skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As already mentioned, the writing style makes it hard to get to the heart of the matter.

For me, it reads like a cathartic post from a stressed out entrepreneur. Needs to be 'understood' rather than being taken literally.

The gist of the post can be summarized so:

Is it a good idea to start a software products company in India? No, it isn't, because VCs will never fund it and you will never make it by bootstrapping. Even if you do, "fast-followers" will clone your business and get the benefit. Heads you loose, tails they win.

Then we have all the obstacles one has to grapple with. Not least are the unreasonable, uncouth, undiscerning customers who want to free-ride as much as possible.

The future will be better but now it's so bleak... :(

----

Being a Bangalore based entrepreneur focused on Indian enterprises and small businesses (co-founder, Greytip), I can relate to the frustrations but also strongly disagree on many counts.

Yes, there may not be a market for Online Tax Filing due to all the factors Archit lists out, but, it could also be because there are already many players in the domain. Moreover, it is a once a year business opportunity so it's a tougher nut to crack.

As for customers willingness to pay for software, it is all about value for money. A $5 per user pricing, although reasonable in the developed world, will not cut ice in India. A 50 cents per user pricing may yet work.

Which brings us to the key challenges to doing business in India: how do you keep costs low and still make profits, break-even before you break out of runway, and not compromise on quality and service.

Some days you put your head down and get going, some days you silently scream in the dark, and on some days you just rant... ;)
Facebook Takes a Stand Against Employers Who Request Passwords
If you want to roll your own, don't steal the man's hard design work if you're going to plagiarize his concept anyway.

Dustin is often quite cocky, but I don't wish this kind of mindless copying on anyone.
And while NMT phones didn't use easily (and user) replaceable SIM, they were paired to operator/number not by some database but by contents of replaceable EPROM chip in them. SIM cards were introduced not to make changing carriers possible, but easier and also more secure (NMT phones could be cloned without direct access to phone, only by eavesdropping on signaling channel).
AKA: Quadrocopters - Flying Robots Deliver Themselves To You!

With all the crazy scamming I've experienced on places like Craigslist, I can't imagine there wouldn't be some jerk that would just start taking the vehicles. Even if there's some type of visual/tracking, they'd figure it out. How many tacos would have to be delivered to deal with that kind of shrinkage?
OmniMD announces V 11.2 & Surescripts Certification for New Prescription
OmniMD a division of Integrated Systems Management, Inc., announced today that OmniMD EHRVersion 11.2 has achieved Surescripts Certification for new prescription to mail order messaging for files, transactions, and requirements.
Perhaps I'm not familiar, but what CMS/blogging engine looks like his and is structured like his (esp in the admin)?
If anyone is looking for "prior art" for Obtvse or Svbtle should look at Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal implements multiple columns of one line ideas, in Pivotal's case they are features or bugs instead of blog posts.
Paul Allen invests $300M to completely understand how the brain works
The nice thing about having a physical object is that I can hand it easily to someone else, I can destroy it, I can save it, and I can do all these things when my service provider has disconnected me.
Please don't do the same. I mean, apologizing is OK, but don't delete the original post, especially if there are twenty replies to it.
Apple would love to kill the sim card. They have numerous patents around technologies that will enable the SIM card to become software based. http://www.nfcworld.com/2011/11/09/311213/apple-patents-sim-... The carriers won't want this at all. They are trying to move payments from a card (with a chip) to another card (with a very similar chip i.e. the SIM) but this feels pointless to me. The SIM and the plastic payment card have had their day.
This is a very reasonable action for Facebook to take to protect its brand and product.

I'm definitely against random employers asking for a fb password (or rather, access...there should be a way to give them read only access without the password, in any case). Just getting the username (to see what is posted publicly) is more defensible, as is getting deeper access for a security clearance (my credit report is basically boring; interviewing my friends is more useful, but I have literally never spoken to any of my neighbors more than twice each, and never at any length; this is probably not that uncommon). My Facebook account would be a good way to easily get that information.
Ruby namespaced methods
Telerik Sample Apps, Resources and Giveaways for Windows Phone Developers
There's still the problem of tutorials: There are tons of bad tutorials out there that teach people to write insecure, sloppy, and un-substantive code. The result is a plethora of bad PHP programmers who don't seem to understand seemingly simple concepts like global variables. And much of the practices that result from it are considered idiomatic.

Some of the error messages that PHP spits out are incomprehensible at best, and misleading at worst. Broken code quickly becomes a nightmare.

