the 10th percentile payout, but this shows 50th percentile.

http://talkfast.org/2010/04/28/angel-investing-simulation-pa...