skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Facebook example is a terrible example. If that had been their business model since day one, then fine, they can do whatever they want because every new user knows what they're getting. But if they get huge because users are flocking to their site without having to pay anything and dedicating a lot of time to the site, they shouldn't TAKE AWAY features that were previously free. That just seems wrong to me. That was the model they chose and that's part of the reason why they got so big. I don't think very many people created a Facebook account with the idea that they would eventually have to pay for what is currently free.

If FB had this business model from day one, I highly doubt they'd be as big as they are now. I think it's up to them to figure out a way to make money while not charging for any CURRENT features. If they want to charge for new features, that's fine; otherwise, it's just a bait-and-switch and they're doing a major diservice to the large user base that made them who they are.
I think he probably couldn't move due to him taking out a large mortgage prior. He's most likely underwater and there aren't too many scientific jobs in Alabama?
A little off topic but how do you like the glossy screen on your MBP?
Electric-car race could strain lithium battery supply | Green Tech
I hope Gabor is not going to compete with Xobni.
Yahoo Video gains, YouTube crosses 5.3 billion streams
Virtual Heist Nets 500,000+ Bank, Credit Accounts
Morris Worm Turns 20: Look what it's done
I'd like to chat, hang out, and work with potential cofounders for four days to a week. That should give us enough time to see if we gel.

That's a less than ideal, but a fairly decent way of recruiting co-founders.

Good luck, Gabor!
Eee PC 1000H Runs Windows 7 Well
Gabor, it would be helpful if you could outline what stack/technologies you have in mind for hacking to give people a better idea of their suitability.
Thanks, prakash!

In a couple of week, you can usually pretty easily tell if there's a fit, and if the person has technical ability, but I have no illusions of being able to predict the future based on just that. :-)
BTW, one more service: BudURL.com
Its awesome. Actually its got all the features that cli.gs (the best of 5 you have reported) has, and on the top, it lets you create custom URL like budurl.com/ycombinator than a random letters.
2nd big advantage is: its a decent domain name, than cli.gs - I can tell that to someone over phoe without them asking 'What?', 'Can yo spell that?'
I apologize if I'm mistaken (I'm sure if I was right somebody would have also noticed this by now), but isn't this a letter to the shareholders of the company, telling them they need to help out, even relocating to their office for a month, as their full-time employees are already overloaded with work, and the company may go bankrupt in months?

This is a huge difference because the link isn't to a typical story about leadership telling their employees they need to work harder. It's in fact a different type of letter--one that appears to have been sent to shareholders who are not employees--that I don't think any of us have seen before.
I am sure he won't for multiple reasons:

1. There are multiple interesting, challenging, lucrative problems to be solved in the email field. Why would he want to try & solve what Xobni is doing?

2^. He probably had to sign some sort of document that says he can't compete directly with Xobni for X no of years

3^. He seems like a nice guy, and probably left the company on great terms with the co-founders

^ 2, 3 are pure speculation excluding the nice guy part
There's a company (http://www.ultimasports.co.uk/canam/index.html) that sells kit super-cars. According to them it takes 40 - 80 hours to put together what is essentially a car that is 95% as good as some Italian machine but at 10% of the cost. Not bad considering what you are getting.
Indeed. The same kind of net worth represented by Pokemon cards, Beanie Babies, and my vintage Flooz collection.*

(*I don't actually have any Flooz. Oh, but if it were so....)
bk -

This is mostly up for discussion with my cofounder. I'm currently looking at implementing a large part in Python. I have some UI ideas for which I've been looking to use Silverlight or Flex.

But overall, I'm open to suggestions and would like to work with someone for whom learning a new language or framework is not a hurdle.

Gabor
You have bad social engineering skills.
Ask HN: Workflow Issue: How to "deformat" text without losing links?
What's the best way to get text from Word into raw HTML...without cutting out URLs, bold tags, italics and underlining?

I run a Drupal-powered news site. We've got about 30 contributors. They post their own work. Sometimes I post it for them.

These people always write in Word. No matter how many times I ask them not to, they do. Pasting into our site from Word leads to formatting problems. Now, I've got a tinymce plugin that will strip out all formatting from the text and just give me plain text...but then I lose useful tags like <a>, <b>, and <i> and have to add them in again. I don't have time to add in 30 links again. And I don't have time to strip out all the awful <span style="font-family:cambria">-type tags that Word puts into the text.

Solutions?
With regard to this, I will reference specifically health. I've had some persistent health issues that significantly limit my effectiveness. When they are ascendant, quite simply it is difficult to focus in the face of the constant irritation.

(These result from injuries, and the medical community has been less than definitive and less than helpful in finding solutions.)

