skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's harsh, but I think there is merit to it. You can definitely succeed with a strong advertising campaign, but if your product is remarkable you'll be able to focus on it a lot less.

You're right that the poker industry does depend heavily on advertising. I imagine a big part of PokerStars and FullTilt's userbase discovered online poker after seeing a commercial during a rerun of the World Poker Tour.

I'm not sure how that translates into marketing a poker tool, but you (and the other posters) are right to say I could have done more.
Yup, pokerstove. I agree that weighted range calculations aren't so easy with pokerstove, but it's pretty easy to make a good estimate. Still, it's definitely useful, and a feature I expected to be in pokerstove the first time I used it.

Still, I don't get why you would focus on preflop calculations. Knowing whether to shove preflop is pretty easy, isn't it? The tough decisions are often when you face an overbet on the turn or river, in my experience.
A few things aren't feeling right here.

1. Other than that link you include in this thread, I can't find ads anywhere on the site. That's generally wise, but you could probably get away with running some more.

2. The homepage footer says you've had 32,000+ discussions today? I can't seem to find more than 10 or so. Do you mean"so far"?

Otherwise this is a neat idea and a clean, hipster-ish layout. Impressed!
Why Amazon's CDN Offering Is No Threat To Akamai, Limelight or CDN Pricing
Hacker News is supposed to be about ideas. Mark Cuban is a person who has ideas. Many (including the NYT) have suggested that the government is targeting Cuban because of his ideas. It's not entirely clear what's happening, but it seems like something that's worth following.
Great. Now we have to get modchips for our laptops too?
Take a step back... big picture here. 750k is a drop in the bucket compared to some of the shenanigans that have been going on. This charge on Cuban is nothing more than a sideshow (think Martha Stewart) to put us under the belief that the SEC has their shit together.

Example: Angelo Mozilo dumped 400 Million dollars of CFC stock onto the market. He knew the shit that was going on... where's the SEC?
The lesson is: host your P2P app on Google Code, the music industry probably don't have the balls to sue Google.
Dear painters: If you want to succeed, please use the largest brush available.
Wasn't this announced alongside Silverlight a while ago? Flash is still dominant and Microsoft has released Silverlight 2.0 in the meantime. Is anyone going to actually use JavaFX? Why was Sun so slow on this?
Developer strikes it rich with iPhone game
Add this to your /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Slinkset. And as previously referred, Scoop.

Thanks all!
Different players think of different levels.

A beginner will primarily focus on what his own cards are. An intermediate will focus on what his opponent's cards are. A more advanced player will focus on what his opponent thinks his cards are and so on. The best players in the world are experts at figuring out which level you're thinking on so they can think one level beyond you.

Once you estimate your opponent's range based on his style, the cards, his previous actions, etc, you need to know what to do with that information. ALL IN Expert was designed to help with the second part.
Which wouldn't be a problem if you had infinite hours to do everything. If you are spending two hours a day doing that stuff instead of one hour because you type slow, that's one less hour that you could be coding, or learning, or whatever.
yeah, will do that... but i'm myself ashamed at these show sluggish codes... and basically not well documented.. just wait a few minutes for updates...
Amazon doesn't include the name of the buyer in the music file - either in the file's mp3 encoding itself or in the ID3 tag. Tagging the ID3 as you download the file is technically possible, but changing the MP3 encoding on-the-fly as you buy/download the file isn't particularly feasible for several reasons. The most notable is that there would be a 'privacy' outcry from the dark corners of the web, the way they reacted when Apple seemed to do something like that with iTunes.

If you have any suspicion about it, get a friend to buy a random MP3 from Amazon using her account and buy the same file yourself using your account. Compare the two MP3s using whatever tool you want; I did, and they seemed to be absolutely identical.

FWIW, there is a field in the Amazon MP3 ID3 - under 'Comments' - which says Amazon.com Song ID: 20XXXXXXX (I Xed the last seven digits). That's a unique song identifier, not a user identifier.
I found the article interesting, but didn't really understand why it should be on HN.

