skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've ever run a company or any sort of organization, you'll realize that walking around blind is the default. It takes effort to get information on what's going on. Because you can't wait forever for perfect information, you end up taking calculated risks like Netflix did with Qwikster where it's not clear in advance if it will pan out.

As the OP realized, this results in Monday morning armchair quaterbacking from people who ask "why didn't they make the right decision in advance, are they stupid or something?" When in fact, no, they are not stupid, they just don't have perfect information about what will happen.

Incidentally, this is the largest advantage of startups- the cost of a risky bet is much lower because you don't have to risk hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of customers each time you make a bet. As a result, you can take many more risks and come to a better solution more quickly.

edit: downvotes? what?
I don't think genius works that way. I am may not be a 'genius' but I am close enough to get the occasional taste of it. First off you have more working memory, and you also think faster, but that enables you to think deeper. Which let's you find short cuts sooner, and those shortcuts let you think about it even deeper. What's shocking is just how fast this can be.

EX: As a sophomore in collage I took an AI course and the teacher was introducing the idea of using heuristics optimize searching for the ideal path. He basically said find the best node, explore paths from there then resort the node list. And I was thinking how useful that could be but also that you don't really need to completely sort the list just keep buckets of nodes and only sort the best bucket. And then I started running with that idea thinking of various was of optimizing it for multiple CPU's etc. So the teacher and a few minutes into the lecture the teacher asked "does everyone understand why you need to resort the list" and I was said something like "Sure, but I don't think you need to resort the list just find the new best node(s)". Which started a discussion that just confused most of the students.

Thinking back I can see how that was not really the right thing to say at the time. But, I can only imagine someone that's profoundly gifted and has that type of thinking happen not just from time to time but most of the time. Speech literally becomes to slow to have a meaningful conversation with most people. And you start refining your ideas in the middle of a sentience as you consider varies new concepts.

PS: As to the value of practice it's IMO a question of how important that last 5-10% is. Get to the top 70% in your field and you can can be a vary well paid doctor, accountant, engineer etc, but being a physicist is judged on a different scale. A pianist or football player that's 5% worse than the best in their field is probably better of looking for something else to do.
So you would rather force them to not send their kid to college and be in credit card debt for the rest of their life? If you are concerned about people being poor, help prevent them from being poor. Don't deprive them of whatever options they have left because you find it distasteful. They have to do something. If selling their organs is the best option, and they're not allowed to do it, they will just do something worse.

Besides, I don't understand why anyone finds it so horrifying. We indiscriminately implore people to donate their bone marrow for free, and we applaud those who do. But if they get paid for it, suddenly they are being exploited? And it would have been better if the leukemia patient died?

It's not the selling of organs that I find distasteful, it's the buying of organs. Or more specifically, patients not getting an organ because they can't afford one. That, and middlemen profiting from the organ trade without adding any life-saving value. But both of these things can be prevented by publicly regulating and funding the commercial organ drive.
It's not even a given that git is better than subversion for most non-OSS centralized development use cases.
> I don't think we want to

Who is "we" and when did those "we" give you the right to make claims in our name? Neither you nor anybody else can decide what "we" want. Only we can decide what we want. Let stop making assumptions and simply have a vote on copyright policy.
Gowalla's gorgeous. And right when Google is in process of beautifying all its products, makes sense as a talent buy to me!
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Isn't that what business acumen is? The ability to make good business decisions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_acumen
There are a number of factors you're not addressing, and are very convenient to overlook. One particular (example) is that it is no longer necessary to pay for software for typical (e.g., email, web browsing, Skype, music playing, spreadsheeting) activities with a computer.

You can. You don't have to unless external forces constrain you to.

Socially, an expectation is being created that useful software is without monetary charge. I would like the readers to extrapolate from this what happens as more users expect gratis software.

If I was running a business, I would use 100% gratis software unless a really compelling reason otherwise was presented. As a software engineer, I usually recommend gratis software for most things... it works great! Why should I pay Microsoft/Oracle/etc when gratis software works so well? This means that non-gratis software companies (and their developers) are simply not receiving my dollars.

Unfortunately us, we as software developers have to pay the bills, and gratis software is, well, gratis.

Arguably, we can assume that software developers will continue to invent new and shinier things, useful to all, which people will pay for. But "past performance is no predictor of future performance", as stock prospectuses like saying, and I believe that to be a great statement about our industry. Who could have predicted the fall in 15 years of mainframes in 1970 [1]?

