skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Refusing revenue - the death of blogrush
A radical business plan for start-ups: Charge people.
The sites most vulnerable to spam are ones that a) have a critical mass of readership, especially dumb readership that will click on ridiculous spam links, and b) ones not run by people who are active contributors to the field of spam filtering.
Crap. Guess I'll have to retire the ol' guitar and put on my robe and wizard hat.
I installed 8.10 and couldn't get enough of what I wanted to working and quickly reinstalled 8.04.
Have you ever noticed that every epic failure begins with "Well, they were highly leveraged and..."?
When 99.9% reliability is not good enough
LINQ to SQL being killed off?
If you're at a young startup, I think this means you should immediately stop thinking about this category of patents. It's really important to not was cycles when you have so few.
I realize that Facebook gets enormous amounts of traffic, and so requires the resources for scaling/high availability and all that. But how in the world have they gone through most of $500 million? What the hell are they doing over there?
The Need for New Technology will Keep the Tech Industry Afloat
Learn from CD Baby and make $20 million without stress
The discussion of whether we have control over effort is fascinating, but is ultimately pointless within the context of entrepreneurship. The only ones paying attention to it will be the procrastinators, who will use it to further rationalise their behaviour.

The control may be an illusion, but the responsibility is still very real.
Or how about hiding the points and just using them to do internal calculations?
They do have ~700 employees (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook)...
Camp - experimental dvcs inspired by darcs (future darcs 3)
Pretty much every site with user generated content is overwhelmed with people trying to post spam. For my site, I use a combination of javascript human detection, bayesian filtering, and aggressive human intervention (including single click "spam this" links on every piece of content when logged in as an Admin)

It's worth noting that since late 2007, a significant portion of comment spam is human powered. CAPTCHA style bot filtering doesn't work against it, since it's not bots doing the posting. Bayesian filtering and good moderation tools are essential these days.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Why do they need so many resources? I mean, looking at the software and its requirements, I don't see the necessity.
Man hand-builds Lamborghini Countach, from scratch, in his own basement
This post goes on about how we're addicted to gadgets, new technologies, and how we love to buy cellphones, but there's something at a far lower level than that which means "technology" will always thrive.

Technology directly drives economic growth. Indeed, other than "resources" it's the main driver of economic growth. Whether it was the invention of the plough that led to significantly more efficient planting, through to the invention of the combine harvester to more efficiently collect food, technological inventions of all sorts have created our economy as it is.

Given this, it's certainly possible for us to "innovate" or "invent" ourselves out of the current crisis. What about those $1/watt solar panels that were talked about lately? Once in mass production, power at that price could revolutionize the world, significantly improve the environment, and give us close-to-free energy in places where it wasn't possible before.

It's not just the big inventions though. Even if you develop a piece of software that adds significant value (by reducing costs or otherwise) to businesses, you've helped the economy.. not just by earning yourself some money, but by making other companies more efficient and more profitable.

Technology isn't just iPods and cellphones that we throw money at.. it's one of the most significant levers we have to push our economy up with.
I think just walking is good enough, no matter how hard we think, we will never know if the road we have taken is right. So why care about if it is good or bad, just start moving, we can always change the directions later. Walking on the wrong road is way much better than stagnating on the right road.
I think there are algorithms in place that auto-flag spammy submissions to bring them to the attention of moderators more quickly, but as far as I know, actual deletions are manual.
Third party programs not in the repositories are sometimes released only for 32-bit, though I expect to see this change pretty rapidly.
Started using them today for a few smaller jobs. So far performance is the same if not better than what we receive from the "bigger" guys we use, and their new S3+ service seems to be working out better than Amazon S3 for delivery.
“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
[overwhelming majority spend most of their time on] publishing over-complicated solutions to easy problems, or non-solutions to difficult problems, or incomprehensible solutions to niche problems.