My point is not a self-pity fest, but to say that, from personal experience, I've learned there are physical factors that can limit one's effort. I think that some people who have not experienced this, don't realize nor understand it.

It is part of what makes community essential to achievement. We all learn from others, and passing on our knowledge is essential to continuing this progress. Similarly, people have times during which their ability to do for themselves is limited. At those times, the community can help to get them out of that low spot. (Whether family, friends, and/or a larger agency.) The result is hopefully someone who can once again contribute to the community. (Note that I'm not defining what that contribution should be. In that regard, I support a free market of ideas and personal interests.)

It seems to me that for people who claim to value life, this should be a pretty basic understanding. And yet we have this persistent notion of the self-made person. In moderation, it's a good idea. Everyone has to find their own path and success. Taken to extremes, we end up with "survival of the fittest". This is a workable means of defining hierarchy, but it fails to investigate resource optimization where an investment in another may yield larger dividends. And it is at odds with that espoused viewpoint of "valuing life" in a general sense. It may limit the scope of cooperative ventures. And this is a time where human ventures are ever more complicated and in need of such cooperative effort.

Individual effort is indeed necessary. But we need to look also as a community at what enables that effort, and where there are limitations, to work on removing them. And that I see as a group effort, not just one person grasping their bootstraps.

The bootstraps are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient.
4. Enthusiastic about email and messaging.

Ah, you had me until #4.

Actually, I imagine quite a few of us have our own ideas that we have to work on.

I love the idea of this post and I'm wondering if I'll ever end up doing one of my own. I wish you the best of luck, Gabor.

For those of us interested in this process, please keep us posted and let us know how it works out. If you can find the ideal co-founder like this, maybe others can too.
That's one of the advantages of simplicity: far lower overhead.

craigslist is very simple, so they have something like 23 employees.
there are a few apps out there that simulate different types of colorblindness that I find useful for testing all sorts of things (websites, apps, videos and more) when I can't easily find someone who is colorblind. you might find them useful for testing, like http://colororacle.cartography.ch/ which looks to be cross-platform (I only know of ones for OS X).

also in terms of general feedback, I love the idea and it's great for occasional use for a small set of pages, but I can't imagine using the current feature set for any significant testing and testing of anything that's not a webpage. i really love the idea of delivering the whole screen, especially without installing much beyond a firefox extension :)
who in the heck is voting me down for asking this question? Its an honest question that relates to color blindness for someone who isn't color blind, and it relates to whether or not this color blind tool is accurate or not.
Steve Jobs poaches IBM chip and blade geek
I'd venture to guess it's not copyright infringement provided he doesn't sell it.
What exactly would we be betting and how are we going to judge the outcome?

new phones in the preceding month?

estimates of phones in use at time t[0] and t[1]?

iPhones are in the minority of total phones in use right now.

What geographic area do you want to restrict it to? Remember that most of the world cannot buy and operate a 2nd gen iPhone without voiding the warranty, and if you think that iPhones are going to dominate the market in asia and africa, you are being optimistic.
this is a crushingly sad story.
That conversion rate is as wishful as thinking Facebook can survive without an income. 2% would be outstanding, IMO.
Nice. Insults aren't ad hominem when they're hedged.

Look, man -- I quoted you. You can play this game of I-didn't-say-that all you want, but I quoted you, responded to the quote, and explained myself as clearly as I know how.

Now I just think you're playing a troll's game, and I'm done with it.
Gabor, am I right to think that you're going for the Integrated Communication System?

If you want a name, call it gics (read geeks) - global integrated communication system. It will even fit if Google buys it. :p
Perhaps also with some empire-building thrown in? Maybe everyone wants a promotion in recognition of their great work, so they need to hire new employees to work under them. I have seen hiring decisions made for that reason before.
Federal Circuit Decides Software No Longer Patentable
A frightening future. In each “pick” or “put” operation the robot was served by an eager human minion while most of the humans' needs were unmet.
True. Maybe the metaphor was apt. At any rate, we can all agree that there are quite a few niches that are a little cramped.
SPaste|source - a secure, open source, pastebin
There's a service like this at graybit.com that shows everything in greyscale. This is great for looking at your site's contrast. It doesn't seem to be working right now, though.
New OpenID Implementations Abound
Thanks man ...

I think the most important thing is to solve relevant problems for real users.

There are lots of email problems out there, and lots of people suffer from them. Most people I talk to can relate to this and can rattle off their top 5 frustrations with email. Plus, there are billions of people using email. Thus, there are many profitable companies to be built here.
It also helps that Reddit already exists, providing a forum for silly, goofy discussion for those who want it.
I agree with your assessment of the value, but disagree with your conjecture of the solution. It'll take too long to create products that leverage the network and are profitable.

