skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree partially. I have been in the auto business for 20 years and have talked at length with dealer principles. My brother ran a dealership for a number of years. The money a dealer makes at the time of sale is in Finance and Insurance (F&I), as well as preloading with accessories before purchase (disclaimer, I sell truck accessories to dealers).

It is common to add points to the deal on the financing. I purchased a Jeep last year and the dollar amount was right (went through the internet guy) but they attempted to stick it to me on the finance - 8.99%! So I walked out and told them to call me when it was 4%. A few hours later they called and said we had a deal at 4%, so I had them deliver the Jeep to my work. When I used to sell automotive equipment to dealers ('90-'01), MY finance companies always gave me the option to pad the deal. I could add up to 2% to the interest rate and the finance company would give me about half of the extra interest charge. While I thought this was a sleazy practice and never did it myself, on many of my deals the interest money would have far exceeded the income on the equipment.

Besides the service that you mentioned (warranty work and customer pay), there is also a lot of money in parts, especially collision parts. I had the pleasure of spending a plane ride with a dealer principal of 12 dealers, and she said the overwhelming majority of their company profits were on crash parts - especially their domestic brands. She also said accessories for Minis were very strong for the bottom line. Her other significant comment was that they never make any real money from new car sales and they were a pain. She has a lot of headaches with the manufacturers demanding facility upgrades every couple of years (at the dealer expense), and moving cars that the manufacturers occasionally compel the dealers to take (these are the undesirable cars that get sold below cost, a unintended consequence of CAFE regulations).

Another less talked about area for dealer profits are used cars. As the old dealer saying goes "All new cars are the same; every used car is unique", and there can be more profit in a used car than the same model new. Many trade-ins at dealers go to auctions like Manheim where they are sold fast and furious in as-is condition for the most part. Used car departments purchase these cars and then sell them on their lots. A friend of mine just purchased a Honda Element that was missing back seats and some windshield trim for $2000 below KBB trade-in. Ebay and the dealer supplied the needed parts for under $200. If you are looking for a deal on a used car, try and find a friend with a dealer license.
if you don't think 20 under 20 is an attack to get kids to drop out of college (and not attend in the first place) you've paid no attention to Thiel over the years. He's viciously anti-university due to his opposition to multiculturalism.
Wow. I can't believe there is forum dedicated to flashlights!
Absolutely true. I did not mean to imply that the original post was about legality. It just reminded me of my own experiences and was wondering how people felt about it.
I don't think Sarah Lacy knows very much about enterprise software sales cycle, or the concerns of enterprise customers.

When you have enterprise customers, their tolerance for downtime is extremely small. When you become big enough, your IT infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage. Maybe more accurately, the C-level executives believe that their IT infrastructure is a competitive advantage, and they will continue to spend money to maintain the status quo. They believe they can't afford to outsource things like CRM, IT Service Management, etc. And enterprise software companies exploit this belief, and extract billions of dollars from them through software upgrades and service contracts.

I worked for enterprise software companies, and I scratched my head wondering why companies kept spending so much money on mediocre software. And it's exactly the old adage from the 80s: "No one gets fired for buying IBM". When you buy Oracle/Siebel, no one will question the status quo. If you throw out Siebel and switch to Salesforce, and Salesforce suffers a 3-day outage much like EC2 did last year, then your head is on the chopping block. That's why CIOs like Oracle.

Now the one thing that Oracle has to really worry about is new companies that never grew up on Oracle, that grow big, like Facebook, Google, etc. The new multi-billion-dollar companies will balk at the idea of spending millions of dollars a year on database licenses, but as long as the enterprise companies are still around, there's more than enough money to sustain Oracle for a long, long time.
Yes. There was nothing especially wrong about the idea of selling pet food online then; another company started by selling books (a worse idea if you ask me) and they did go fairly well.

That's not to say that it's a good idea to start an online pet food business now. By now the margins must be pretty low. But it is an "old" idea for which the market is still big.
Sorry, how exactly do you keep the government out of it entirely?

Whether there are regulations or not government agencies will still use the data, oh, unless you regulate it...
I'd go after fixing the software deployment and packaging issue. Actually getting software on systems is still a PITA.

There's a huge gap between dev and ops here - I'm thinking that building tools that allows a developer to make an ops ready deployable package as easy as pushing to source control would be the ideal. Then tools, that work against source control and can generate packages off any revision/flavor would be great for both continuous testing and eventual distribution.