[PhD, year 8] I also get this impression from reading papers; and the incentive system rewards it. But I feel I'm too cynical - anyone got evidence?

A contrary view is that a PhD is a Doctor of Philosophy... and philosophy isn't about results, but reasoning. That's the game being played. It could be accurately described as angels-on-a-pinhead "academic" - but useful for practicing those reasoning skills.
Towards Headless IDEs
I'd rather be http://www.crunchbase.com/company/craigslist
How many do you think they would need?
I bet their revenue projections were based upon insane levels of growth (internal and external). Even if the economy was in better shape it would have been hard to reach profitability.
I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn't pay for facebook.
Debugging PIC32 - How to Start
Review of Intel's New X25M SSD (same one Torvalds has) in a new MacBook Pro
The PIC32 micro development boards are designed for learning how to program PIC32 micro applications and for developing PIC32 micro-based projects. The ready-to-use development kits, with fully integrated debugger, are great for everyone just getting started with dsPIC C-programming (like me!).
While not technically hacker related, I figured it would be relevant since most hackers have MBPs and would like to hear about the benefits of the ~fastest SSD on the market.
Yeah, though it's worth noting that Warren Buffet is NOT a startup CEO. Greed and risk mean something entirely different to a guy like him than someone who worries about being able to afford health insurance.
>Hansson calls this the neighborhood Italian restaurant model of Web commerce: It's a lot easier to start a nice neighborhood restaurant than it is to start the best Italian restaurant in the world (the Google of restaurants). But just like their bigger brothers, neighborhood Italian restaurants make money. Sure, they don't make as much as the best restaurants in the world, but they do well enough—and it's not nearly as much of a headache to run a neighborhood restaurant as it is to run a place where investors, critics, and the world's press are breathing down your neck.

This metaphor is bad. On the internet, there can't really be that many Italian restaurants because there are no local monopolies and no marginal costs.* On the internet, there would only be one Italian restaurant, and it would be 37 signals.

*Sure, there's the speed of light and the cost of electricity, but these are not strongly limiting factors.
I've used Drupal's aggregator module in the past, and it often has issue with the publish dates and/or whether a link already exists.
(Advice from Successful Achiever) = (Advice from Aspiring Achiever) * n

For me, n is large.

Great post!
why is it taking these guys so long to come up with a business plan? Why is Zuckerberg promising one in 3 years, and not coming up with one now. Hell they have 700 people, not one of them can figure out how to monetize 1 of the most visited sites in the world?
Sorry for stating the obvious, but they generally have to show that they can make the money back (about 10x) to investors before taking the money... its much harder to comment on whether they can or not when your not involved with the company.
Some spam gets killed automatically. Some gets flagged either by filters or by users (there is a flag button on stories after you get over a certain karma), and killed manually by editors. It's very rare now for a spam not to at least get flagged.
I was on a pretty tight schedule for my MSCS, get in, write thesis, get out. I changed advisors once, but I probably should have done so again and worked on the robot instead of the image steganography.

I regarded my thesis as an interesting failure. I took a new approach that didn't quite make it up to par with existing methods. I made it just far enough in those 16 months to figure out how far behind I was.

It wasn't a waste of time. I learned some academic tools, I got my feet wet, and it was marginally related to my emphasis. But I was glad to cut my losses and move on.

There are a lot of ways to cut your losses. If you have something to show for your work (publication record, recommendations from your supervisors and coworkers, new skills and thinking modes), so much the better. If you can find another project, that sounds like a good way to go. You obviously care about doing good research. Don't give up.

I am on the fence about going back for a PhD, but only because of time constraints, not because I think I wouldn't enjoy it...
A radical business plan for Facebook: Charge people.
Sridhar (HN:mwerty) and I met last week since we both frequent Hacker News, live in Seattle and wanted to work on something. We thought that it will be fun to create a small app... we'll get to know each other and how we work together etc... Creating this app was out and out fun. We also got so many new ideas while working on this app.

