skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system."

People say this all the time without any justification. As far as I know, all content within Facebook that has no privacy restrictions can be viewed without being a Facebook user. Facebook has an API that can be used to both read and write.

Facebook is stingy with phone numbers and email addresses, which is a significant failing in my opinion. Other than that, I can't imagine a more open social network that allows users to control who can see their content.
App turns tablet into math aid for visually impaired students
Why would Facebook go offline?

If Yahoo won, they'd probably wind up owning Facebook (or maybe just owning a controlling stake). They're not stupid enough to take it offline and while they might screw it up with mismanagement, that happens over time.
^ this.

G+ is a worse Facebook (and not in the worse is better sense).

Gmail is getting slow and the recent changes haven't been for the better. In fact it's hurt usability for common users for the (dubious) benefit of "power" users.

The unified google interface is rather crappy. I don't know which which i have to click/hover/etc to get to my account settings.
I've been running a version of this app for a few years now. Originally started when I was attending my alma-mater (Georgia Tech) and I have since added more schools. I hope to expand to even more by the end of the year.

Looking for feedback on branding, image, usability; anything you want to critique and comment on.
It almost feels as if someone at Paypal read my comments today and acted on my account just for fun. It turns out that around 2 hours after posting this I got another one of the lovely "we're holding your money for 21 days" letters, which is really annoying. No returns on my account, no complaints, nothing. Fully verified and long term customer. I happened to buy/sell a few things and used Paypal for payments, and I almost feel punished now for using it.

I'm going to try and get in touch with customer service, but I have the feeling I'm going to get a stock response that's cut/pasted.
Micro Indy Car Created in Record Time with 3D Nanoprinter
Taking acid once a week will do bad things to you. Worse than morphine.
So what you're saying is that Facebook is open because you are allowed to fetch information that Facebook allows?
With the recent crowdfunding bill obama just signed, I hope to see a kickstarter-like site that offers equity instead of "rewards". There are lots of businesses that don't work well as kickstarters, but could work with an equity model.
Thanks. The only way to really know what works is to study the history of successful brands. If you really want to learn more, I highly recommend The books mentioned Below by Al Ries and Jack Trout, or Al Ries and Laura Ries. They also have a bunch of videos on youtube you can watch called Ries Report.
They actually took the time to study successful branding, and completely opened my eyes to a world where there is actually a rhyme and reason to successful brands. (keep in mind that you can still make money without owning a category in peoples minds. This is probably what throws big executives off track. They see opportunity to make money in a new category, assume if they launch under their recognized brand, they will rake it in.... but fail to appreciate how they might hurt their brands in the long run.

What ends up happening is more often than not, they fail, fold, and move on.

Just as a note: since we have less history with Internet Brands, there are different rules, rhymes, and reasons why certain things work.
Traditional publishers trembling? That would seem unlikely to me given that one of the legends of the game development community only managed to raise a budget equivalent to an average XBLA game.
Bank bail-outs aren't about employment, they are about protecting people and other business from losses in assets in the banks.
When thrill-seeking CEOs rattle the board
Two plugs in a single thread is pushing it, but please see my other comment regarding Bootstrap themes/templates: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3701287
The article is correct in so far as the new Apple building is not consistent with contemporary urban design principles.

Curved glass aside, it's basically The Pentagon of 1943 in so far as functional layout goes combined with 1957's site planning for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company plopped in the middle of a contemporary bedroom community's street grid.

What it lacks in comparison to both is any sense of urban scaled outdoor space (the courtyards between rings of the Pentagon and Noguchi's courtyards for the SOM design).

Apple's new building is what Robert Venturi would call "A duck."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Pentagon_January_2008....

http://www.som.com/local/common/modules/gallery/dsp_image_ga...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Duck
Ask HN: Go with what I got, stay the course, or learning the wrong stuff?
I got into startups as a sole 'business founder'. Even back then, those were slimey words to say to a coder, so I started writing, what I now know was bad, php in order to have something to show and convince real developers I wasn't another 'biz' guy w/o a clue and get them to join my team (for no money). And it worked.

I've worked on my own startup projects for a few years full-time, building quick and dirty front-end mockups, wire-frames and writing middle-ware that needed to get done, to hit deadlines; while doing the biz dev, sales, customer dev, etc.

After a few years, a few projects, a lot of project management of small / agile teams and tons of customer development, product development and product marketing, I haven't made it on my own. But, at best, I've become an okay, but unsuccessful startup founder. Turns out that while lots of startups claim they want entrepreneurial people, after working for an early stage startup, turns out that I make a better co-founder than 1st employee.