Is an article supposed to be relevant to hackers or entrepreneurs simply because it is written by an angel investor? By this logic, why not just automatically post every article Cuban has ever written?
Anyone ever play with DrumCircle on BeOS?

Basically the same concept, but with cowbells and an extra checkbox marked "Hippie AI."
Does anyone think this will go anywhere? Since JavaFX was announced it's seemed like nothing more than an also-ran that was dead in the water before they even got started.

FTA:
"Sun officials demonstrated JavaFX running with video capabilities, touting the ability to drag and drop video out of a browser and onto the desktop. With JavaFX, users have a single platform with both browser and desktop deployment capabilities, unlike Adobe, which provides Flash for the browser and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for the desktop, Sun officials stressed."

JavaFX seems useless in the browser because no one is going to download a 15+ MB installer when the Flash plugin can be installed in seconds without even having to restart the browser. Youtube was the real killer app for Flash and the fact that Flash is so ubiquitous and easily installed likely contributed greatly to Youtube's success. In comparison, choosing JavaFX seems like a risky proposition.

As for the desktop... Are they out of their minds? Java is more or less dead on the desktop except for maybe some crappy "enterprise" software. Besides, there isn't a rush to adopt AIR so it seems like there isn't much developer interest in that area.
I find the automatically generated "Possibly related post" amusing: "Engine Yard Closes $15 Million in Series B Financing" dated July 14, 2008.
The real problem is that Flash is a gateway for a lot of graphic artists wanting to make something more powerful on the web. A lot of copy-pasting and poor practices being executed on a powerful engine with a very steep learning curve.

By comparison, JavaScript is abused less because it's less appealing to beginners (it lacks the wow-factor).
You consider flash cool and interesting???

Look at some of the awesome things going on with javascript+html5 - being able to do multitouch, canvas, video tag etc. That is the future, flash is likely to go the same way as Java applets IMHO

Who wants java applets on their iphone browser? not me thanks.
What is the difference between this and tech crunch selling advertising on their site? Both offer access to a market for a fee. Paying for job listings seems to fall in the same bucket.
The calculations are actually still done the same.

Preflop is easier to build an interface around, which is why I chose to focus on it for the first iteration. PokerStove's postflop range selection tool worked, but I felt it could have been done a lot better. For example, how would you select the range "A2s-ATs of hearts and clubs" using PokerStove? Making a clean way to select that would have been the next step for ALL IN Expert.
Thanks for all the input..thanks especially to those who went thru the 'pain' of signing up and creating a liveblog. The feedback has been very helpful. I'll go back to the drawing board and will come up with something better, thanks to all of you.

@SingAlong , the kiva ads are for "charity"
There's a web app (forget what it's called) that analyses the writing on a web page and decides whether a man or woman wrote it.

So something like this could be largely automated, start off with a collection of links then categorise them according to the text on the page and/or the writing of the person linking to them.
Reminder: Vancouver Hacker News Meetup at Noon today
The Vancouver meetup for HN is at noon today at the Old Spaghetti Factory in the Gastown District of Vancouver, Canada.
Alternatives to Hibernate updated
An overview of current peristence frameworks for Java
Why would flash games use "server resources?" It's just bandwidth, which has never been Twitter's problem.

Besides, you can embed it from an external site or CDN.
If the company is really worth 15bn then at a 10% ROI they should be making 1500million profit /year, 10mm yearly revenue would be ~.75% of that which is not a "lot" but it's still a useful number. At 30x it's 2.25% of revenue which is still valuable.

However, compared to their 500mm raised it could significantly increase their runway.
Hmmm what about the Youtube player on there already? Maybe that should be made available for other FLV video sites
Single Bad Solder Costs CERN's LHC a Year, $21M USD
A return to the Bretton Woods international gold standard is inevitable - Eric Janszen
The Long Fail: Web 2.0's Faith Meets the Facts
> In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services

I don't think advertising is necessary for an online dating service. For example, quite a few of my friends are on OK Cupid, and as far as I know they don't do much advertising.

"Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" is a really succinct way of putting it.
I note that on the website there seems to be no real screenshots of your application in action that give me a good idea of what it does and how it works. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake - I generally won't download /anything/ unless I've seen a screenshot first.
Is it really this easy? Has anyone done it? Are these for sale anywhere?
Disclaimer, I am a co-founder at springpadit.com.

The problem with a wiki, from my perspective, is the fact that it is unstructured. Some wiki's attempt to derive structure, or force users to use special syntax but that ends up being a little clunky. With structure comes some power. Tasks suddenly have meaning. A "Restaurant" data type can associate a map, or reviews. What we are trying to create is almost a personal content management system that helps users track all of that interesting structured data.

I am a fan of wiki's though. In fact I created

http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/

Many moons ago.
Wrong question. The right question is why everyone decided to hire so many people in the first place. Clearly, they were not essential.
What Python learned from economics
Yeah, we go back and forth on that. We only use it currently to send you a confirmation. You can still login immediately though. OpenID is definitely in the road map.

I suppose we could allow you to login to a more restricted account (no spamming since we do have email/sms out support) until you validate in some way.
Howto connect a PIC Microcontroller to a Telit GM862
Fancy to know how to: connect a PIC microcontroller (PIC micro) to a TELIT module, set up the GSM Module to handle SMS. And much more.... Looks juicy, so what are you waiting for?
H.264 seems to be the way ahead for now.
For a guy who just spent $600 on filing fees... I'm impressed.
You mean the little dinky gradient grid on the front page isn't enough? Just kidding -- thanks for the feedback.
"Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone..."

"Adobe's recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile..."

Which phones currently support Flash? I know a certain amount of phones support Flashlite? And I openly welcomed Flashlite when I was dealing with terrible mobile browsers and MIDP app development. Now? I don't particularly care for it...
I hear you but seriously, my instincts after years of troubleshooting this kind of crap is that the problem is the plug-in itself, not the particular developers that use it. I've seen bad javascript, hell I've seen HTML that can cause performance problems. What's happening with flash seems to be related to the underlying technology.

Some users are affected far more than others, and I have noticed very little correlation between particular sites and performance problems. The only constant seems to be: if the site uses flash (and most sites do), there's a high chance browser CPU usage will spike to 90%+ and stay there until it is killed. I think it happens less-often with firefox only because I've got adblock set up and it stops a lot of it from ever being loaded.

I really don't think the symptoms would be like that if this was simply a case of developers misusing the platform. Some sites would rarely have issues, others would fail all the time. It's mostly a gut instinct at this point and I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
The really depressing thing are people who have no idea how Africa really is making blanket judgements on the continent. If there were less of that, and more people who are willing to actually do research about the continent, there would be more trade. As-is, people like you just have some 2 paragraph opinion of the continent, and never ever see it as a place where one can invest or otherwise communicate with.
The story is about a public startup and insider trading. It seems very relevant to a startup CEO, for example, to know what information his investors can trade on, or not, and under what circumstances.

The involvement of Mr. Cuban is just coincidental :).
It would need to be something you don't have to look at. One of the important features of touch typing is you can keep your eyes on the screen.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Social news sites are only worthwhile insofar as your interests and participation align with the interests and participation of your peers on the site.

The author is really saying two things:

- "I'm not interested in the articles that make the front page of Digg": a terrific reason not to use Digg.

- "If women had a Digg of their own, the articles on it would be much more relevant to me." Probably somewhat true. But I know plenty of female geeks who wouldn't give a shit about anything on weheartgossip or kirtsy.

The real goal here is to find a quality community that appeals to you. Unfortunately, this is not all that easy: not only are most people morons, you need a lot of people to be active in the same place for a social website to be worth visiting.
I disagree.

I think the massive innovation on the Internet is due to the fact that it's easy to see the code for everything (HTML, CSS, Javascript).

