skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue of BigCo's closing useful small services just to harvest the developers post acquisition is certainly a valid one that's worthy of debate.

However, the premise that this only happens because the startup in question was "free" doesn't hold weight. Call me a cynic but the recommendation to use "paid-for" services only to avoid this outcome just seems a little too self-serving to paid-for-only service PinBoard (as excellent as it is).

I don't have an exhaustive list of startup acquisitions that were then shut down, but here's a few just from a Google acquisition list I found:

* PostRank was a paid-for blog data service Google acquired, shut down

* Jambool was a virtual gold payment processing system Google acquired, shut down

* Gizmo5 was a VOIP service Google acquired and shut down.

In some cases even if a company is taking money that alone still doesn't make it viable. In other cases, like PostRank and Jambool where the $$$ being paid by customers was probably significant, acquirers like Google have other circumstances where they'll shut a profitable businesses for a 'higher goal' in a bigger project.
CMU Researchers One-Up Google Image Search And Photosynth
Fujitsu Global Cloud needs a fix
Understanding Apple’s endgame
Eubonicode++: Hackin C++ Gangsta Style
Just because it's the runtime with the largest install base. We wanted anyone to be able to run it on virtually any host. The dependencies are carefully kept to a minimum.

Not so much to attrace WP-devs but I do think WP owes its success in part to PHP.
What's the difference between covariance and assignment compatibility?
So a vendor/service provider makes a custom proxy for DNS record encryption and breaks the first rule of cryptography. Granted, they're basing it on DNSCurve so at least a few other people have looked at the design, but the implementation is custom... I wouldn't touch this with a 50 foot pole until a dozen PhDs vet it.

edit I didn't notice libnacl is provided, so I assume a good chunk of the crypto work is done by this. My comments were probably too harsh. But I would still like to see a professional look over the rest of their code to make sure there's no glaring problems.
A Series of Ill-Informed Hunches and Observations
Sorry, is there a typo in here somewhere? Are "idomenu" and "ido-menu" different things?
Your Social Strategy: Setting Objectives
‘Inhuman Microphone’ [iPhone] App Circumvents Occupy Wall Street’s Megaphone Ban
A New Quantum State Of Matter Unearthed
Glad to see another success on here as well :)
I think this could actually break a few things. For example, Netgear routers intercept DNS requests for routerlogin.net and return their own internal admin IP. It's a very useful feature, and it works no matter what DNS service you use.
Maybe it also let's you go through China's GFW if you have some censorable content. But I'm sure the front-end developers I work with (in Portugal) are not thinking in censorship when they do that.
I was disappointed that my guesses at valid invite codes didn't work.

Like:

' or '1'='1
That's actually a pretty standard way to show that kind of data. She both describes it in text and properly labeled the graph itself.
If you grow from 10 to 15, 20, 25 etc., each time, even though you are adding 5, it is a smaller percentage of what you had. In this example, you would be adding 50% to go from 10 to 15, then 33% to go from 15 to 20, then 25% etc. Growth is linear, but growth rate is decreasing.
Undo-tree handles all my undo'ing needs, and non-emacs users like looking at its strikingly elegant tree visualizer.

(http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree) Scroll down for screenshot.

And follow-mode on a monitor turned sideways is pretty funny. Doubles your vertical space (good for eyeballing logs and data dumps).
I tried out the database class, but didn't follow through with it because I found myself just teaching myself through looking things up online anyways (i.e. W3C tutorials, free online textbooks, etc).

I didn't find the class itself terribly worthwhile, but I was impressed with the quizes/tests/assignemnts. They seemed like a great way to evaluate whether or not you've learned something.

It's hard to describe, but it seems like they really got this part right, at least based on my limited experience with the DB class.
Couldn't agree more. I'm a software developer and after reading the copy and the TC article, I still don't know what it does.
The flipside is how much talent is squandered, on a national level, when that talent is not buying what they can't afford? Layer in that there's a problem with the disproportionate rising costs of tuition; college in the US is now three times more expensive, in inflation-adjusted real dollars, than it was in the late seventies. But the average person isn’t earning three times more money than they did back then.
It's not just a great C book, it's a great book. The writing is extremely clear and concise, and packs an incredible amount of information into a few short pages (short by comparison with the "doorstop" books that seem to be in vogue).

People associated with writing technical documentation of any kind could learn a lot from it.