I'm trying to figure out what to do next and I've started teaching myself how to really code. I gave up OS X and Windows, and am going cold turkey to Ubuntu. With that, I've been coding exclusively on VIM (which is amazing & amazingly complex) and learning to use an MVC, the right way. But, I'm still coding in PHP (when I feel like I should be learning Python). Coding is something I've always enjoyed, but I figured I should get better at it.

I've always been interested and really enjoy coding / building stuff. However, am I wasting my time trying to build up my skills to get a job as a coder? Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm currently so low after my startup experience, that I'm pre-maturely giving up on using my product & startup skills to get a job at either another startup or large company.

Advice?
Disagreed. I'm on my 2nd startup (b2b SaaS) with 2 other cofounders. We're profitable but stagnating with $6,000 in revenue per month for each of the last 3 months. Although we are working on interesting problems, we aren't exactly passionate about what we are doing. We've been talking about a pivot for a while now but nothing compelling has come up. I have always wanted to go through YC and this sounds like an amazing opportunity - I love it. Now I have to run it by them....
Ask HN: Will Y Combinator accept you if you don't come from MIT/Stanford/etc...
I have this strange idea that Y-Combinator has a bias towards Ivy Legue applicants. Is this factual? It seems like the majority of startups from them have founders that are all from MIT (look at dropbox for example). Does someone who goes to a regular public university or none at all even have a shot? Any examples?
Yahoo's lawsuit is not against any small fish or unrelated business, Facebook is a direct competitor (Google was too). Please don't take it out of context and mud it in some emotional fudge.

If you want to be emotional though: Is Facebook is fine with selling people's private information, and using others' IP in the process? That money Facebook is soaked with has been made with the lowliest of the bait&switch. It is obvious that they have used the technologies developed with hard work in other companies which they are now killing. It is only fair that they pay the fair price for what they have taken.
I'm impressed with Pinterest, don't get me wrong - but the article is painting over a much more normal, steady trajectory - a long, quiet bootstrap, followed by a steady rise amplified by the megaphone of VC funding.

The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest)

I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few "mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could easily bootstrap to success.

Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article - written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly raised a 10 million round another six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...)

No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)
BBC News Hacked By Iranians
I wish more handheld browsers would allow any search engine. I'm pretty sure the first Nintendo DS browser allowed you to use any by giving it the URL of the search page and having it append your query to the end of it. Unfortunately, the last two versions of the Nintendo DS browser (and others like Opera Mobile) only allow Google and Yahoo!.
Thanks. I learned a lot about power supplies writing these articles. By the way, I liked the title you submitted better, so I changed the article to match :-)
I guess the question is... Were your preconceived beliefs about facebook being more personal, etc.. the chicken or the egg?

I suspect your perception highly influenced your experience. On that note, I also suspect that had Google done a decent job branding, it wouldn't have been an either/or choice... They would have convinced you that facebook is for personal entertainment but G+ is a utility for managing information and relationships... they would have talked to your existing beliefs about facebook and explained why you need them for a different reason, or why their solution makes facebook obsolete. By trying to win you over with " a better product" they didn't stand a chance in the battle for your mind.
That's because most existing VNC applications aren't designed for that purpose.

There's no reason you couldn't use a proper video compression algorithm in a VNC application where applicable, or just send the whole image as compressed video.
I'd say their legal status in current intellectual property law (in some countries) is what makes them special.

The widespread abuse of patents has IMO flipped the original rationale for having them (to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts) into tools that discourage innovation and experimentation.
I think this is a great idea that YC are allowing people to apply without an idea.

Personally, if I applied to YC I would apply with an idea but remember most investors won't invest without seeing traction and if the company removes some of the risk etc.

YC used to let you just apply with just an idea. The HackerSchool/HackerRecruiter guys were accepted with just an idea (although they built a prototype before their interview)[1] and now you don't even need that.

Awesome.

The reason that I think its awesome is because, there are a lot of startups that I have seen recently that are not actually viable or a good idea and this has created a lot of low-value startups (you know the ones I'm talking about)

I personally believe that great people/founders will only start a company if they believe their idea is good and viable. The reason they haven't is because, they know their idea sucks - this is where YC comes in as they will help those great people/founders by providing the tools and resources to help them curate their ideas so they can build meaningful and valuable companies.