Flash (and Silverlight, etc.) are all attempts to hijack the Internet as we know it. They do offer a better experience, but at a cost (freedom, more code, less innovation, licensing fees, patents, higher costs).
There is a great distinction to be observed between the words "me" and "us".

It seems as though your experience leads you to your conclusions, but I'd bet rather confidently that your conclusions are conjectural rather than empirical with respect to the experiences of everyone else.
Incidentally, girl geeks I know seem to be drawn toward MetaFilter and Fark (!?).
cool, the site seems pretty neat. btw, how long has it been around?
I'm not buying that. Any startup whose CEO relies on HN and blogs for legal advice is going to fail.
> I think it sounded like fun.

That was my reading of it too -- he enjoyed winding up his idiot boss.
How does anyone with dev background bear a job for any length of time where all you are doing is editing HTML and ftp'ing it?
Technology sets sights on piracy
Youtube re-encoded a ton of their videos for iPhone viewing. Perhaps Youtube could offer re-encoding in the cloud or something. A proxy that does this would probably solve the iPhone/Video argument, but it would be expensive to implement and use in practice.
I'm seeing 38% faster downloads from Phoenix (nearest CloudFront edge: L.A.). I ran 5 trials on a 178MB video hosted on S3 [1] and CloudFront [2]. The S3 GETs took: 6m02s, 1m50s, -failed after 28MB- , 2m01s, 2m04s. The CloudFront GETs took: 3m40s, 1m10s, 1m23s, 2m05s, 1m25s. Ignoring the failed S3 run, we can compare average client latency: 2m59s vs 1m50s.

[1] http://2008.s3.amazonaws.com/09/javascript.mp4

[2] http://d11tgpuxrsgxu4.cloudfront.net/09/javascript.mp4
It restricts your ability to sell the MP3. I can sell a CD, which to me factors into the price (assuming I could sell the CD for half of the new price eventually).
That's going to be true exactly up to the moment when Apple reveals they've been a button click away from enabling Flash on every iPhone, thus killing that differentiation.
I like Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood a lot, and I respect them as experienced programmers who probably know a lot more than I do. But, frankly, articles like this discredit their expertise in my eyes.

You would either have to be an extremely poor typist or an extremely prolific programmer for your productivity to be constrained by your typing.
Oh geez... Better go get my tinfoil hat...

I'm not going to waste my time with any conspiracy theories, but I do think insider trading is kind of a bullshit crime in many cases. Only an idiot would fail to act on a tip that happens to be passed to him whether it is inside information or not. No one is going to sit idly and watch $750,000 dissolve. Of course, it's a totally different story when it's a deliberate attempt to acquire and profit from information unavailable to other investors.

If I remember correctly, they went after Martha Stewart because she was the CEO of a publicly traded company and also once had a stockbroker license. In other words, she definitely knew better and should have handled the situation differently. Is or was Mark Cuban ever an executive for a publicly traded company?
There IS a digg for girls: PrettySocial ;-)

http://www.prettysocial.net/

Seriously though, there are several such sites with different target groups:

PrettySocial (ours): for young women, focus is on fashion, beauty, health etc. with lots of pretty pictures!

Kirtsy: for mothers and older women, coverage is more general

Boudica: it's a new site, the stories are a little random, but looks promising
"Pong in 30 Lines" isn't really the interesting thing to me. I think it's far more interesting that you can write an interactive python app and embed it in a pdf.

Perhaps this would have been better submitted as "Embed python games in a pdf"?
Here's a question -- what percent of iPhone developers see this sort of success? Would be interesting to know. C'mon Apple, please share the data with us?
Thanks, that is good to know. Can't wait for that stuff to come to Amazon Germany.
Videogame for flies lets them pilot a robot
If there is such a thing as genius in interpersonal relations, Jobs is surely that kind of genius.