A better short term solution is to sell the data on the user base to mailing houses and other companies that are looking to find more information on their customers. Example target customers are political campaigns, nonprofits, associations, and magazines looking for new subscribers. This is an old fashioned business that has been around for years. It's proven, it works.

FB is headed this way with Connect, but Connect is too muddied, unproven, and relies too much on cooperation with 3rd parties.

A second set of customers, which in retrospect may be what you are referring to, are universities. The alumni network websites of schools are inactive wastelands. Facebook should be marketing walled garden solutions to Universities. Why build your own network from scratch (or expensive off-the-shelf vendor software) when you can just subscribe to a service from Facebook that will instantly give a University access to a huge percentage of their self-identified alumn...
Wikipedia seems like only have 5 programmers. Am I correct?
LG KM380 BLACK (Unlocked)
LG KM380 Black Unlocked Flip, which is among the first LG mobile phones to include a separate sound chip.Announced in February 2008, the mid-end slider has been launched on the market in March 2008. Which are delivering the best music phones.
Not a bad idea, but then you wouldn't get the fine-grained feedback on individual comments, which would make it harder for new people to gauge the communal standard.
I don't see how captchas "just make sense", especially in the most common image-based incarnation. I have worked with visually impaired people and the most popular request was always "I want to something on this website, but they have a captcha I can't see (and occasionally an audio captcha that makes no sense), can you sign me up/comment for me/do whatever task?".

As a sighted person, I've even run across captchas that were impossible to decipher, both from some third party solution and from something like recaptcha, the latter which bothers me to no end because sometimes both words are ambiguous.

Whether or not they make sense depends on your audience and your site and your implementation of it.
If only 5% of your Facebook network existed, would you use (let alone pay for) Facebook?
That line hit home with me too.
I encourage you to write that post - this community is full of smart, technically competent people. And connecting them is what it's all about. :-)

Will definitely keep you posted.
They should sell a small, maybe 8GB version to use for swap or for installing a DB. What do you think?
Why is Facebook burning so much cash? They keep hiring
I got a plugin required for a site requiring a plugin.
The site had a youtube video imbedded.
I actually wish it disappeared. It would make a lot of people more productive (me included) and allow me to not worry about writing a facebook app.

This is like a negative network effect where so many people are sucked into this black hole that it's hurting everyone.

I'm exaggerating a bit but I do see a negative effect. It may be outweighed by the positives but it's still there.
"It's good to see people trying to translate, but they should really ask for expert help."

The sad thing is: they did ask for expert help, and this is what it got them.
Good to hear Gabor, I raised the issue because it is unfortunately a common problem among startups. I can tell that you mean no harm. Good luck on your new projects.
Don MacAskill & SmugMug is one of the great success stories. Don & his team have created a business completely on their own terms and it their own way and they are massively successful. If your not following his blog you should, I would take his advice over just about anyone else in the Silly Valley echo chamber.

Truer words have never been spoken. Now is the time for us to strike and create the next round of great businesses.
I don't think he was looking for an original idea.
Ideas are overrated and cheap anyway.
hi markessien. i have heard similar stories from others and am keen to see what your software is about - do you have links?
One key piece to remember is that in true austrian theory, the central bank has no place as that is an attempt at free market regulation which is utterly impossible (see book "I, Pencil" as an example of the difficulty in truly understanding and regulating a free market). The bad policy of th Fed itself was NOT within austrian theory but caused by the introduction of the Fed in 1913 to "quelch" financial instability (what good that did, as expected).
Waste disposal is a much smaller problem than people think. It's really not that much waste - you can store the waste of every plant ever made in the space that a single large coal mine and tailings takes.

I think the personal lifetime waste size for each person was something like a cup - we can find space for that somewhere on this very large earth.

Plus if you allow nuclear reprocessing, you can burn the fuel almost to nothing at all.

Right now renewable energy will not going to work. It's not enough, and it's not consistent enough. The only source with enough energy is sun, but that would require massive amounts of land use - I'd rather use a millionth of a percent of that land to store some nuclear waste.

On top of that storing the energy for use at night is problematic.

Except for sun, renewable will never be enough - there just isn't enough energy. And sun has it's own problems: it can be done if you use enough land (like all of texas), but that's not practical. You can put collectors on each roof, but that doesn't work, because right now they use almost as much energy to make as they produce over a reasonable time.

Today renewable is not going to work, and it probably never will. Don't wait for them, there are very large problems that will almost certainly make it impossible to supply energy solely with renewables.

The solution is this: nuclear for now. When materials science improves enough to put in a space tether you put in a collector in orbit and send power down the tether.