Sure, YC focuses on people but great people often have great ideas, even if they don't know it yet and this is why this is awesome.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667055
I worked in the main Apple complex (R&D5 on Infinite Loop) and it seems like they're just doubling down on what worked well before. It was really nice in there to have a little private park interior space to lie on the grass or have parties and it was really practical to be able to park underneath (when there was space) and to be able to subdivide slices (at some level of granularity) to let members of different groups have a floor or a building to themselves. So this will be just like that but on a bigger scale and with more parkland to relax in and on, a more size-appropriate meeting space and not so much located in the middle of a vast sea of parking lot.

This will take a long time to build and move into, but once they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually manage to buy out that "missing piece" and incorporate it into the plan. One step at a time...
I met Ben at a coffee shop a few years ago, and he explained Pinterest to me. Going into the meeting, I didn't get it at all. But by the time I left, I knew it would be huge.

His perseverance is impressive. He could have looked at the number of users he had and logically decided to give up anytime over the past few years. However, he believed in his product -- and now everyone does. Good for him.
I agree with wanorris. You're applying an incredibly strict definition whatever term you wish to use for the opposite of consumerism. I don't understand why you seem to be arguing that making an Arduino or RPi accessible and low-cost somehow cheapens the value it holds for the rest of the community.

Yes, there will be some consumers who are buying these PCs. But without them, would XBMC or Cyanogenmod exist? With that in mind, what's the marginal value of one more RPi user?
But, for various legal and practical reasons, Apple isn't suing over the things that made the iPhone and the iPad innovative.

Instead, they're suing over ticky-tack nonsense that other people did before like:

- "slide-to-unlock" (Neonode N1m)

- clicking to call phone numbers they detect in text messages and email (Palm Treo among many, many examples - especially if you look at analogous desktop functionality like recognizing URLs in email that makes the concept obvious)

- tablets that are black rectangles with rounded corners (Knight-Ridder concept tablet from 1994, the movie version of 2001, ...)

Perhaps if more people were aware of exactly what Apple was actually suing over they'd be less supportive.
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Did he sign it? I didn't know it had made it all the way through congress. Last I heard it got merged into the JOBS act.
if you have the luxury you should learn something other than php.

you likely won't find the transition to python too difficult.

if you are already really productive in php; it probably isn't a huge priority.

another thing to think about is looking at something like haskell/lisp/clojure which is probably more a difficult task to pick up; but will eventually (in theory, and if you can grok it) lead to even greater produtivity; probably not the route to go if you are looking for a job, but as an entrepreneur it is probably a really good use of time, if you've the luxury.
I keep my Firefox up to date with release versions, have few plugins, and still find it absorbing memory at a tremendous rate. Chrome can also use memory, but somehow manages to let it go sometimes, as well as not drag my entire (Windows) system to a stutter.

I guess so many of us mention FF in this context because it still happens to us, even though we gamely continue to use it. But we still love it, and that's why we continue to use it. Though admittedly, most of us have a Chrome on the side...
Parking space finder; a startup idea.
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> For Fourier, given an N-dim vector you would compute the N Fourier coefficients in Nlog(N) time

But Nlog(N) only works for certain values of N, right (like powers of two)? I guess for other cases, we could use the clipping method to dictate behavior, but that doesn't feel great.
Why is child labor a dirty word in the USA?
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Putting that in Chrome gets me to a page that was new to me, chrome://memory-redirect/
This article is two years old and amusingly timed because ultimately Shadow Physics got shitcanned. There was a talk at GDC about it just last week.

http://m.kotaku.com/5891076/why-the-indie-game-that-was-supp...
Perfectly Imperfect
Thing is, Google search used to be the exact same way.
Open-Source Curriculum for Teaching Ruby-on-Rails in a Classroom
when the best a company can do is copying, no wonder people are leaving.
I created a website in 2006 called saafnews.com for this very purpose. Nobody visited. I shut it down. Looked similar to this one. It may be still visible on archive.org
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Things worth being made would be prefunded

Prefunding isn't going to get us flying cars, just faster horses.
> You know WIPO isn't a U.S. organization, right? It's part of the U.N. It's in Geneva.

Yeah, and who created the UN? Denmark? Indonesia? The UN is about as Swiss as the Warsaw Pact is Polish.

> U.S. patents have no force outside the U.S.

You mean in theory, or in practice?

> First of all, people who don't like the patent system are not my enemies. They simply hold different beliefs than I do.

No, they are your enemies - for one simple reason. You're stealing from them. They may not know this, but I do.

