skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Could a free, ad-supported SaaS app work?
I ask this mainly because I have a SaaS application that I launched in 2009 and has been stagnant in growth for a while now, and I just can't put in the amount of hours to catch it up to speed with the current competition.

Since putting a ton more work into it isn't an option for me right now, the alterative options I have considered are:

1) Selling it
2) Sunsetting/Closing it
3) Transitioning it to a free ad-supported SaaS app

In particular, (3) is an interesting option to me, because I'm not sure I've seen it done with a SaaS app before. It could be an interesting experience. Thoughts?
I love the idea, but I suspect that most people writing the sorts of content that could benefit from this wouldn't take the time to break down their work in a way that would take advantage of the layout.
Okay, I can't just let people keep repeating this. $30k for a promo of this magnitude is not absurd in the least. This thing blew up huge, and it went off huge without a hiccup. If you just hire some low-ball bidder who knows how to slap together some APIs what guarantee do you have that it won't crash and burn under load? If that happens in seed-stage startup, oh boohoo, you disappointed your 100 early adopter friends, you learn from the mistake and you iterate, no experience necessary. If you do it with a viral promo that cost you hundreds of thousands to produce you just threw 90% of your potential millions right down the toilet and you probably end up crawling back to your bitter paymasters who are not feeling particularly generous after being cut out of the last big deal.

You hire people who know what the fuck their doing. No one here knows all the edge cases and planning that went into it. It looks super simple, but that is the brilliance of it. It looks effortless because it so well achieved. It's disappointing to me that HN members would dismiss this as just combining a bunch of commodity components and calling it a day. Just because you fancy that you could churn this out in a week of working 14 hour days with your buddy like you do for your startup doesn't mean that people doing this professionally shouldn't charge $250/hr to do it. Remember, they have no upside, and should charge a proper fee for their expertise.
Designing your Own WordPress Themes with Genesis Framework
I've never bought the "tragedy of the commons" theory, though I'm familiar with the argument, mostly because I fail to see a tragedy. A robustly protected public utilities system is one of the reason the US is a first world country and Somalia is not. Hardin’s arguments lack any practical value. Can you imagine what an unregulated wireless spectrum would look like?

I've also never accepted the Coase Theorem because it too ignored the practical problem of "whomever builds the tallest tower wins". You simply can't build wireless network (or wired that have any practical use) without government control. Or, if you do, the market will work out a natural monopoly over time because of the need for standardization. It's the same reason it's so hard to break into the social network market, one platform is better and the larger it is, the better it gets. Imagine that extrapolated to something as economically essential as the telecomm system. We enable free markets by providing basic infrastructure (roads, telecom, etc.).

But that's getting off the topic of the discussion. The spectrum, in practice, is the property of the government and, by extension, the people. Wired networks are more complicated, but shared ownership is implied by right-of-way agreements, or at least the obligation to operate them in the public interest is implied. As long as that's true, governments are obligated to protect the public's interest in a free and open form of communication over those networks.
Here it is in Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CiuHx3i...
Tired of being a script kiddie
http://zacharymaril.com/blog/2012/02/15/tired-of-being-a-script-kiddie/
You're basically asking for DRM on your contact details. That's not going to work.
This is the same fallacy that some people use about planes: "Traveling by plane doesn't result in more fossil fuels burnt because the plane would have flown anyway".

The way these things work is that after such an event the organizers assess whether there was enough food, and based on this they order food for the next event.
Shape the future of the product? This is the first time I've heard of that and I was an alpha customer.

I bought it because I wanted to play it. In its current form.
I like novel keyboards quite a bit.

However, as someone who spent the last 20 years training the muscle memory for programming in QWERTY and 10 years using Emacs on QWERTY, this is completely unusable to me.
Is this letter "from Congress", or merely from a Congressman? If it's the latter, it's less "Congress can begin an investigation" as much as "this one Congressman can try to convince the other members of his subcommittee that it's worth launching such an investigation, if he thinks it's sufficiently worth exercising the political capital".
It took me a while to appreciate it, but what I enjoyed most about this was the letter from Brushwood to Teller. Teller's letter was awesome in all of the general ways, and he makes great points about about doing something besides the thing you want to excel at.