Please tell us what you think. We are big boys with relatively thicker skins.

Email us at dev@colorblindme.com to be a part of our inner circle :-)
Platform Monetization is a Two Way Street: Lessons from Facebook and Sun Microsystems
My guess is they're a victim of cargo cult thinking: Hugely successful companies have lots of employees and spiffy offices, right?
I think you're spot on. An I also think that this is the reason that being a single founder is so hard - there's noone to share your esprit de corps with.
Play With Our WebApp - ColorBlindMe
http://www.colorblindme.com/

mwerty and I met last week since we both frequent Hacker News, live in Seattle and wanted to work on something. We thought that it will be fun to create a small app... we'll get to know each other and how we work together etc... Creating this app was out and out fun. We also got many new ideas while working on this app.

Please tell us what you think. We are big boys with relatively thick skins.

Email us at dev@colorblindme.com to be a part of our inner circle :-)
Openness is not enough
Apparently Zuckerberg didn't read the Sequoia meeting notes ...
Google Tweaks AdWords To Reward “Quality” (And Juice Revenues)
Deriving the Y Combinator in Javascript
Sorry for stating the obvious, but VC is a big risk that only rarely pays off. The VC bets on Facebook weren't because of a business model they have, it was on that they will be able to find one that works on a huge scale. Sort of like Google and AdWords. It's all unproven at the moment and the valuations were simply based on the number of users.
Great idea for usability. Bravo. Design could use a bit of work (nothing drastic, just maybe the font). And, you don't need the demo there, since your page is already one.
It's simply that the software doesn't (yet at least) have different categories of deadness for links that are offtopic vs spam. Most dead links are spam, and with those you want to be fairly severe.
"...and yet my only goal was to have a pulse." http://dilbert.com/2008-10-29/
Trojan virus steals bank info
Gotta love market shrinking.
Actually, I don't think I've seen such a concerted, well-focused troll since I left reddit. My hat's off to you, sir.
Rather a spun title.
I know Ted Nelson, who was funded by John Walker (after an introduction at the secretive Hacker's conference) to the tune of $10 million for Xanadu. He's had problems getting funding for Zigzag, which is equally as innovative.
He is surely right with almost all his points. But if I would have known all that stuff already when I was 15 years old - I would have been already an old man at that age. I prefer to find out those things myself with all the failures on the way.
Isn't this what the 'long tail' is about? Online, your 'neighborhoods' are demographic niches.

Now, if the needs of your online 'neighborhood' have already been met, then that's similar to living in a neighborhood full of Italian immigrants and still looking to start an Italian restaurant nearby. You'll have to move and learn about the needs of other 'neighborhoods'.
Why not teach students a technology that could potentially make them money (maybe even a lot of money) while they're still in school or shortly thereafter? Of course they should keep and require the basics as well, but what better way to build enthusiasm for programming than becoming a successful programmer?
I though of this one: http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html
The $8 an hour shuttle driver behind a Nobel Prize
This is interesting. It also reminds me of how much about statistics I forgot since I learned it which makes me kind of sad.
Most people aren't coin collectors. Also, some of the designs on the state quarters leave a little to be desired.
Cool idea, with a little work this could be a very useful tool for color seeing folk. The method you use could definitely use tweaking though, Ive seen other sites that do this which produce images that look identical to the original to me (im red/green colorblind), but with this there is a significant difference.
Most people spewing that kind of vitriol care very deeply, they just wish they didn't, hence the tirades.
Nice idea, but:

I put in "milliondollarhomepage.com", and it worked. Then I put in "clayvalet.com" (my last startup), and it showed the MDH image again. Google/Amazon/whatever work fine, but "clayvalet.com" shows the "milliondollarhomepage.com" image.
I realised most of that between 15 and 17. The thing is that knowing this does not always prevent you from making mistakes, but it helps you to figure out where you screwed up quickly. You can't be prepared for everything.
Maybe it's a really hard problem that we don't fully understand.