> If one has gotten the short end of the stick in a patent dispute, I guess it could make him dislike patent attorneys.

It's not me personally - just my entire community.

> There's simply no reason to believe this. If Congress made a clear law prohibiting software patents, and it was a well-drafted law, then it would be followed.

Europe has a clear law prohibiting software patents. Parker v. Flook was a clear decision prohibiting software patents.

> So we've gone from you being "quite confident that you have never, ever once told any of your 'inventors'" . . . to "OK, but you don't say it often enough!

No, you misread. Intentionally, I imagine. I said: how often do you refuse to pursue a patent you're confident will issue, just because you don't believe it is morally worthy? I got my answer, between the lines.

> Just so you know, I've enjoyed our discussion today.

I have as well. I think you've been as frank and reasonable as is possible for someone in your profession.
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How do you feel about non-tech, consumer products? I noticed it wasn't expressly prohibited and was thinking we might apply.
I never really coveted EB but I promised myself that the moment I strike it rich with my startup I will order the print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: the 20 volume 2nd edition set is just $995 (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?view=usa&ci=01986...).
Mozilla knew of Pwn2Own bug before CanSecWest
Interesting how lacking that article is compared to it's Wikipedia Brethren.
For those that think USA only tackles people profiting from copyright infringement, there's this person extradited from Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Griffiths

It's likely you'll deal with USA due to American copyrighted content (Hew Grifftiths), Americans visiting the website (Gambling precedent), profit or altruism, they can come after you depending on extradition treaties and the local government's support of USA.

Join the Pirate Party in your area to outlaw domain seizures among other issues. To protect your current/future business as well other entrepreneurs. No other political party is doing this to my knowledge.
With treble damages, that could turn into an expensive hobby.
Imagine, for a thought experiment, that you were running YC and Mark Zuckerberg came and said "I am done with Facebook. I want to do YC but I don't have an idea right now."

You would feel pretty stupid turning him down right? It's a reasonable bet that whatever he did next would also be successful. At the very least you'd be scared to bet strongly against him.

There are many people who, while not being so famous, have accomplishments and abilities of some kind which could inspire a similar feeling.

That's who.
Did you apply with an idea / company with only you? Or did you apply as a founder who had a team who weren't co-founders?

edit: grammar
Corporations are like nations: they don't have friends, they have interests.
I can only get a cogwheel and can't find any support link.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:britannica.com gives about ~1.5M results.

They have interesting robots.txt, though:

http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt

I would recommend them to hire a web designer.
This bothers me too, perhaps it's romanticism, however I feel it's taking away from the authenticity of the process. VCs investing in a company are investing in the team. The team should be more than some technical folks.

This situation makes me wonder how much of the ideas and direction came from the incubator, and how much came from the team - and who's specific vision, etc.. I don't know how far ahead, long-term thinking (re: strategy, future features, etc) could be figured out if ideas weren't solidified over a period of time. The depth of the ideas I don't think in most cases would go very far.

From my own experiences putting time into development without first having a solid idea of what you're wanting to create ends up being a lot of extra development time.

For myself, I have spent years evolving my ideas and now I'm very ready to find technical co-founders / core team members. I've been told by some very experienced and very wise folks that I have everything else figured out.

Also, I don't see any company posting drafts of business plans. It would give away too much. I do always wonder where these 'other ideas' come from though. I would think people would keep their best ideas that they'd hope to be able to do someday, for themselves, and only share their secondary ideas that they'd never see themselves doing.

I do see this being beneficial for incubators in being able to experiment with relatively minimum costs to them, though is this really going to yield big results for the team members or are they selling themselves short?
Found a set on Amazon for 1K. And $4 s&h?!

We've talked about picking up an encyclopedia before... this kicked it into existence.
Orange groves are nice but they're not necessarily a great form of land use in an urban area. If you build an orange grove in one location then the housing and everything else that could have otherwise been there gets pushed farther out. Distances between things increase and people have to travel farther.

It might become a great campus, but do I think something higher density with a mix of uses would be more environmentally friendly.
Even so, I have my doubts that mob mentality and viral marketing will prove to be reliable diviners of good investments. That said, they may be every bit as good as say, a gated community of silicon valley entrepreneurs and angel investors. After all, in a sort of perverse coincidence, these people purport to predict mob mentality and viral potential. Maybe crowd-funding is just trading the experience and insider knowledge of the investor community to cut out the middleman.

In any case, I fully expect both sources of funding to produce plenty of gems, so I would fight to make sure both can survive and be strong.