But Brushwood's email was great because it asked for advice for a specific problem, and it was a problem that Teller had the expertise to answer. Not "Oh Teller! I want to be a great magician just like you!" Not "What are 10 things an aspiring magician should do?" Not "Dear Teller, would you mind sending me information you find relevant or letting me pick your brain over coffee?" It was "I want to develop my own style, here's what I've done to that end. I've had some success, but here's how I struggled with taking it to the next level. What do you suggest, as someone who's accomplished this?" Emails like that tend to get the best kinds of responses.
There are definitely some common qualities by now, but nobody seems to actually treat the common qualities as principles, as things unto themselves. "We want 3 years in Ruby on Rails." "I've done Django for 5." "Nope."
SSD - order sandwich ingredients online and wait for them to arrive (about a day, give or take)?
LightSquared CEO: FCC Harmed the American Public by Blocking Network
Archiving Twitter on Your Own Server
I don't think this party crashing has brought him significantly closer to his success goals. Not once did he give an example of a time he was able to successfully leverage a new connection to his benefit. He basically name dropped a handful of famous people that he met one time, but that's it.

The only benefit I see is that he's actively stepping out of his comfort zone. This is valuable, however, it's at the cost of charity. There are better ways to go about exercising this character trait.
Worked on me. I had to do the math.

180,000mi/sec * 5280 * 12 = 11404800000 / 3,000,000,000 = 3.8inches.

Extending that a little further... on a 45mm i7 chip going from one end to the other and back would be ~3.5inches of travel. Gives me an idea of how much of a constraint packaging is.
I think my issue with Facebook Timeline is often the content is text-based. When it's more visual like on Pinterest it poses less of a problem to me, and can do the "washing over" kind of flow that it's designed for.
FTA: "Every piece of software released to the world without legal protections may leave open a door for someone else to attempt to patent the same technology (and may leave its creators more open to legal threats without a patent to wield defensively)."

Wait, what? No, every piece of software released to the world, with or without patent protection becomes prior art. It slams the door shut on future attempts on anyone's part to patent the same technology. Even more so when the software is released as FOSS.

On the face of it, this campaign is already sounding oddly misguided. The only way to win this game is not to play, and I'd expect EFF of all orgs to understand that.
Australia dumped notes for coins some time ago -- we also have a $2 coin that is fairly convenient. We also use polymer notes, which last much longer and can survive being put through the laundry.
hey diwank,

I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.

Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though). found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting. so I think i've had a peek at how you plan to generate ideas.

What I'm about to outline might seem obvious to you, though might seem blasphemous to lotsa folks out there.
I'd like to outline the one thing (most) founders ignore during their idea process.

-----

Given the inital variables:

- no idea how much the idea would scale

- market factors sketchy (platforms changing etc.)

- wise to assume failure

- chances of a pivot close to 99% for most startups these days. (yeah, they're all thinking it)

- sticking with an idea is hard in the absence of positive traction

-----

Imagine the 1-2% of your life that you're giving away.
depending on how old you are, that might not seem like much.

As a startup founder here's a few things you could get out of the 1-2%:

(1) money (sustainable growth/revenue, acquired etc.)

(2) PR

(3) credentials

(4) connections

-----

IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily.
There's a lot of perception hacks that can be applied to get ahead with those three.

Now, here's the ONE thing:
I'd like to suggest that founders imagine the kinds of people they'd like to connect with during this span of time: women(yeah!), movie stars(?), other founders, journalists, scientists, atheists, social workers.
Don't just think it though, get it down on paper, turn it into a goal of sorts: I must form connections with these people!

It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.

You'll have to imagine yourself answering the 'what do you do' question to these people. (maybe you'd have to do some research into what they might likely want to hear)
Now, regardless of the traction you have (ideally > 0, for mental reasons),
that fact that you're running a 'startup' can get you places these days.

Before I get carried away,
answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.

we're usually just thinking about what investors want to put money into.
so yeah, think about the money, what's trendy, but also the kinds of people you want to connect with OUTSIDE the startup community.

I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.

Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.
Apparently I'm doing a good enough job of hiding my bias that you thought I was advocating the opposite of what my opinion is. :)

(Full disclosure: I work at Mozilla.)
If it was phrases "the presence or absence of certain viruses made mammals what they are now" would you be happier with it. That's more accurate (in terms of what the article says), but less poetic.
This online book is very well done, at least the parts I read today. BTW, the author's main web site http://mixu.net/ lists an impressive number of earning and utility projects. Someone who enjoys writing code!
You should always download jQuery and link it locally because antivirus vendors make stupid mistakes? That doesn't make much sense at all. They could just as well decide "/scripts/jquery-min.js" was a vulnerability if they found that on a lot of infected sites.
Don't worry about it too much. IT is a very humbling field of endeavour. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, IT is mind-bogglingly big - you'll never learn it all. You're doing exactly the right thing by identifying new things to learn and then learning about them. Good luck!
Rubymine has a fairly decent VIM mode ( http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=164 ) but its a lot less snappy than MacVim.