You won't find many programming books from 1988 that are still relevant and on the market -- the only exception that comes to mind is SICP, which also has a very high rank.
Thanks. A few small successes but the project has a long uphill battle ahead :)
How to Split Test Banner Ads Fast – Case Study
They do mention the following:

with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month

Maybe I read the graph wrong. But there are only 11 spikes for 2011. So they probably haven't reported December downloads.
Why don't I pay you through your phone carrier? Not bad for me, but you'd probably have to split your profits with Verizon.
As someone that runs a paid service, I can tell you it's awesome to interact with customers. There's an air of respect that you don't get from completely open products.
Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
http://www.free-culture.cc/
It looks like the December bar (yellow) is actually for November if you take each bar as a month (which lines up with the rest of the marked points). The labeling on the graph is wrong (the yellow bar should be slightly below 10 billion and labeled as November). I'd like to see the downloads per month (and especially see the paid downloads per month), but as a marketing tool, I'd bet that 10 billion downloads sounds better than whatever their current downloads a day rate is.
Great to know. I didn't realize it was that poorly described.

Think about having an open source Flickr (self installed or hosted) that connects to your Dropbox or personal S3 bucket.
"Khan Academy, a popular online educational resource — more popular, even, than MIT’s OpenCourseWare"

Khan Academy is to OpenCourseWare as a castle is to a small, below ground, flat.
Not this again. Amazon does not do this in the way that you imply. They try to have a single page for a given item (not always successfully). On that page, different users may see an offer for the SAME item from a DIFFERENT merchant - the price is set by the merchant, not Amazon. If you don't like it (and if there is a choice) click on the "N more used & new" link close to the buy button to see all the offers from various merchants.

Amazon themselves DO NOT show different prices to different customers for the same item sold by the "primary" Amazon merchant. However, they also run a merchant called "Warehouse Deals" which is basically B-grade stock. Obviously this is cheaper, with limited availability.

Disclaimer: ex-employee.
Try reading the description of the crypto, it might make you feel better: http://dnscurve.org/crypto.html Basically it follows NSA recommendations for public-key crypto and uses an algorithm developed by Daniel J. Bernstein which adds even more guarantees. So it's not like they're starting from scratch here.
Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder. I just switched to being a paid user of pinboard (which I had always intended to do but hadn't gotten around to yet).
let me summarize the main idea for you: A bunch of people pay me because I store their a few hundreds lines of text, save their ass from the sites full of annoying ads like cjb.net or freeservers.com.

no need for the user friendly, smart business models. no need to develop a new vision. this is the hack.
Here's a suggestion to their Director of Communications: communicate with a smiling face. Perma-frowns only work on people purchasing stock trading bots or MiGs.
Curious about this as well. Are there any SaaS replacements, or does it mean moving to Solr or Sphinx?
Upcoming startup incubator & accelerator deadlines
One option with engineering degrees is to do a co-op. My brother did this (at Va Tech) and not only got out with minimal debt but also left with a job at the company he co-oped for. This seems pretty common at Va Tech as other family members and friends have done it. I don't know how common it is elsewhere, but if it's not a common practice it sure should be.
I use `self-insert-command' an awful lot. I'd say it was the single most important feature.
You haven't run into the ones that think that because they shelled out $15, you are their personal butler?
Open Source and Free do not work for serious businesses.

That is probably a too extreme take on this as well. Open Source is a great "insurance policy" for companies, but not enough on its own. You also want a company dedicated to supporting and developing the software that your company uses so that you can have a proper contractual relationship into it.

For example, MySQL AB was running quite a good business supporting the freely licensed database for companies using it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
Anyone notice that it can handle 1080p, not just 720p. Not that you would be able to notice on that 7" screen.

Always the option of plugging it into the tv....but I have never ever in my life seen anyone do that.
> Even among recipients of bachelor’s degrees, 90 percent manage to graduate with less than $40,000 of debt.

This seems inaccurate to me. I graduated from a Canadian University (which are very cheap for the quality of education they provide) and accumulated ~30K in student loans for tuition and living expenses.

If I went to a school of similar caliber in the US, I would need more than that for a single year!
Except MIT's OpenCourseWare has a lot harder stuff. I'm not saying Khan Academy isn't doing good things - it is, but it's designed for a fundamentally different audience, even if there is some overlap. Kahn Academy is for kids, or to get a basic handle on things. For that it is superb, better than anything out there. OpenCourseWare is in general high-level, sophisticated, and far more in depth. Just because you watched Kahn Academy's presentation on diffeq, for instance, doesn't mean you'd be able to breeze through OpenCourseWare's diffeq.