I think that a viable business model for AGPL3 software still needs to come into fruition besides consulting/SaaS.

Let's personalize this: I own a Macbook Pro, and have paid $0.00 for software on it; I use it probably 80% of the time I'm at home doing all sorts of geeky things. I feel bad for Mac app developers, but I don't need what they sell: gratis software does it for me. I've only paid for 2 pieces of app software on my personal computers in the last decade(not counting games - maybe I should?):

- Microsoft Office for Mac (prior Mac)
- Quicken (Once)

Plus OSX 10.6, 10.4, and Windows 7.

Until I come into a stiff requirement for a piece of proprietary software, I have no plans to change the 'use gratis/GPL software' model. It's worked well so far!

I've bought about 4 (cheap) apps on the iPod, in contrast - the GPL is effectively banned, iirc.

Of course, the GPL has caused some wonderful shared goods to come into being: gcc, emacs, Linux, etc. But those hard-working very smart developers don't receive money from me in general[2], because it's more financially efficient to use software gratis. I release my small amounts of public software under the AGPL3, because I believe in building a better world together, instead of grabbing each other's resources. But I think that we need to figure out a better way to make our bills get paid.

To summarize: Someone around here referenced the idea of a post-scarcity world. I think common software is becoming a post-scarcity world, and I don't know how common app developers are going to survive and keep developing on those common apps.

[1] probably a few visionaries, but besides them... :-)
[2] modulo donations or swag
i use aws/cloud like i use spare tires. i only use them in emergencies. why? the price, i don't care much. it's just the performance gain going from aws network i/o to directly-attached SSD/SAS i/o is almost night and day
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RIM will never win, because they're developer hostile.

The developer environment sucks, the APIs have always sucked, the signing system has always sucked.

Keep in mind that until very recently, the BlackBerry OS had no way for you to execute a HTTP request without implementing your own logic about which of the 500 different esoteric connectivity options you wanted to use. It's just a clusterf*ck.
The content is refreshed every 15 min - both database and UI.

Probably the production version of the code will get memcache and some other features. Apart of couple suggestions from the discussion here the educational version of hnpickup will be frozen. Although, any simplifications or correction to the code or documentation are very welcome.
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The best book I've read in a long time: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin...
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Facebook is an advertising company. Many of their customers will be in NYC. It makes sense for them to open an office there.
It was sort of like a "hello world" tweet to let them know I'm in the game too.

I follow your work on Pyramid, good stuff!
Not really a fan of this, but made me think of Matt Mullenweg's business card: http://paulstamatiou.com/im-2-on-google

The card reads:
1. Go to Google. 2. Type 'Matt.' 3. Click 'I feel lucky.'

Edit: Added what the card reads instead of just the article link.
I guess the assumption (not actually stated in the article) is that if your company does not get big or get bought, it will have its market share stolen by one that does. (Also mentioned in one of PG's essays but I can't remember which one.)
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Well, as someone in the rural US, I don't want to see the landscape peppered with suburbs. I think suburbs are a terrifically ugly invention and have a number of nasty externalities (a rant for another time).

So places like where I live (semi-rural northwest) are incentivized to make it difficult to expand. I like urban apartments/condos/flats, I think those are a good solution, but as a culture, outside of the urban areas, people like houses.
it's not a major exit just a talent acquisition but I guess he had his original investment back...
Interesting that they mention Gowalla pivoting and looking for a buyer. Then I see this a couple items down in my reader: Facebook buys Gowalla [http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/02/technology/gowalla_facebook/...]
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I dislike your lack of humility and modesty in this discussion. You may be correct in your A point, but "just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks" remark makes it sound like you guys are some elite squad, and FB is picking up some stragglers to join their team.

I can see why you've taken this attitude though, since commenters here are attacking Foursquare and making you seem like you lost to Gowalla+FB, but there is really no need to say these things in HN.
It's really no different from using iTunes to sync your music, except that Calibre is much nicer to use than iTunes.
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larrys' point is that there's a difference between begging the other registrar and using professional connections to ask for favors. Your original comment implied GoDaddy could do nothing the previous owner of the domain could do when that's not the case.
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A company I used to work for attempted to migrate once and nearly gave up, but then realised it was feasible (and not very expensive) if we did not insist on preserving the history.

So the new revisions were kept in Mercurial and the old ones in CVS. A slight inconvenience for the first year, but after that nearly all of the interesting revisions were in the new system.

As for the legacy systems, they already required us to maintain Windows NT4 boxes and a no-longer-supported C compiler, so the additional overhead of a second VCS was tiny by comparison.
Awesome!