EDIT: deleted unnecessary nagging
It's actually possible to do this with 1st generation Camaros (1967-69). Someone thought ahead and saved the original tool and die casts before GM destroyed them. Some googling will find you sources for parts: from frame and body to seats adn trim. From what I've read, it costs somewhere in the realm of 12-20k. Not bad for a clone of what is the most fantastic American muscle car to ever be made with modern reliability.
That's the common wisdom yes, but is it true?

If you have a business that depends on Metcalfes law (the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system) then yes you need to get big fast and become the market leader.

But for many other types of business this is simply not true. To take 37signals as an example there are plenty of players in their market, probably thousands that are turning a tidy profit. I can name a few just off the top of my head.
I would pay for Twitter. If enough of my friends did.
Coding/magic parallels have been common for a long time. Rockstar is a blogger-era term and the primary purpose seems to be to inflate the egos of young programmers.
I watched it all last night - between the blurry slides and my dim memory of electromagnetics, much of it was over my head. But it was thought provoking, and a good example of a small team of bright adventurous people building something without waiting for 'permission'.
The title is a bit misleading because it makes it sound like we're talking about a scalar. Actually you can control both the length and the direction of the vector. The direction is probably the more critical.
Computer model reveals cells' inner workings
Got the following error: http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_d_80ee3622d58e38042c8...
That's someone who doesn't let anything, including his basement, get in his way.
In some industries the ubiquitous cell-phone camera is a liability. I have friends and family with security clearances who are only allowed to bring phones without cameras into work. Finding such a phone these days is actually kind of a pain, enough so that several of these folks just don't have a cell phone.
Ask HN: Looking for a good gateway/merchant that supports multiple currencies
We're expanding into the UK, Canada, Europe with one of our services. Our current merchant/gateway provider only deals in US dollars.

Anyone have experience with a merch/gateway that accepts multiple currencies (and not named "PayPal")?
Or maybe it's a really hard problem that we don't fully understand.

The problem seems simple in one sense: uncontrolled growth, no?
HP, Dell, Toshiba recall Sony laptop batteries again
Google Search For "startup new"
Google introduces service-level guarantee for its Apps suite
Hmm, apparently personalshopper.com uses an invalid security certificate...

http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_s_a104f13f889b73b841b...

In your server's Firefox installation, you may want to turn off notifications.

And maybe install Flash (or not).
http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_s_f8e133dc8711169cef5...
Tech news quiz: The week that was
The Ten Web Clips That Shaped The Election
But what's that personalshopper.com about? I tested for a different site (dezidr.com)...
Part 2 sounds powerful but it would make the submission process less simple and maybe less user friendly for new users.
Is that wood?
I also found it insightful and was quite surprised that so many of those who commented thought that the points were negative.

"However hard you try, you can’t avoid being yourself." Perhaps he should have reformulated it as something like "Personal change takes time; you can't change yourself in an instant and insisting on this is a great source of unhappiness".
Their real problem is not the burn rate but that they can't bring in reasonable revenue (for the traffic they have).

Here is an interesting article on how other social networks are doing:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/industry/2008-05-1...
Tired of waiting, wrote them directly, got a reply promptly... and joining the "Waiting for another lucky chance" team :)
They told me that my email was issued out on Wednesday; so probably it was some mail fault why it haven't arrived before.
Maybe this should be a Firefox extension?
I don't use twitter now.
People are oddly consistent. Liars usually tell lies. Cheaters cheat whenever it suits them.

This not only isn't true, it's famously false. Psychologists call it the "fundamental attribution error". It may be counter-intuitive, but lying, cheating, and virtually all other behaviors, rather than being consequences of consistent personality traits, are in most cases highly contextual.
Thanks :) That is one of the plans.
12-20k + how many man hours? More for me, all this programming doesn't help my mechanical skills :).
When I try it, there's a big Gimp install dialogue taking up most of the site snapshot. The title is "Opening Gimp-2.6.1-Leopard-Intel.dmg".