Almost every account of a face to face meeting with Jobs talks about how superbly persuasive he is. They don't call it the Reality Distortion Field for nothing.
Perhaps you can make an online free version and put some ads?
They might not sell apps/games...but that's better than not selling the phone in the first place!
That's kinda the point. Since bits from a CDN travel less distance, Amazon charges less.
Ask YC: Monetization on iPhone App Ad Networks?
Does anyone have experience with Pinch Media, AdMob, VideoEgg, etc? If so, how is it going? Can you point to your app? I'm researching them for an upcoming iPhone App but can't find basic information like rates.
Yahoo BOSS Is Down
Even if you can be successful without advertising, it seems a bit silly to be against it. If you know that by investing 100000$ in advertising, you can earn another 1000000$ in revenue, why would you not do it? Just because it loses you points in the indie scene?

I used to be all negative about advertising, but I changed my attitude since I realized that nature itself relies heavily on advertising. A beautiful flower is advertising, too. Even a flower has to announce "I am here" with colors and odors. Maybe in some cases a "social recommendation mechanism" is also at work (like the bees who inform other bees about food sources), but without such a mechanism, how are your clients going to discover you?
For those interested in submitting and reading more financially related news, there's always nickb's new forum:

www.newmogul.com
Nobody has done it because that's not the weakest link in the chain. It's easier to just decrypt the file in software.
Don't forget the Chinese premiers for the past 20 years or so.
You managed to embed the actual game into a PDF? How did you do that?

I was only able to export an image of it.
Thing is, I programmed (garbage collected) Java on mobile phones for years, and those devices had far less memory than the iPhone. So the "it makes sense for a mobile phone" argument simply doesn't fly with me.

Header files: Java doesn't have header files, and I am sure it provides the same level of compile time error catching (or doesn't it?). I just deeply resent having to write the same code twice, and I suspect the explosion of files required doesn't make things easier, either.

There is also a personal preference: having coded Java for years, I would simply prefer a dynamic language now, instead of Objective-C (which also has the Java-style interfaces, I have heard - why do they need BOTH interfaces and header files? One would be sufficient for the compile time checks, I would think). .
OK, I forgot about that problem (I assume it is the limitations of browsers to two connections per server at a time).
http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

It doesn't work well enough for what you're proposing though. The accuracy (according to their blog) is roughly 50%, which is no better than chance.
"My favorite solution to this problem is to start out as a consulting company and evolve into an ISV later."

Is it terribly unwise to do this consulting as a sole proprietor? (That is, not incorporated nor as an LLC.)
First, this app shows Google's stunning ability to innovate across all platforms. While there are some certainly some flaws, this clearly is revolutionary technology, and it seems prophetic that Apple held this technology back for whatever reason, even if only for two days. Surely if this app can be held back it seems like iPhone developers are going to be in for a headache in the future.
If they're spending that much money on advertising doesn't that imply that they are unremarkable?

Advertising isn't a bad thing, but if your only differentiator is advertising you're probably screwed.
Interesting article. I remember reading your announcement on 2p2 at the time. I went to your website and scanned the 2p2 thread.

The main reason I didn't buy it was that from what I read it seemed like anything I could do with your program I could already do with PokerStove or StoxEV. And they're both free.

If you want me to pay for poker software (and I've paid for lots of poker-related software) you have to convince me that it will give me an edge or allow me to do something that I can't already do with existing free software.
Hmm...that's going to be too long for my tastes :)
"but I decided it wasn't worth the effort."

Good decision. It seems like you have a lot of talent and can make a LOT more money in a vertical other than poker. Also, it will probably be more enjoyable in another domain.

My 2 cents. We tried to a business in the lottery space once because it seemed there were no good tech companies there, there was a ton of money at stake, and lots of innovation to be done. But after a short time it was really demoralizing to be in that type of vertical. Fail fast and move on!
> What kind of punk keeps a diary of how bad his contract is?

An IT guy who has nothing better to do because they won't let him go online. Somebody who's working in hell and has one place to truly vent. Someone with self-restraint? This guy's unbelievably patient; I might've been out of there in a week. Looks like the catharsis paid off...give him a break.