skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To play devil's advocate a bit:

YouTube has a bit of a network effect going on in that viewers want to go where they think the videos will be and people want to upload where they think the viewers will be. I don't (personally) use dropbox in a manner that has any network effects. I basically use it to sync files between multiple computers that I own.

If most people are using Dropbox in a way that doesn't take advantage of other people also using the service, Google could make good entry.

Also, you mention Google Video as a space that Google entered against competitors, failed, and bought the largest. However, that isn't always the case. "We've seen this before. It was called Gmail. In the end they ended up taking most of the new signups away from Hotmail and Yahoo." The distinction between those two situations is important. Was it that Google was facing off against competitors that had rested on a mediocre product while Dropbox is still making their product awesome? Was it that Google was able to (though Ajax) provide something inherently superior while this new Google storage will be at best a clone of Dropbox?

I don't think Dropbox provides as much lock-in as email or online video. If Google introduces this tomorrow, I can easily copy the contents of my Dropbox into it and see if I like using it. If they provide something superior, it's easy for me to switch. I've used Dropbox since early on and been a huge advocate of it at my workplace and to my friends. I do have a certain loyalty to a product that's been around, is reliable, and I trust. Still, that isn't the kind of lock-in that YouTube or email have.

At the same time Dropbox is more like YouTube in that it's a company that creating something good that people love to use. The argument could be made that Google disrupts best where competitors are lax - text ads, search, email, maps. They disrupt products that people use to get to an end, but don't enjoy the means. With Dropbox, I don't see how Google can make it significantly more compelling and it seems like they're resorting to more storage. I love the Dropbox model of having a sync'd folder and whenever someone tries to do something more complex, it leaves me with less joy.

I guess my question would be: what makes Dropbox like YouTube and not like Yahoo? Is the lock-in (or lack thereof) not an issue? Is the crux that Dropbox is an innovator making things people love rather than taking a "that'll do" attitude?
I'd suspect that there's a reasonable network effect; I've used Dropbox as a group fileshare with three separate groups of people, and each time, new people signed up for Dropbox in order to participate. Their referral program is especially well-designed, too.
Yes, I think you're right. I guess my feeling is that I would rather pay for the service. That way I am the customer, I'm not the product.
It would be in such bad taste that even the American recording industry wouldn't go near it.

Oh, I'd take that bet. I would even bet that the producers will claim to have been in touch with his spirit.
I lose too much stories on HN, sometimes because of lack of time, sometimes because I check HN without paying attention. A podcast would be a great idea, I would be the first to subscribe. Too bad I can't help.

Best of luck!
I'd love to see a remake of "BomberHehhe!" - (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDFbFmZCsHY). An option to play as evil and destroy ancient monuments (or cause as much damage to non-target buildings as possible) would be funny.
I'm hoping this will compel Dropbox to reevaluate their pricing structure. Storage from Google is an order of magnitude cheaper than Dropbox - paid storage starts at $5/year, and for the same $100/year as the cheapest Dropbox account (50GB) you get 8x the capacity.
Hi i'm only in a few months, none of this is a deal breaker. I've made mistakes along the way, but I think everything is fixable, luckily I'm not in year 6 or something lol
i used to be the one who would ask, "where is everyone we're a startup and it's only 7:30pm?" I used to freak out if I saw a line of code that was stupidly duplicated or just plain wrong.

It's been 3 startups, and 2 kids later that I realize just how wrong I was... so far no great success - but moderate success, many lessons learned and certainly people i've pushed away for truly silly reasons like perceived hours spent behind the desk or strange lines of code written... reality is I now spend fewer hours behind the desk although admittedly probably still far too many to be sane... and definitely used to (and still do) write crazy lines of code... I think it's a matter of perspective, age, prospects and who knows probably other factors that'll influence our feelings about how many hours we need to put in... after all, is it one critical bug fixed or 100s of lines of new code written which matters more - is a mater of perspective, that one bug fixed could make the difference between winning the big client or losing'em... I think "hours spent behind the desk" is a silly measure of ones productivity... a well rested mind after all makes far better decisions - that's not to say we should be lazy, but that we need balance - plan and simple.
They might do better maintaining Dropbox as a storage platform, and trying to get their storage API into as many web and mobile apps as possible.
When I see things like this, it makes me feel like some people create startups as a way to get a job at a big companay.
I was about to post something similar, but saw this, and it's close enough to what I was going to say, so I'll piggyback.