And frankly, the fact that Rasmus Lerdorf doesn't like programming shows pretty well in the language. His incompetence is all over its "design."
>an international figure denied bail, put under grand jury investigation, and in court two days after being arrested

France does not have extradition. So if he eventually was asked to come in for trial, he could have chosen to halt extradition and France would have complied as they do not extradite. It's not that strage a stance given that.

So what if he's an international figure? He goes thru the process like any other suspect in a credible rape allegation.

Europeans are somewhat used to politicians given some extra slack when it comes to these things --but here he was just another guy who allegedly raped a maid.
I take your point but let me offer a counter-counterpoint. :)

The OP likewise spent his life (or some substantial part thereof) honing the skills required to do this (and do it in a short space of time) then give it away for free including source code.

At that point you have to acknowledge either the significant charity of that act or the relatively small nature of the original idea (not to belittle or impugn dcurtis's abilities, motives or skills in any way).

Look, I would take this as a relatively cheap entrepreneurial lesson: if your idea is extremely reproducible it can still be a business but you need to be first and you need to be ready to scale. Invite-only works for things that are hard to reproduce and/or have some kind of lock-in or network effect.
I always find it fun and interesting to see people implement random known "x" software in a language I really understand. As the presentation says, it really does help me learn something once I see it in Python, or Ruby for that matter. Both languages seem to help me grasp code.
Git Extensions + Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio are great. Only annoying thing is that VS 2010 forces me to switch between SCC providers (Team System and Git) manually. (Anybody know if VS 11 resolves this? I stopped using the beta when it stopped being able to start my applications with debugging.)
While I agree that C++ templates when used for anything but simple type generalization, are a gross, gross part of C++. I'd hardly call that core to the C++ syntax.

You're welcome to feel that way, but template abuse is simply a given with 99% of the C++ that crosses my screen these days. It's pervasive in Boost, it's pervasive in the STL (especially in C++11), it's pervasive in libraries like ATL and WTL. You can write C++ that avoids these parts of the language, but you are in the distinct minority in doing so. I think my complaint about C++ syntax is fair.
The question is "what is your favorite language", not the language that is used the most, or the most easy to learn.

Of course there are good PHP developers and good PHP code, but the language itself it's weak, full of flaws and promotes bad design (PHP encourages the coupling of processing with presentation).

If PHP is your favorite language this is just a sign that you don't know other languages, not at a good level at least.
Long story short, curtis's idea-invention was not the design or the bloging engine itself, his unique idea was to create an interesting and exclusice bloging network. In that sense, noone really cloned his idea and he is still free to execute it.

On the other hand, we just witnessed what bad-marketing could cause, especially if your target customer-users are smart people like HN readers. You need to be carefull about every word you use to market your product.
Agree with the general sentiment. The down side is something I'm waiting (hoping) for someone to fix. If I get a text message on one phone I can't get to it when I put the SIM into my other phone.

It'd be awesome if there was an operator-netural, handset-neutral, multi-platform and secure cloud-based SMS sync service.
Please stop calling them dumb pipes
I see what you're saying. But Android doesn't copy Apple nearly as thoroughly as other examples of copying.

Android has different hardware, a different OS, a different programming language for development, etc.

At the most precise level, copying music creates and absolutely perfect copy. There is literally no difference between the original file and the new one.

Would it be fair for someone to make an exact copy of an iPhone, running an exact copy of iOS and then distribute it?

I think the precision of the copy has a great deal to do with whether it's OK or not, which I think is what Dustin was getting at when he said it's OK to steal his ideas but not his implementation.

Maybe he doesn't get to draw the line wherever he likes, but it seems there ought to be a line somewhere.
LittleBigPlanet Karting For PS3 Announced By Sony
I have the distinct impression that the people supporting Curtis's point of view are mostly designers, while those supporting your point of view are mostly programmers.

Let's attempt an analogy to bring these worlds together. You need an algorithm to process some specific data faster than any generic off-the-shelf algorithm can. Something like this: [1]. You post the results to HN, explaining exactly what you came up with as a result of 10 years of experience and 2 days of solid thinking on the subject. It actually turned out to be possible in relatively little code. You haven't implemented it yet, but intend to.

11 hours later, someone has already implemented and open sourced it. People argue you aren't being ripped off: after all, if someone can do that in so little time, "you haven't really invented or created anything (substantive)".

I would disagree with such an appraisal: it's your experience that made it possible for you to come up with this solution. That someone can implement it in a couple of hours once explained, does not reduce the value of the solution. You could probably charge an employer $10K for this expert solution, independent of how long it took you to come up with it. It's the same with expert designs. Once they are shown to you, they are obvious. It's coming up with them, and fine-tuning them, that's the hard part.