Edit: BTW I wholeheartedly think Kahn Academy is awesome.
Can you elaborate?

I don't follow how pushState (being a javascript function) replaces the need for _escaped_fragment contraption for letting crawlers fetch page snapshots in a specific state.
Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms
PayPal seems to make a habit of screwing over their customers and generally being assholes whenever possible. Mojang and google have a lot more good will to burn through before people start getting angry.
I, too, would have preferred to have Sal. We had another Fortune 500 CEO -- it wasn't a bad speech, but the speaker was unknown to most of the crowd and is not regarded as an innovator/trailblazer/person who has made as large an impact as Sal has in his field.
If you're healthy, and really in a pinch, you can make money donating plasma and hopefully soon, bone marrow for more money.

Don't be afraid to go after social services you paid for in the past with your taxes too. You paid into the system, now it is time to collect out on unemployment, food stamps, whatever and everything you can find. Don't be too proud or something stupid like that. Every little bit helps. $100 in food stamps is $100 more you have.
Tarang's a great guy. I spent a lot of time with him at my last startup when he was with SoftBank. The book has considerable coverage of Sequoia Capital which I found particularly interesting.
While I agree with the reasoning, I don't like the point being made here. A better one would be to say: be prepared for a possible shutdown of the service you're using if it's free. That means, make sure you can easily take your data out and that you're not too much dependant on it.
I'd imagine logistics would play into it also. Not just shipping, but things like UL certification. When your're working on the sort of razor thin margins they certainly are at that price point...
Thanks for the feedback! I just put this page together last night and didn't put in any touch events. Will put in scrolling tonight.
You should try A/B testing your copy.

I don't understand the concept of openness and liberation as it applies to photos. To me, those are political concepts, not technological ones. Maybe I'm not in your target market, but to me it makes much more sense to tie "sync" and "share" to your copy more so than "open" and "liberation".

For example, if the name of your service was PhotoSync, and then if I went to the front page and saw a comparison between your service, Facebook, Flickr, and ICloud, I'd be very curious to see what you could offer over the options available to me.

Best to ride the coattails of those companies that have invested orders of magnitude more money to educate the market than to educate them yourselves.
I'll join the others in saying congratulations and good work. I'm interested in using OpenPhoto myself, but like a few others who commented I'm a little unsure of what I get out of it.

If you don't mind a bit of hopefully helpful criticism, perhaps change the three-item rotator at the top of http://theopenphotoproject.org/ to the following:

- A gorgeous web album to show off your photos (getting across that a Flickr-like interface to view photos comes with the product)

- Free mobile app for iOS and Android (getting across that a mobile app interface to view photos comes with the product)

- Take back your photos (change the long description here to state more clearly that you have full file-level access to your photos, hosted on a server you "own")

- Free, open and easy to use (perfect as it is)

- Flexible API & apps (perfect as it is)

That initial point-form section should get across everything you need to know, and I don't think it currently does. Lastly, I'd love an invite if you wouldn't mind sending one to sully AT yllus DOT com.
Personal business cards are so 2004
Ok, I understand now, thanks :).
He keeps saying "free software", and also says "anti-free software movement".

He means "free service", which is a radically different scenario from "free software" in either sense, and should be treated as such.

Whether we're talking about Free software or just freeware, the user's use of a normal piece of software on their computer doesn't suddenly disappear when the developer goes away.
There's nothing about eating paleo that forbids carbs. For example, many eating paleo eat large amounts of sweet potatoes
Doesn't really mention the fact you can make far more from showing your users a few adverts. (Disclaimer: I do).
NYTLabs Magic Mirror
What are some things that neuroscientists know but most people don't?
The easier way is to have your own SKUs (barcodes), so they don't get a match on Amazon. This also prevents people from price-matching.
I would think having the ability to raise 18mo of funds to deposit in a bank already puts one in a small (and quite fortunate) group. True, this ability can come from diligence and careful financial planning, but there will always be external factors that could preclude this ability to save up in the first place.

Besides that, the more reckless half of myself is reminded of this Oscar Wilde quip: "Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
I believe the point is less about revenue being a guarantee that it won't happen and more about the fact that a lack of profit makes it increasingly likely that the product will eventually be shuttered because free isn't a sustainable model.
I can't think of any good reason not to make the raw numbers public, down to say hourly granularity.