We've been stuck in the "download the tarball and compile it" mindset for far too long.
An ambitious machine learning project that I was not sure would work out in the end. I think with a lot of machine learning projects it's the journey of discovering trends in data which is the most interesting. However, it's only after you start the project and learn what the actual challenges are that you know if the solution is even possible, much less accurate.
Patrick, i sincerely want to thank you for participating in this thread. I feel like you have the accumulated amount of knowledge everyone trying to do business both online and offline has to know (or, at least, trying to). Do you ever feel like you are not using your knowledge in full or allocating it properly?
I tried this and couldn't really get off the ground... it's a very saturated market, do you mind sharing any ideas?
http://www.csd.uoc.gr/~hy220/2009f/lectures/verilog-notes/Ve...

This is probably the best reference for Verilog out there.
Looks like SquirrelMail, Aurelius is probably right.

http://squirrelmail.org/

Makes sense, it's sort of the goto open source webmail app.
- Good to Great
- Beyond band of brothers
- Moments of Truth
College student's 90 days without phone, email or social media
Recently, the company i work for decided to move out of G apps(paid). The top mgmt got some doubts abt google employees reading our emails. We were trying to close some deal with Google.
I think they did it after some credible suspicion.
Get ready for "It depends", "How to win friends and influence people", and "get a mentor".
Good luck to everyone involved. Hope you continue to live your dream. Here is to treating others as you would like to be treated.
Hi,

I have installed bonobo git server for my team and it works smooth most of the times . The web console for bonobo git server is quite handy . There might be some hickups during installation but when installed correctly works like a charm .
> I thought I had a form of ADHD with how much distractions distracted me. It's quite comforting to know other people operate this way.

It's not just that "other people operate this way" -- this is in part a side-effect of the increasingly powerful behavior techniques that are conditioning people to behave this way (see Stanford's "Behavior Design" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3454469).
I'm going to say something trite, then try to explain it.

"Ideas are useless"

A business is a combination of dozens of little ideas supporting a large one. The large one could be anything. Maybe it's a "good old idea." Maybe it's something new and freaky.

Doesn't matter. You get zero useful information from the large idea. It's the dozens of supporting ideas -- the execution model -- where the money is.

So you can take something done to death and make really good money off of it. Or something totally new and unique that people might want -- and screw it up. (Most likely screw it up in either case.)

Maybe a better question would be "Which broad categories of web money-making ideas are hard to screw up?"

I'd be interested in that one too. :)

From many years of HN-watching, I find lots of folks more than willing to blog and go on at length about the broad-but-useless ideas. It's extremely rare that you actually get a peak into how the cookies are made.
Idea is good, and have crossed my mind a few times. Design is OK - clean and simple.

Yet, UI is ridiculous. Logging in utilises pattern, I've never seen before (just displaying the same login form with a tiny "Thanks for logging in" message below).

If you use javascript so thoroughly, try to implement HTML5 History API (stay clear of hashbangs, please). A few times I clicked "back" and went back 5 steps.

Some of backend glitches, probably, can be ignored because of "unexpected" load, right? :)

Having said all that, it's good that after Bespin and all-favorite CodeAcademy, programming challange sites get modern touch.
On the other hand, flashlights are not that cheap, if you think of a decent xenon/led light in the middle to upper class. So have to think a bit before you make your choice about a flashlight.
Functions that need to employ this trick are often overly complicated and could use splitting into more manageable ones. For one, you could relieve the need of do-while-false itself by moving its content into separate function and replacing break with return.
AT&T's $100 Billion All-IP Network Real Estate Windfall
I should add "Have you been accessing sensitive sites such as your Google accounts" on a shared computer." The HN reference was to distinguish if the poster's complaint was worth of a discussion or is it one of 100k+ people a day that get caught by keyloggers/phishing/social-engineering through their own stupidity (like accessing Google wallet on a shared computer)
Am I the only one who feels that distraction isn't necessarily a bad thing? I find that even my most productive days aren't distraction-free. And oftentimes my best ideas come when I'm most distracted.
Upgrading the Hurricane Forecast
I've moved my family's email to Rackspace's hosted email (not exchange). I have an SLA, and I own data. So far the loss of spam filtering and webmail are my biggest aches, soon achieve searching will be added to that list. I sometimes wonder if Google didn't have the same role as anti-virus companies did. Secretly promote viruses to over value their software... Google's spam filtering is amazing now that I have to contend with RS's lackluster spam services, so it's another case of "you need us, because it's a scary world out there."

Whatever the case, I'm happy to be off gmail.
Another suggestion for tuffmail. Used them for years. Stable and does what you need.
People in this thread are asking for ways that Facebook is used by third parties.

How about future credit checks based on your network of debt-ridden college friends? http://www.pcworld.com/article/246511/how_facebook_can_hurt_...

How about health insurance claims? http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2009/11/19/queb...

How about investigations? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_social_network_websites_...

Skeptics will say "just don't do anything wrong and you'll be fine." But what about civil disobedience, like the Occupy movement? What about when the definition of "wrong" changes? What about when the information is used not to implicate you in something, but just learn more about your activities?