I only use it (Rubymine) now and again though, for things like browsing through projects I don't work on often, or to help find syntax errors in code and so on.
I attended the university with "the worst free-speech policies in America", and we had an active Objectivist Society and a Republican Club that spent its time trolling the rest of the (very left-wing) campus. They spoke quite freely.

The issues tend more towards the administration wanting to prevent a riot and passing speech restrictions than towards "Free Gaza" hipster-activists actually managing to really suppress speech through heckling.

If you think that a minimum-length requirement on a paper is an odious suppression of your rights, I advise you to:

A) Right a truly concise paper and pass it in with a note justifying its brevity on grounds of said concision. Warning: only the best writers can really do this.

B) "Get the fuck out and start actually building things." You might make a good sum of money that way, but you won't ever learn or think much. Just another thoughtless capitalist.
My father was an EE who for some years ran his own 1-man shop. His cards said "VP Engineering". His reasoning was that he mostly used the cards at trade shows, "VP" made it look like a bigger company, and while it made him appear senior, "VP Engineering" suggested more technical credibility than "President"
Very good for 500 lines of code :)! Thanks for sharing. O(n^2) for n-body simulation could hurt performance for the larger graph, i guess. But it should work really well for smaller ones.

BTW this one by Lars Rönnbäck is also very impressive: http://js1k.com/2010-first/demo/618 - press any key to add nodes. It's only 1016 bytes. Amazing.
Suppose the other browser engines somehow died out leaving WebKit as the only browser engine, and then WebKit was forked: we would be back to having multiple browser engines.
>Do you touch any MS products?

Heh, no actually. 100% non-Apple *nix. :)

Actually if I were going to trade BTC, the only one I would probably consider right now would be Intersango.com:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63877.0
Thank you :)! Would love to hear your feedback!
How I learned to manage my time by playing a videogame
If you can get past the naivete, there is a lot of really wonderful ANSI art up on http://sixteencolors.net. The severe constraints of the medium inspired ANSI artists to exploit perspective and color theory to create the illusion of detail. Check out artpacks from ACiD, iCE and DARK from the mid 90s, for example. There is also, of course, a lot of amateurish juvenilia, but even that has its own charm.
Don't you know that everybody on the internet has pretty much got ADHD, and you have barely a few seconds to deliver some kind of value proposition before the ⌘-W ?

I spent a few clicks and a few seconds and found no indication of wtf this thing is, despite several pretty pictures and nice typography, and yes... I know it's ironic to take the time to post about it.

Good luck.
Ask HN:  How to go about in selling a domain name
I own the domain myapp.is
I want to sell it.
If you were me, how would you go about in doing this?
Don't mind the anti-academic circlejerk.
Not a very relevant HN material. Still puzzled on why it got so many votes.
With the political climate in Texas, I'm sort of surprised it didn't become another brick in the wall for the successionists in that state.
Yes. Who cares if your file looks "messy"? When you are delivering any content to users, it should be as minimal as possible. You, as the developer, aren't reading the compressed files. They should be compressed automatically as part of your deployment cycle. If you don't have this automated, then include it in your manual process. Develop normally locally, but before you push stuff out run it through a compressor.

Also, I recommend the Google Closure compiler instead of jscompress. Just leave it set at simple unless you are explicitly using Closure. http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home
Also check out http://6colors.net for lots more Apple footage. There is a lot more to be added, already encoded even.
My life keeps getting better. Thanks you, Thomas and Quan, both. I always leave the front-end work for last because design is ridiculously more difficult than coding. Guys like your are easing the anxiety I feel every time I start trying to figure out colors, fonts, layout, etc.
wow thanks for the list. So mostly US organizations.

Could the design be better if we had to rewrite it today? Any plans to include other countries (China etc.)?
Um, you proposed "DRM on your contact details", not me.
Ask HN: Anyone using DNS.com?
I'm looking for a DNS host to handle a large number of domains (1000+), preferably one with an API. DNS.com seems to bill by the number of queries rather than the number of domains, which would seem to fit our needs. I haven't found much information about their service, though (reviews, testimonials, etc) - anyone using/used them? Any recommendations would be appreciated, too.
As far as I know, they should still send a SERVFAIL response if they are unable to contact the authoritative servers.
NeXT Was Used to Develop DOOM and Quake
Life is a Startup
Soooooo ... why are they telling everyone? Forewarned = forearmed and all, yo. Won't work. Unless they have something totally different planned and this is a simple misdirection.
I was doing some ANSI art stuff a few months ago and made a BDF font of the original DOS 437 codepage font, so I could view BBSes and ANSI art properly in xterm. I converted it to TrueType so it would also work in Terminal.app:

https://github.com/jcs/ansiterm

The TrueType version was easily converted to a WOFF font so, after writing an ANSI-escape-code-to-HTML parser, I could render ANSI art in most modern browsers with just normal HTML:

http://jcs.org/tmp/go-east/index.html

(HTML version on the left, static PNG exported from ACiDDraw on the right)
Nice post, especially because it never occurred to me that twitter could be a way to arrange my own thoughts and so worth of a backup!
It already is a competitive advantage. Connecting at an U.S. airport better be a whole lot cheaper and extremely convenient for me as a Canadian to consider it versus connecting at a Canadian airport or a direct flight.
Thank you very much :). I am JS n00b also. I started learning the language several months ago with Crockford's "JavaScript: The good parts" book.