Now I'm not arguing that this is instance of expert design (I wouldn't recognize it if I were slapped with it) and I'm not arguing anything about this specific case (and I specifically do not think it is relevant to argue about whether you lose rights by publishing a design/solution). I'm merely arguing that the general argument that gets thrown around here just seems wrong and insufficiently appreciative of how hard it is to properly design something.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3716458
That makes sense. thanks for clearing it up. I didn't know it was necessary to have url formatting to write python. but then its not a language problem. its a framework problem. And php can have its framework too. But I guess it doesn't matter if its a language problem or a framework problem when we choose our favourite language :)
Why a bigger picture is required?
> I would never repaint van Gogh, because I'd rather paint my own things.

If I were a painter, I would paint me the hell out of some van Gogh. In every skill I've practiced seeing what the masters do, reproducing it (especially figuring out _why_ they did it that way) has been a very useful learning technique.

More to the point of your post, and this story: Would I sell my van Gogh copies? Probably not. Not because I think there's something terribly wrong about it. Mostly because they'd still be inferior to the original.

I would certainly give them away to friends who wanted to hang it in their den or library, though.
Quite the contrary. I hate on PHP pretty hard... Because writing a PHP web application is my day job. My own complaints of the language (which others have already voiced) are problems that I run into frequently enough to have flown into a wild rage at the office on more than one occasion.

PHP was incompetently designed by an incompetent bunch of programmers. And it shows. And it attracts even more incompetent programmers who don't know better.
Show HN: A better interface for PHP's libevent extension.
To celebrate this article, I just set my cache size in Firefox to zero. Why? Aside from being a bit contrary by nature, I present the following...

Fact: My netbook is memory constrained and the network is often faster than my local disk.

Hunch: Caching content locally does nothing but thrash my disk, trash my FS cache and slow my entire computer down.

We'll see how it pans out. :-)
python

Wondering how the points are assigned to each language.
Depends how you define "fastest". In this case it's "percentage of households after 7 years". I think if we shortened the definition (arbitrarily) to 1 year we would get very different results (yet keep the same headline).
I was guessing that's the walkman (in any form), was close.
Show HN: KytePhone turns any Android into a kids-friendly phone
From what I know about them when helping install them in a new retail store where i was working a few years ago, there's quite a few of them that act like nothing more than a keyboard. the fancier ones with a display still hook up over usb and i don't think they use a challenge response (I honestly don't know there, i don't know the software for them). Even once I got them in if i was skimming I wouldn't even bother removing them ever. Instead I'd use something like the little XBee modules or some other wireless device to read them and just walk in and act like a regular shopper leaving the retrieval thing in my pocket the whole time.
I second this. Especially with coding, I've found the answers to my philosophical questions, and my logic quandaries more than a handful of times.

Also, make sure you're surrounded by motivating people, or atleast people that get you thinking. I lack this sometimes in the work environment and it's a drag...
.. And that some of them you'd rather un-learn
I think the title is misleading. It's not so much about the fasted adopted gadget but rather fastest adopted consumer technology.

Gadget connotes a single device --like a Kinect, iPhone or Garmin GPS.
In 1 year it would be probably just the cheapest one, new stuff is usually quite expensive. 7 years is enough to become an affordable comodity.
Again, what does open source have to do with any of this? Designers steal from designers regardless of the openness of the back end or availability of unobfuscated CSS.
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I just want to be fair to business:
Sometime they get it right, Erlang is an example. It's great for telecom, and maybe more. Horrible at numerical stuff.
I fail to see how "my password is under an NDA" could not be a sufficient response to this silliness. Are they really making breach of contract a necessary condition for employment?
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His logo is based off Apple's Thunderbolt: https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/40910311120703488
Facebook will take action to protect the privacy and security of their users
SQL

Didn't realize SQL was an option too.
I'm like that too, but only if i report it in a timely manner. I think it's something like 72 hours, otherwise there's an amount of about $50 or $100 that I'm liable for.
When Wounds Make a Man
This depends on your country. For example, in the UK, the Payment Services Regulation 2009 makes no difference between credit and debit cards with respect to a payer's liability. In either case, your liability is limited to 50 pounds (unless you acted grossly negligent, intentionally, or fraudulently), regardless of the type of card used.

This is largely a consequence of article 60 and 61 of EU directive 2007/64/EC [1] (some countries have been lagging behind in implementing the directive, though, so don't expect it to be the law everywhere in Europe).

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...
After the first chapter you receive a message "Please purchase this course to continue."