A lot could be learned from making such an organization of the world's data (cough) public.
I've heard about Muscula (and I'm reasonably sure they've heard about Errorception - it's a smallish world :) ), and I'm curious to know more about how they do what they do.

That said, the architecture isn't too different. Errorception is also built on Node and MongoDB. I am not a fan of JSONP (GET) for writing data (POST/PUT), mostly because I'm a stickler for HTTP semantics. Otherwise, without too much insight into what Muscula is doing, it certainly looks like we are very similar.

Browser/OS information is rather easy to get - it's all in the UA string. Errorception captures that already. :)
It also has the option to tunnel your DNS over TCP/443, avoiding all the dumb things wifi hotspots try to do with your DNS.
That's a false choice.

Using google to search doesn't make me a "product". They just happen to be able to make a ton of money showing adverts, which are useful for me also.

Ignore advertising revenue at your own cost.

But OTOH, this is hackernews, so continue hating advertising lead business models as usual...
You shouldn't need touch events, unless you are doing something very wrong, like overriding the default scrolling/zooming with JavaScript. I would also confirm the issue with someone else, it almost seems like a safari problem on my end.
That was my initial reaction... I mean it's no mystery that for $100, it simply cannot compete with the iPad and also be profitable.

Not everyone in the world earns $120k/year at a Silicon Valley technology job. For much of the world, $500 is a lot of money to spend on a tablet, especially for those outside the United States. In Brazil, for example, after accounting for import taxes on electronics and difference in incomes, spending $500 on a tablet is similar to spending $5,000 on a new tablet in the US. And if you're comparing to a high-paying tech job, that might be more like spending $15,000 on a tablet.

If the iPad was $15,000, would you buy it?

Wherever there's a successful high-end product, there's an even larger space for a lower-priced, lower-end version of that product for the billions of people who can't reasonably afford it. Those who look outside the Silicon Valley bubble realize this, and know that there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's at low margins.
I think the spirit of what he is saying is pretty clear (free service), but sometimes he could use better terminology.
Did you ever take that test yourself?
I wrote a long reply to this, but it was too big for HN. Now on my Tumblr instead.

http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of-stud...

Its the perspective from someone that is in well over 100K of student loan debt- me.
SAP did not create Hana in-memory database. They wrote a check to buy it. I don't think that qualifies as innovative.
As a current tech journalist AND entrepreneur, I can definitely see your point regarding TechCrunch. Our mentions in "buzzier" publications got us a huge strike in interest with about zilch market fit. This writer's suggestions, however, really apply well to trade and niche press journalists, too.

The right mention in the right publication is worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's much more about whether they reach your market rather than whether you've heard about them.

And yes, it's literally hundreds: I get about 300 pitches a day (a lot of them are "robopitches" that go out only semi-personalized), and his advice is key for making your story standout.
I think the Danish furniture retailer Bolia works like that. They have showrooms you can visit but to actually purchase anything you go to the website, either when you get home or from a kiosk in the shop.

[ edit: spelling ]
This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers.

See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter.

As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a few, try http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)

Unfortunately, $7/month from a few people can't keep things afloat.
Khan Academy has expanded quite a bit and is not just for kids. The sections on Finance and Banking are better than any of the college lectures available.

Khan Academy material is generally better than a recorded college lecture because it is designed specifically for web video. Even in the good OpenCourseWare lectures, or similar videos from Stanford, at least half the video is wasted time.

I was pretty excited when videos of real classes from respected universities became available online for free. I have watched quite a few from places like MIT and Stanford. One unexpected result I've had is that I have been mostly unimpressed. The lectures were not better than the lectures I went to at the no-name college I attended. My conclusion is that college lectures really aren't an efficient way to disseminate education, and they are even less so when they are recorded on video. I am now much more excited for Khan Academy's expansion into more advanced topics.
We have a very successful co-op program here at NC State. (I plan to go for one starting sometime next academic year.) There are also a lot of internships available, and we have a huge engineering career fair every semester with loads of companies from all engineering disciplines.

Incidentally, there are very few engineers in NC State's contingent of occupiers.
From what I've read, the effect is actually the opposite. If I remember correctly, patio11 had a post a while ago about how his free users consumed most of the support requests. The hypothesis is that giving users one entitlement (free use of the service) leads them to believe that they have access to others (your time).
My ISP can see which IP addresses I connect to and can perform a reverse lookup. I don't think the privacy angle has any value. I suppose a shared host could serve multiple sites, but then simple packet snooping would reveal which hostname I am requesting.