Sun power from space is the future, but without a tether it's too dangerous to send the power to earth.

Right now it's nuclear is the only realistic power source.

And besides, if we can be OK for right now, fusion power might eventually work.

You mentioned hydrogen. Hydrogen is a joke, it is totally unsuitable as a fuel. It's all but impossible to store. People have mostly given up on it, and if they didn't they should.

Hydrogen will leak out of just about any container ever made, and if it doesn't leak it will react with the material and damage it.
Agreed. I think he meant it in the context of "Don't try to be somebody else", and not "you can never change so don't bother trying".

I think if you come at it with the first take, you can be inclusive of personal changes due to growth.
Google Techtalk - Is IT ready for the Dreaded DNA Data Deluge?
Not really. He still had to go through the process of creating something. He still needed to buy and assemble materials. He didn't just borrow someone's Lambo and throw it in a matter replicator.

In copyright infringement cases, people are making exact duplicates without having to work to produce those duplicates. When someone makes a copy of a picture/song/program, they get all of the benefit without having to reward or acknowledge the effort that went into producing the original.

This guy is more like a cover band than Napster.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=debugging+site%3Afo...
Video: What is semantic search?
IPhone vs T-Mobile G1
25 according to CrunchBase.
Also there's a big difference between somebody spending a few moments with DVD Shrink and this guy spending 17 years on his Lamborghini clone.
From the note at the top: Almost two years to the day after this letter was written, Autodesk completed its initial public stock offering;

So "shareholders" would have been employees and private investors.
That's what happens when you ask for things you don't understand and you trust the answer from just one person.
Alternative database structures
Hey Hackers,

My site www.HearWhere.com has started gaining more traction after being covered by TechRadar and TechCrunch earlier this week.

I'm noticing some lag in response time from mysql (nothing too huge at the moment, but it will only get larger as the database grows).

I'm considering moving to a different database, maybe BigTable from Google, though i know there are other alternatives as well.

I'm already using memcache to speed-up response times, but am wondering what the hacker community thinks about these non-relational databases.

Anybody using BigTable? or other recommendations? or should I just stick to optimizing mysql and move to a cluster or something?
I agree. Copyright protects original works of authorship. A car is not an original work of authorship. A picture of the car is...

And I agree about trademark being the biggest issue, perhaps coupled with infringement on design patents held by Lamborghini.

No matter what this guy has an extremely strong personal use defense. He has zero effect on the market and is not distributing.
They're all afraid of Paul Graham.
More generally, it's the attitude that once people start getting serious about something or it gets complex, then they're "wrong." As another commentator said, it's about seeming cool, at all costs.

That, in turn, is due to people caring more about rhetoric than reason. Regardless of whether something makes sense, if people can say it in a way that conveys the right image, they are "right."

And this is all because we spend way too much time passively consuming media, and are consequently taught to process things via image vs content.
So…What is Design?
You're projecting the vector onto a plane. You still have to pick the right plane (I wouldn't have chosen this one, for example), but it does simplify things in that you only have to choose once.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't use facebook even though it's free. I don't particularly need gratuitously large social networks made up largely of people I don't really know. Sites like facebook, reddit, and even this one to a much lesser degree mostly just distract me from getting things done at the computer.
Thanks for the valid bug report. We noticed it too. Our translation needs work.
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemory/index.htm
Actually it doesn't have a single thing to do with copyright as it isn't a creative work, it's solely under a patent. As long as he doesn't go around calling it a "Lamborghini Countach" he isn't breaking any trademark laws.

Finally a patent only extends to cover something that is in itself patentable. Nintendo is taking forever to get patents on it's DS game cartridges because they're based off of an SD card. If its not found to be useful or inventive then it's not patentable.

Inherently most vehicles are non-patentable as they all serve an identical purpose and relatively few are at all inventive.

Quite simply a patent can be invalidated by someone simply inventing it themselves, which turns something from 'original' to 'obvious' and thus non-patentable.

Vehicle patents are very complicated to enforce, namely because if anyone ever tries to enforce one they can actually end up getting it invalidated (which in patent law, abolition happens more than enforcement). Lamborghini might not be able to enforce a single patent because a court might find it an obvious improvement over Henry Ford's original patent or is outright patent infringement of Fords. It's a serious lose-lose business.
I appear to be on the list of people for whom the upgrade will remove 3d acceleration. I'm going to have to wait. Does anyone know if this is purely an issue with kernel and drivers that should get resolved soon or if this is a strategic change in supporting the vendor drivers (Nvidia in my case)?
No idea if the translation here is right, but it's sufficient for a sanity check:

http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?url=http%3A%2F%2F&...
Well, thanks for taking the time to add absolutely nothing to the conversation.