Good idea though!
Sorry about that. We have to turn off all such notifications.
Cool idea. One suggestion I would give is to remove the screenshot grabbing process from the post/response cycle and make it asynchronous. Maybe with some kind of ajax landing page that periodically checks for the screenshot's status and then displays it when done. That way, the user gets an instant result which will make the site feel faster. Also, this would eliminate any timeout errors if the screenshot machine is overburdened and takes too long to respond.
A neighborhood of billions has more than enough room for many Italian restaurants.

That same neighborhood sometimes wants Chinese, or Greek etc, etc.

Given those two statements, and the sheer numbers on the internet, it will be a long time indeed before we reach the limits you talk about.

That being said, if you open an restaurant and serve canned spaghetti, you're probably not going to see high levels of success.
Im not the "Too long didn't read" kind of guy, honestly! But whoever wrote that sure was trying to kill me.
It's true that if you allow them everyone will vote them up and talk about them. But so what? That's like saying that all magazines should put Paris Hilton on the front cover.

Editorial influence is why this site will succeed where others have failed. We don't need editorial influence to ban stories we hate, like spam. We need editorial influence to ban stories we like, for the good of the site.
rfeedparser looks perfect, but i'm in dependency hell...

Gem::Exception (can't activate hpricot (= 0.6), already activated hpricot-0.6.164])
There's a different way of thinking about effort that takes into account both direction and magnitude. What could you be doing right now that would make you $10,000 an hour? This way, you will focus on the right tasks, and the right intensity.
Thanks. We'll do that.
Hear that? It's the ghost of .com past sneaking up on you... timing might be right too. :-)
Or he did, which is why he's trying to raise money now.
After seeing the movie tomb raider I became obsessed with Lara Croft and hand built a detailed model in my basement. I think I'll keep it down there.
Did you read the commentary about they types of comments his post attracted on reddit? Or some of the commentary about this phenomenon here?

Do you think your comment is more typical of HN or of reddit?
The wood is only there while fashioning the sheet metal for the body. The wood was then removed and replaced with the frame and suspension from a Corvette.
It's just not big enough of a target for typical spam. For your case, if it's real people that you're having a problem with then you'd be well served to just put up a big warning against off topic posts and advertisements.

You could rely on the users to moderate, but then you get-inconsistent moderation with no one accountable for false positives.
It happened as we reuse the same instance of Firefox. We'll come up with a fix soon.
One thing I'd add to this very good list: if you write a list with the intent of fostering discussion, use a numbered list rather than a bulleted list. I still find myself screwing that one up time-to-time, and I always regret not being able to easily refer to, say, "number 6."
Thanks! I agree. We'll remove that.
That type of thinking led to the first dot-bomb, the housing boom/bust, and hell, even the depression.

Lot's of people do very stupid things.
Thanks. Yeah it is very much a work in progress.

> (im red/green colorblind)

If it is okay with you, can you please email us at dev@colorblind.com so that we can ask you to test few things for us in the future?
I believe they work in groups to develop their own application. Also, I don't think there's a prerequisite of programming knowledge before taking this class, thus making it a great way for any 19-year-old student to collaborate on developing an app by the end of the semester. From other posts, it doesn't count as part of the computer science major--and it may not even count as an elective.

I'm a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics at another university. I'm taking a class in developing an iPhone application (though I'm not being taught anything, it's more of an experimental independent study), which will count as an upper-level elective. Sure, I'm also interested in the "real" level 400 classes as well, but I can't take those until next Fall! So in some cases, students who take such classes are actually going above and beyond their "level" in school, with instructor permission.

If I was at Stanford, I would definitely enroll in that class.
McCain and Obama's Views on Tech and Innovation