First, let me start by saying that I think that in every case, Kyro's redesign has been superior to the original page in the broad sense.

Most of what I'm seeing as complaints have to do more with copy and content than the design, which for a designer should be a good thing, right? Maybe.

In my opinion, content and design are interlinked so heavily that it's impossible to separate the two. Good design accentuates the copy, and good copy accentuates the design. The design should visually reinforce the message at every step.

While I think these redesigns are great exercises, and are sure to benefit Kyro more than not, I think what they're missing is the key to good design, which is interacting with the product team, learning the message, figuring out how to surface hints of that message at every turn, but without beating users over the head with it.

The only other complaint is that yeah, these designs look a little stock. There's nothing to stop me from coopting this design as a WP theme and selling it to 100 other companies looking for a good product page. Nothing wrong with that, but a great design is unique, and can only work for the product it's for.

http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/ is a good example. There's almost nothing else that page could exist for. Nobody can steal that design because it's way too close to the product.

Anyway, I don't mean to sound like I'm coming down on anybody -- I think these designs are good, but since Kyro specifically mentioned that he's trying to improve, thought I'd offer some of what I consider to be important in design that isn't just aesthetic.
Eclipse might not have any up-front monetary costs, but it has costs in lost productivity while waiting on it (which would arguably cost you more than a closed source license when applied to the value of a developer's time).

It's gotten better, but it still has a ways to go.
Per the blog post, Cloud Servers is no longer based upon an existing VPS product. Instead, it is based upon the OpenStack project that Rackspace started with NASA in 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
That doesn't make the original statement untrue (or particularly interesting in my opinion).
Maybe. But I barely spent any time reading all the arguments and more time reading through and learning about the syntax of JavaScript, so it was probably more interesting for me than most people simply because I tuned out most of the boring bits. Also, I learned that Closure linter's fixjsstyle can add semicolons for you, which is nice to know.

But that's what I always do: scan for the interesting bits or move on.
My commute is no less than 1hr, so if I'm to be home for dinner with my family I need to leave at 5 (5:30 tops). My boss is very understanding of that... in the sense that he agreed to let me come in at 7am so I could leave at 5. Did I mention my 1hr commute? You do the math. I'm gone 12hrs a day. And I still feel like I need to sneak out as everyone else is likely to be there until 6 or 7. I hate that this seems "normal" and that I feel guilty for leaving at 5. I do enjoy the couple hours of quiet time in the morning though.
> Visual Studio is the best IDE out there, beating Eclipse, XCode and TextMate hands down

Well, that's a pretty bold statement. From my experience VS will beat the rest for .NET stuff - but C/C++ support is best with XCode.
I really don't think you can fairly characterise this as pure aesthetics - "an eye, but what an eye!". Clearly producing a new home page without knowing a company and with a superficial understanding of their products and requirements is quite a shallow exercise which does not encapsulate the totality of design practice. I'm sure the poster is well aware of that, but that doesn't mean it does not involve thinking about the products and requirements, and only focussing on aesthetics.

This is not design in the holistic sense, but that does not mean it is not a useful short exercise and potentially a useful collection of user feedback for non-designer founders who have neither the time, the money, nor the inclination to hire a designer - perhaps seeing a redesign will prompt them to think further on the designs they have, which probably grew organically with the sites.

In short it is only dangerous if you mistake this sort of exercise for a complete design process. No designers would, and no clients I'd want to work for would either. I think it's an interesting and useful thought experiment, though obviously limited in scope, and the designs so far have had some useful hints for the site concerned - I particularly liked the wave one, which humanised the product and neatly summarised it in one image.

On the Internet it is easy to criticise or run things down. This sort of exercise brings back constructive criticism which is so hard to do well - the sort of thing that starts conversations, not arguments. If you see it as only the start of a process (one of many possible starting points) perhaps it will come to seem less dangerous and more fruitful.
Ninja? Really? I thought the "ninja programmer" thing was a bad joke.
Thanks, if I duplicate it that would be crazy! We'll see, I'm excited!
With acquisitions like this and backtype, I wonder if Twitter is exploring offering an enterprise service for analytics. It provide a revenue alternative to the (still) annoying in-feed promoted tweets.
As usual, concerned about privacy.
> many are still based on the geocentric view of the universe

And others are not. Individual religions may rise and fall--ironically, the way this happens isn't that much different from biological evolution. But humans have always been religious, and there's no reason that would change, at least not as a result of extraterrestrial life or intelligence.