If you or anyone else is interested in migrating from Gowalla to a different service, the company I work at, Factual, has a useful (Beta) API for mapping ids between different location data providers: http://developer.factual.com/display/docs/Places+API+-+Cross...
Oh, I think that the team at gowalla is great, and I have mad respect for them. But in terms of facebook's overall hiring this is a relatively small deal. Don't really know how many folks FB hires a year but I'm guessing hundreds?

Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.
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Essay writing in public school is about teaching children the peculiarities of the format they will be graded on in their next standardized test. This is probably a wash.
I still think it's the best/most insightful/most useful business book ever. The implications of truly understanding that book and disruptive innovation can be huge if you're a company founder or a CEO, Product Manager, etc. It's not so easy to internalize. I'm sure a lot of CEO's have read it by now, but I can barely spot some that follow it.
To the article.. I doubt they are gonna close it down. My guess is it's a social experiment of some kind. Not sure what kind.

Would love to know the actual story behind this.
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He has a white paper (understandably vague) on the site: http://www.simmachines.com/resources/whitePaper.pdf

It does sound interesting. These metric-space based methods usually make poor use of caches at all levels (random access). So while they may indeed access only <10% of objects in the index, they can nevertheless be slower than a simple, cache-happy linear scan (given a simple enough distance function).

I wonder how that last example -- 120M strings in RAM, 5-NN search -- compares against an optimized linear scan?

EDIT: at the end of the white paper there are also several references to the author's academic articles. Apparently the method is based on speeding up sequential scans by compression ("sketches"), so there :)
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Since nobody is playing devil's advocate, I suppose I have to. :-)

Have you done anything that doesn't fall under the "slashdot" header? If I saw this resume, my first instinct would be to say "Yeah, he made slashdot, but how do I know he's not a one-trick pony?"

Might I suggest a couple of open source projects or something to suggest that there's more to you than a degree and slashdot?

I like the nice, simple, and to-the-point layout. But I think it might be a bit extreme.
It's understandable that you don't consider them a competitor, but who is? Most people tend to agree that it is not good to have NO competitors.

Go walls was in some ways a kind of straw an against Foursquare. You had someone to be "100:1" against. Now who is your competitor?

I would not call this inconsequential because it can also be interpreted as the non-viability of check-in sites as a distinct business.

I appreciate you engaging in the conversation but you haven't convinced me that this acquisition is in anyway irrellevant to Foursquare.
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Instagram isn't paying on-demand prices, 3yr reserved is 48% cheaper than on-demand.
That's the importance of regular breast cancer screening! Men have our own equivalent too. If you're over the age, go do it!
At ~35k/mo (they may have a deal here, though), that's the fully loaded headcount of 2-3 FTE devops people. In return, they get EC2's turnaround time on new instances. Not to mention that they're constantly pushing images to S3.

I would agree that EC2 isn't a no-brainer decision here, but it seems like a reasonable one.
No, I don't think so. Latchkey did the same calculation, using on-demand prices and came up with $35k[1]

3rd reserved is roughly 48% cheaper than on-demand, so real hosting cost would be around $18,200 for those servers.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306394
So should we just stop developing technology because all those jobs have to be preserved?
You seem to take jobs as something that is inherent to the existence of the individual. The book recommended by the parent (and some others) question that position and explore alternatives and the transition from a society rooted in that belief and one that doesn't require the existence of jobs.

Technology is not about putting a few people out of "work", but about freeing people from it altogether.
Here's what we know: Their GMail accounts are the common thread here: even Kirupa posts his addy with @gmail.com.

And we know that hackers have been all over Gmail. So obviously they got into their account. Their account probably had links to the registration... or they tried the same password, who knows.

But now they have them. I think the important thing is that the new 'Registrants' return them to Godaddy.com right now. They are trying to say that these people have to prove fraud?

That's ridiculous. With easy to provide proof, get them returned.

Also don't use GMail for important stuff... maybe your own mail server? One that you harden yourself? JK!
Of the open source licenses, GPL is (ironically) the friendliest to commercialization because its terms make commercialized forks difficult (because it's difficult to close-source the fork).

One reasonable strategy is to adopt one of the fascist GPL variants (like AGPL3) and then offer a commercial license alongside it.
I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. You asked a question, and I answered. Just trying to be helpful.