I think eventually this will become a big enough issue with some event (maybe a popular crime case in which the defendant is perceived to be innocent but FB data is used to implicate him/her) that the general public is appalled and will try to delete their data. But by then it'll be too late.
And yet Penn and Teller, who show you exactly how a trick is done after they do it, are still really entertaining.

There's a disconnect between "magic is an art that has to be practiced religiously to be good" and "we can't reveal the secret or it's ruined."

Even knowing how the trick works, it's very easy to appreciate the artistry of a good magician.
I agree your approach does seem more elegant and more flexible, but what about in terms of productivity? How does productivity compare with Clojure as backend and using javascript alone to render the HTML compared to Django or RoR where there is a HTML rendering DSL available?
The new beta web interface for fastmail.fm looks pretty good: https://beta.fastmail.fm
Games. More specifically: 3rd person RPG games for the iPad. Games are the reason I started programming, but somehow ended up being a web developer.
There's nothing to learn from the Jack Nicholson article.

There's a lot to learn when looking at this situation. Andrew hired too many people for his level of funding, treated them poorly, attempted to ensure untraceable communication, and was dishonest to employees in many ways.

And despite all those things, people worked for him because they bought the hype.

This is a warning to think about what you're doing before you sign on. Learn what the conditions are really like, what the expectations really are, and what your future is actually likely to hold.

Sure, some people might look at this and just think 'Andrew is immature, a lousy leader, and an incompetent manager', but that's not the lesson.

I like this because it's a reminder that interviews are two-way conversations, and that employees should pay just as much attention to where they're going to work as employers pay to who they hire.
Something educationy, like khan academy.
Good to see Pyramid (Python web framework) here, just wish it had been made more attractive either in content or in style.
Do a proof of concept, and do a Kickstarter, and make one. There's really no reason not to do cool projects that people would enjoy in 2012.
There are several[1] guides[2] that demonstrate how to set up a full-featured and secure e-mail system. Personally, I run my own e-mail on Exchange Server 2010--complete with a multi-copy database availability group and multiple front-end servers--but I'm known for overkill.

1 - http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html

2 - http://www.mail-toaster.org/
It looks like it doesn't like recursion.
Commodity News for the week ending February 10, 2012
I find controlled-distraction -- set times when I let myself be distracted (such as: 'at 2pm I will spend 15 min reading HN) -- is helpful. Otherwise I don't think sporadic, intermittent distraction could be of much use.
I'd guess by having a quality product with good design. Time tracking is definitely over-saturated, but Freckle is a simple, powerful product with great design. That makes it makes it much easier to stand out.
There are salient points here, but they're masked by the caricature of a maniac who can't go without Facebook for five seconds and a mythical beast that never gives his brain a break from work. Real developers fit into some reasonable amount of both kinds of behavior and it's the balance that is important, and different for every developer.

Be smart and be true to yourself, not a watered down version of someone else's life philosophy.
Web Based Productivity Tools for SEO, Social Media and Blogging
They add useless latency and another point of failure. And sometimes, the AWS APIs DO fail.
Protecting animals from animal cruelty. Especially elephants,that are brutalized while alive for their tusks. The cruelty is beyond shocking.

Anyway, I would try and stop that, via a non profit organization.
PhD in computer science.
(As a European) I think it's an exaggeration to say it's a common view that the government truly represents them. However, there also isn't a shared faith that corporations will do the right thing automatically, or there is more cynicism about the 'free market'.
It's not Google who you should be afraid of it's your government, if your government cares about data protection, than Google will not risk it, it's not worth it, even if they are evil,

But if your government forces Google to make a wiretap interface for them, they have no choice.

Either way they are in the hands of the government.
The situation is different for me: almost every customer I have had in the last 3 or 4 years has at least partially used AWS so I have already gone through the learning curve.

Your point on vendor lockin is certainly valid: if you really take advantage of AWS services, you are locked in without a porting effort (like AppEngine).
I'd paint all day and play the blues on my Les Paul! A really creative and joyful way of spending time.
incredibly insightful analysis, i learned quite a bit! i'm always jealous of amazing UI, and i'm well aware that the beauty derives from simplicity and designing for intent/ action, which takes a great deal of time to achieve with customer development, and paring elements down in response.

i'm grateful to have you point out many choices i would have glossed over at first blush (perhaps several views, even).

your comments are definitely valuable, but one thing that might make these UI posts stand out even more would be to get comments from prospective users, as if doing customer interviews. i know such activities are beyond the scope of posts like this for multiple reasons, but if it could be done, it would be amazing to see what "regular" users think/ do in the context of your break-down.