From a theological perspective, you have to actually make an argument that extraterrestrial life conflicts with doctrine. If you can, I'd like to see you make that argument, because it would be pretty interesting. Plus, theology has a trump card--dogma is always true. And as Quine taught us, it's possible to believe anything as long as you rearrange the rest of your belief system to accomodate it. A man cannot survive inside the belly of a whale, pi is not exactly 3, and the Big Bang and evolution happened--but theologically and philosophically sophisticated religions reconcile these facts with their dogma somehow, and unsophisticated religions pretend the facts are false.
A priced round has 25-35K in legal fees? I'm assuming this depends on the size of the round.
A priced angel round, yes they do still happen, should not incur 25-35K in legal fees, or the angels will walk.
unreal, no matter what your stance is on how people should enter this country, i think we should all agree that if you've been here 10+ years, paid taxes, and have no criminal record, citizenship should be automatic. my father immigrated to the states with his parents when he was 4, they came and were granted legal residency but it took nearly 50 years for him to finally get citizenship and not for lack of trying. it was a proud day when we went down to LA and watched him go through the ceremony and swearing in to become a citizen but it just made me so upset that it took so long. what's crazier is that he was a police officer for nearly 10 years, was a small business owner (which made him a millionaire) and created 15 jobs in California, never went a year after 18 without paying taxes, and went through the citizenship process five times before they finally granted it (the previous four times he was just told "we'll call you when we're ready to make you a citizen"). for a country that was founded because of taxation without representation, it's pretty backwards the way we treat tax paying "visitors". i know none of this helps you but i was in need of a rant on the subject. :)
Just please, please, please, don't BS in an unscripted manner for the first 5 minutes. Get to the meat.
What specific problem does this fix for the Google ecosystem? This feels very Microsoftian. Very "we must compete in every market" without good reason.
Yep, after they switched to a .NET version of VS it really got bad. I used VS6 as long as I could - and then bought a Mac :)
You keep making that hand-wavy distinction, without any backup or precision.

Quote (emphasis mine):

You say: Some fictional violence [...] has no emotional content of note

You say: Both fictional and real depictions of sexuality can carry emotional content

I'll assume you're trying to make the point that fictional sex is worse than fictional violence. I further assume you don't really know why (hence your imprecise wording) but have this diffuse belly-feeling that this is how it must be, because that has always been your belly-feeling.
Chartbeat Raises $9.5M, Debuts Redesign of Analytics Platform
Elop was hired from Microsoft where he was the head of the Office division. At Nokia he bet the company on the success of WP7, something every specialist in the market considered insane. Microsoft's money will not last long enough.

To be sincere, I imagined the plan was to make WP7 a success with Nokia's help (after all, they know how to sell phones to telcos, if not to end users). Plan B was to acquire Nokia's patent portfolio. I never had much faith in plan A.
Most people who practice religion don't do so primarily because of factual belief in some mythology. Rather, it is motivated by deep human social and psychological needs. Many atheists get this wrong, especially if they spend too much time on the internet only mingling with their own kind.

If we meet aliens, theology will adapt and evolve. It won't disappear.
Hotfile Slams MPAA's Interpretation of YouTube Ruling
"I wish you way more than luck."
Yeah, but some folks have come to the same conclusion as jacquesm ( above ) and use the big G as little as possible.

Sure, I have a google account. I almost never use it.
For me, the epiphany came when my adsense account was suspended years ago. For what I never found out. I appealed and was reinstated. I then pulled adsense from every site. Lesson learned, and I don't need to learn it again.
I absolutely agree with Jeff. Often times I catch myself choosing open source over better features so that I can fix the damn thing on my own if it goes wrong.
So it fits in with their desire to bring all usable files to the cloud with google docs etc, okay that makes a lot of sense. Thanks! I don't use Dropbox regularly so I hadn't considered that people use it to share / manage files, I was only remembering about the desktop sync side of it.
> Contains a depiction of the prophet Muhammed. (The names of the people who worked on this title have been withheld for their safety.)
>That said, this is very obviously a pride war between those who stick to convention and those who undermine it.