And I left a looot of room for improvement in VivaGraphJS (blush). I don't like a lot of its parts. Hope to make it better in the future.
I have exactly 0 hardware manufacture connections. I give you my word that this was just a fun post that I've been thinking about off and on for a long time. No one influenced me to write the post at all, in any way.

Why did I recommend the OCZ? AnandTech writes about OCZ products a lot, and I trust them. I wrote the post a few days ago thinking that mostly my friends would read it. It only occurred to me today to post it on hacker news, when I saw that I got like 7 +1s from friends.
"An encyclopedia is a survey of existing secondary sources"

This is incorrect. The definition of encyclopedia has nothing to do with 1) primary vs. secondary sources, nor 2) a survey of said sources. Consider "The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences", which contains links to primary sources. Consider the "Encyclopedia of Physics", which is certainly not a review of existing secondary sources. The "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" (from the 1970s) contains new research and essays about the people and themes in science fiction.

"Encyclopedia articles are the worst way for them to address the public."

When one of the first things that the public does is to consult Wikipedia, then a Wikipedia page is one of the best ways to reach people. If the information on the page conflicts with the primary sources, then the weight of the secondary sources should be diminished in favor of the secondary sources which are in agreement with the primary sources.

Your statement here is also wrong even on the surface. Stephen Barr (to pick one of many specific examples) is a researcher on grand unified theories, and he contributed the article on grand unified theories to the Encyclopedia of Physics. You saw elsewhere in this thread that Mandelbrot contributed the "fractal" article to Encarta. The Wikipedia page for "Encyclopædia Britannica" even says "Britannica's authors have included authorities such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Leon Trotsky".

Why would he or the other expert contributors have done that if doing so is the "worst" way to reach the public?

The obvious conclusion is that your views of how encyclopedias work is wrong, in that it does not agree with numerous real-world examples. Hence it is you who have redefined "the concept of an encyclopedia."
The legal definitions of words like "theft" and "ownership" and "property" are not the only definitions. There's obviously a widely held definition of "theft" that does include copyright infringement, whether it constitutes theft in a legal sense or not. (You can tell it's widespread because the argument that "infringement is not theft" keeps being made against all kinds of people.)

You can argue that the usage of that term might be prejudicial, but calling it incorrect is at odds with the enlightened linguistic descriptivism we're all so enamoured of. :)
You can discover friends using a service without allowing wholesale access to address books.
As always you make enlightening points.

Yet, even under the law, there are some significant difference in the purpose and implementation between traditional property and intellectual property. IP rights are for instance limited in time. In fact, historically the original purpose of patents was to encourage inventors to disclose their information so that eventually it could be used by society at law. Patents are inherently, and meant to be, self limiting.

Also, traditional property is normal inherently exclusive. If I am using my hammer, you are not. We may manage to come to a time-sharing arrangement or something similar, but only one of us is using it at a time. On the other hand, my building a product based on a patent you hold is prevented only by the law, rather than by the mere fact of you holding it. To quote Jefferson "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. "

In a legal sense, IP is most certainly property, but it has significant differences from more traditional property and is not property in the same sense that a hammer is.
You can find everything that I have currently published in a peer-reviewed place on my (old) webpage in my profile. I've done lots since graduating (lots), but we've hit a bunch of paper rejections (aarrrrggg), so they're not published yet. I was, however, involved in a paper that we've submitted to a journal, so it has not gone through peer-review yet, but we made a tech report so that others could cite it: http://researcher.ibm.com/files/us-hirzel/tr11-rc25215-opt-c...
You're right. I should have just linked to the google search. https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+gale
Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future
This is fantastic, you should make a submission so it gets the credit it deserves.

I'm terrible at creating nice colour-sets and looking forward to making my bootstrap based projects less 'out of the box' looking.
Who said anything about "his break"? What he did on the Internet was certainly more novel than his previous stuff which has been by countless other people. Again, the "importance" of that is up to Louis to decide, but it's not as obviously ridiculous an assertion as you seem to think.
Bittorrent will still work, though ;) Well, at least if using DHT. The trackers use a domain, of course.