I thought Codeacademy was free. Not complaining, I just misunderstood.
You cheap, freeloading bastards (and how not to be one).
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How would giving them read-only access be significantly better than the current situation of them demanding read-write access? They aren't asking so they can pretend to be you, they're asking so they can snoop on what you've posted that isn't public..
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Facebook says it may sue employers who demand job applicants' passwords
The Story with Promoted Twitter Accounts
Every once in a while Facebook does the right thing. Is there any sort of self-motivating factor that I'm missing here? (other than good PR)
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Also, it's 7 years after first introduction to market. There are lots of products which spent a long time going nowhere and then suddenly exploded once they became sufficiently refined.
You need a framework and OOP if you want to use Python for the web. Without them you can't really move beyond simple terminal programs.

The thing is that many people don't really want to learn to program: they do it as a way to accomplish other goal (in this case, create a website for some purpose). So they aren't likely to have the patience to learn in a structured way - often start by copy-pasting snippets and examples and learning as they need.

PHP fits right into that mindset; in fact, it was originally designed for that: as a set of tools for people who just wanted to add some small feature to their mostly static personal site. And even if it has added a lot of advanced stuff, that quick-and-dirty approach is still easy.
Static-CMS: Dynamically create static websites to host on Amazon S3
Fear of a blank planet
A collection of nearly 200 developer products on Google+
Sounds like they lost one guy and ran the rest off.
the future just hasn't arrived yet

As far as microkernels go, I'd say that the future has arrived. We don't call them microkernels, of course -- we call them hypervisors. But they're fundamentally the same thing.
Another good book with a chapter on this is "Thinking Fast and Slow".
Maybe a little. The request to support Git was opened back in Nov 2008. [1] I bet Scott Gu helped as well. He's very supportive of Open Source and I feel the reason we see Node on Azure and various Microsoft projects on git. As a .Net developer myself, I've very excited to see this!

[1] http://codeplex.codeplex.com/workitem/19723
You complain about him being ripped off when his logo is a rip off of The Flash super hero logo? Irony
Yep, awesome project. I have used this to make a mini-heroku. Only problem is that it is http 1.0 and not 1.1.
Facebook Says Don't hand Employers Passwords
That page declares lang="zh" in the html tag. So it's probably not using the default font for Western or Unicode, but whatever the browser maps to Simplified Chinese.

In my case that was much uglier, and I had to fix it to read the page.
I would also say it depends on what your want to do.

If your intention is hit and run success through easiest means. And then complaining that it isn't happening won't help.

Good things and 'value for money' is not easy to build.

Something like Flipkart is not easy to build(The whole thing with their supply chain, not just the site) and not easy to copy.

And for genuine stuff its not going to be as easy as heads you loose, tails they win.

A more important question to ask

Is your success that easy to replicate? And if it is, what is so great about your work?
It gets worse in Canada. They carrier lock the phones to the brands. There's a big phone company called Telus that has a brand called Koodo and you can't swap phones between them even though it's actually the same network. All the joys of fake competition with none of the compatibility!
How (and Why) Musicians Are Using Twitter
Official Facebook press statement is here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-and-privacy/protecti...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745484
I worked with agentzh on a module at one point, and he was extremely helpful in validating my ideas and helping me out. He answered all my questions by thorough example and explanation, which is why I'm excited that I saw this post. Hats off to agentzh!
"a path to connecting all of the pieces"

I would guess this. A memory could essentially be just a combination of pointers to different people/places/concepts. And if you wipe out the pointers, you have indeed totally lost the memory. Anything else would seem redundant.
The article already gives that as the canonical solution.
It's worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media.

IMHO, that's the biggest takeaway from this article.
Giving away a ticket to Erlang Factory SF Bay (next week)
I guess it's in Facebook's interest to get users to share without the fear of a future employer looking into it.
I managed my birthday party with eventbrite and it gone soldout
> I have the distinct impression that the people supporting Curtis's point of view are mostly designers, while those supporting your point of view are mostly programmers.

I can't give an authoritative answer to that hypothesis but my sense is that while it won't be absolutely true there probably (IMHO) is some (probably even significant) correlation.

You'll note I raised the question of whether the design itself (in concept) is substantive. I don't think it's clear cut (either way) but my opinion is largely "no".

> 11 hours later, someone has already implemented and open sourced it.

Here I think it is clear cut. An algorithm is nothing more than a mathematical formula (with or without heuristics), as much as the US court system seems to not understand. If you describe in English how to that formula works to the point that someone can reproduce it then you've already given it away. The actual implementation is nothing more than details.

I suspect you're right: designers will be outraged and see this as theft. Programmers won't. I see the true value of this in the platform and the tooling not the aesthetics. IMHO there are good reasons why design is largely work-for-hire.
Gah, you're right.. I only saw the larger function.