To answer your question about who our competitor is, it's the same as it's always been (and always will be): the back button. Our job, as pg says, is to build something people want. We started by building checkins and attracted millions of users doing that, now we're moving on to building the best social city guide we possibly can as well as starting to explore interesting new ways for local merchants to communicate with their customers.

It's not about beating someone else. It's about building something useful enough that people will pay attention at all. That's what startups are really about.
As has been demonstrated time and time again, the way to get rid of a black market is to repeal whatever prohibition is creating it.
Small but sustainable startups are not on the media's radar. Simply put, we're boring.
The ability to write well co-evolves with having stuff that you want to say. Students don't get to choose their topics or when to write: they are acting under coercion, and those few who are relatively motivated remain anxious about grades.

Hence student essays are boring, while students' blogs are (often) interesting.

OFC, if authority figures started reading those blogs and assigning grades to blog entries then the blogs would disappear. If the blogs were subsequently required to re-appear with deadlines etc then they would quickly become boring, just like the essays.

Saddest is that if a teacher understood this and confined herself to helping students with stuff that they actually wanted to do, and only when asked, then she would lose her job!
This is anecdotal, but I've seen more Python articles in the past couple of weeks than Ruby. node.js is a pretty useful tool for random hackery, and most of the CSS articles have been "hacks" for creating cool UIs. I like to think of the "Hacker" in Hacker News as someone who employs neat tricks to get the job done.

Are you looking for news related to network security?
The fact that foursquare was beating Gowalla 100:1 is proof that you don't have to have a better, more fun-to-use, better designed product in order to win in the market.

My love affair with Gowalla was prematurely extinguished when they pivoted to local guides, but I hope that this acquisition means that they'll bring some of their original magic to Facebook.
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How Janet Hoilian got more stock then Malda I'll never know.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1093580/0000950135-99...

Agood lesson in there for today's bootstrappers
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Migrating source code systems is intense. It's very much a superlinear scaling question - the more people involved, the more training, the more chance for errors, the more miscommunications, the more tooling needed.

Where I work, we've been doing some migrating from ClearCase to Mercurial. Pretty intense work.
I haven't seen a single workable model (other than copyright) that rewards creative work rather than "added services" like performing concerts. What if you're a writer or an independent software developer? What if you are a 40-year-old musician with a family, and cannot be on tour for the better part of the year? What if you are terrible live, but a great composer?

I think the best approach is to reward the actual creative activity, not "added services". It's a basic management principle: reward for what is actually valuable. For example, if you ask programmers to provide their software for free and charge for support services (which is often proposed as a substitute for per-copy charges), you are incentivizing them to design hard-to-use software. Similarly, if musicians are only able to make money on concerts, this will incentivize the creation of music that sounds good live (not all good music does) and caters to the concert-going demographic (usu. young people with no families).

Kickstarter is nice, but I don't see it as a real source of income. How many people are going to pay for the promise of a product vs. for the actual product? I don't know what Amanda Palmer is doing. From what I can tell from her site, it's the "live shows + t-shirts" model I've already discussed.

I don't know what abuse of copyright you have in mind, but I am the first to argue that copyright law should be reformed. I would shorten the copyright term, for example.

Finally, I would like to address something you've brought up repeatedly in this thread: the issue of zero marginal cost. There is no rule that says that the cost of something should be equal to its marginal cost. Do you believe the cost of a book should be the cost of the paper + distribution? Or that if there are free seats at a movie screening, I should be legally allowed to watch that movie for free (since the marginal cost of another viewer is zero)?

Time to wrap up. Thanks for the discussion. I would like to change somebody's mind on the Internet just once. So far it hasn't happened (I've been on the Web for 16 years). Maybe next year will be the year.
Personally posted over 15,000 stories, rejecting a million more.

Although 15K is not a small number, for some reason seems like it should be more. I guess that makes every user submitted slashdot story that was posted by cmdrtaco himself that much more cool.

An oldie but goodie: http://slashdot.org/story/05/03/02/1456237/yahoo-turns-10-fr...
tl;dr Paul Graham is working to improve education, specifically composition (for this article).

The article argues (successfully, I think) that reality is nuanced.
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Beluga was a product acquisition.
> Client side cheating (Wallhacks, Aimbots) are not preventable without a locked down client, open source or not.

You can easily prevent wallhacks; just don't tell clients information they shouldn't display to the user, such as the positions of players the user can't currently see.
This is totally cool. I applaud these efforts. That said, I'm more interested in switching to pypy than to py3 at the moment.
Actually, the monetary thing is irrelevant to him and he doesn't see a problem with charging for Free Software or related services.