(about me: i'm a startup co-founder who isn't a trained UXD but appreciates the importance of UI and UX. apologies for not providing insight at a much higher level.)
A guide I mentioned earlier (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html) shows how to set this up on Amazon EC2. If you haven't partaken, Amazon is still giving away a free-for-a-year tier of EC2.
This is definitely the core idea in D3, the way data is joined to the DOM. This explanation is the shortest, clearest one I've read yet.
I'd teach high school Latin.
"If I were to give my non-expert experience, I would guess that about 50% of the people I met in the USA had ever smoked weed"

It's actually roughly 85% of people in the US smoke weed at some point in their lives, as you can see here on p. 103:

http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol2_2009...

(You need to adjust upwards a couple of points to account for those who don't make it to 11th grade, who are assumed to use drugs at 50% higher rates, and also to account for a couple other factors that are discussed in the methodology.)
Why does this scare you though? I am curious as to why people are so afraid of advertisers seeing their interests. Personally, I don't care if I get served targeted ads, is that really going to harm me?
The problem Pets.com had was trying to build a billion dollar company selling pet food online. There is nothing wrong with selling pet food today as long as you stay lean and focus on the niche items and or bulk.

Exotic pet food (Squids) + supply's + information.
Bulk shipments of food + breeder information for show dogs.

PS: I have a friend who has been making good money selling cookies online. It's a classic small business with a few workers in a low cost of living area, and it's been steadily growing for a while now. (http://www.thebestcookie.com/) There secret IMO is simply high quality and high minimum order sizes.
Skyscraper index points to elevated risk of financial crisis in China, India
I'd learn AI, machine learning, natural language processing, compilers, interpreters, drawing, playing guitar/violin/piano, snowboarding, martial arts, socializing better and effortless, programming/natural languages and whatever else I can come up with.

I'd love to come up with answers to questions others have not yet answered and discover questions no-one else has discovered, yet.

I'd also like to travel the world and get to know as much people as possible.

However I fear that even with unlimited amounts of money the real problem I will face is time which is why I hate procrastinating and even more the fact that I can't seem to stop it.
They appear to have fixed it? When I click on sign up, it goes to the gmail oath page...
This is also a benefit of interpreted languages like Ruby or JavaScript.
Open source projects, stuff that's fun and creative. I had a great time with Hecl ( http://www.hecl.org ) for instance, but don't have a lot of time for it these days.
Suffice it to say I know a few things about a few things and get enormous satisfaction from sharing them with people. I'm privileged in that a couple of things I know how to do are worth stupid amounts of money, and perversely the more I try to give them away the more money gets thrown at me for them, so my businesses essentially allow me a lifestyle similar to that of a tenured professor except with less academic politics and an even more flexible schedule. Downside: a regrettable lack of cool faux-medieval robes to wear once a year.

I'm pretty happy with the pace at which I'm getting to take on new challenges, and pretty happy with my net impact on the world, including through building stuff and teaching folks. Besides, I'm not even 30 yet, so I've still got plenty of time to achieve total world domination through smoothing out market inefficiencies on the Internet. (I think I'll hire a tailor to get me robes as that point. Something in silk maybe.)
We've been trying to solve this problem for our software IgnitionDeck, and haven't yet had time to write our own tools for the job. I looked, unsuccessfully, but would certainly pay for a decent solution.
A lot of people seem to miss the point about enterprise software and the purveyors of that software; the end goal is not agile or slim (that is incidental) but to enable many, many disparate systems to function at least somewhat coherently. Probably on a level that boggles the minds of most people who have never worked in a large enterprise.

Big businesses end up with lots of disparate technology because they consume a lot of software and it creeps its way into the business by way of developers wanting to play with tools; some C-level moron making 'strategic' decisions; or real demands of the business. But unless you're the technological masters of the universe (like Google) the idea of replacing something wholesale is a recipe for disaster once it's entrenched: it's expensive and what would you replace it with? Who out there can furnish an accounting system that works across 40 different countries that also ties in neatly with a company's logistics or shipping department AND comes with consulting and bespoke development services to handle the 50 billion edge cases that each big business has? This is not a simple problem. This very same thing happens amusingly enough just as frequently in startups and SMEs, but on a different scale ("Oh we couldn't use Mongo, it didn't fit our needs, so we rolled our own -- but then we had to use Frob X and Widget Y and patch it up with Python")

That's why tools like Oracle RDBMS come with such a kitchen sink variety of tools and features.

For instance, I once had to do some reporting and OLAP work across multiple DB systems and stuff the data into an Oracle instance. Unfortunately said systems used a mixture of Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL (oh the wonders of maintaining shrinkwrap products...) so we bought a database link for Sybase and MSSQL so we could query the databases from inside Oracle using two-phase commit. Sure, each adapter cost us $15k but so what? That's pocket change compared to the hackneyed approach of using some external, asynchronous batch job. All this money and patchwork effort in the name of report generation -- but that's all businesses care about.