I'd frame it as "a pride war between people wanting a sane codebase not based on fragile parser edge cases --include two that know the language inside out--, and the developer of some minor js code that thinks he's too clever for all that".

That's no "undermining convention", that's juvenile bs. I know who I'd rather have on my team.
It's funny, I was just discussing udacity with a co-worker today. I might try some of the easier courses before I tackle the more hardcore topics like a self-driving car!

On a slightly tangential note, I'm blown away when I look at the learning resources on the web in the last year or two. I largely learned the (admittedly rudimentary) iOS knowledge I have from the Stanford U course on iTunes[1]. Then you look at things like Udacity, Coursera and Khan Academy. In the case of the self-driving car course, you are getting a world-class computer-science education, free, from one of the foremost experts in AI, all from the comfort of your own bedroom. We might not have flying cars yet, but you can get a world-class education for free! The times we live in.

I'd also encourage you to do more write ups on your bot experiences! You have a knack for explaining things well. I'm toying with the idea of doing maybe a series of YouTube videos or blog posts myself once my Python skills get above the level of being totally embarrassing ;-)

BTW, here's a link for a series of blog posts on how this guy builds working poker bots:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090608115755/http://www.codingt...

http://web.archive.org/web/20100130074034/http://www.codingt...

(Had to put it through the wayback machine as some current employer of his persuaded him to take the content offline!) Not sure if it's something you would be interested in, but have a look at some of the content. He goes through using Monte Carlo simulations and everything to aid decision making. Very C++ and Windows based, but have a look nonetheless, there may be transferable concepts to your own projects.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-...
This is my (only) beef with Rackspace. We're currently using them, but we're looking to migrate away. Because of their tiered pricing, we need to pay through the nose for our ssl-proxies/edge caches, since that's the only way we can get enough bandwidth on them.
Robots of Mega Startup Weekend
When did Hotspots.io launch? Did they ever broadly launch? I hadn't heard of them and couldn't find anything except news on the acquisition.
> if things get really dire, expect a bailout/takeover from Microsoft.

I suspect this was the plan.
Skydrive is a sad joke that points out how many easy opportunities Microsoft has to leap frog Android and iCloud. They already have a huge cloud platform. They are have millions of Live users. They're finally integrating Live accounts as Windows accounts.

They refuse to add dropbox like functionality to SkyDrive to make it possible to just have a set of files synced between all Windows (8, specifically) and WP devices. I've been told and have read various different reasons, but none of them were good.

edit: Scrap this post, my information is embarrassingly outdated. Kudos to SkyDrive. Glad to see Microsoft utilizing their Live accounts.
>Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off.

That's a good point. And I don't even think it's so much about AI being really hard as it is about photorealism being such a clear goal. Because really there is no limit to the other dynamics that can be explored that aren't as unattainable as a human AI. I still think the ghosts in Pac-man are clever. And while I'm by no means tuned in on the gaming community today, just the fact that you still play these super good-looking games with a few buttons and two joysticks says a lot.
He said genetic programming not genetic algorithms. For the former, type and category theory are useful!
I'm not qualified to opine whether there is a bubble or not, but having recently visited the tech start-up scene in SF & SV from my economically depressed corner of the country it definitely feels unworldly. The rest of the country is slogging along with poor growth or outright contraction and I think it is wonderful that somewhere people are still bringing good ideas and hungry money together. As we say down South, "make hay while the sun's still shining."

Bubble or no bubble it's a good time to make something happen.
I think it creates a dictionary of n-grams. Adjusting heuristically the probabilities the algorithm probably chooses the one with the best chances. There is probably some assumption about the fitness function that can be tuned to include more special cases.

Not knowing the algorithm I can't be sure, but I guess what it's showing is that we are usually pretty bad at generating numbers, since it's hard, for example, for each person not thinking about it, to keep the same frequency of 3-words as 000, 010, 110, 111 etc...

Your idea of using the Fibonacci series is good. I tried something similar. I tried once implementing the integer series, :-), 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101... and I won. Now with that I lose. So maybe the algorithm has been changed to take that into account. I tried other series and I won, but I guess it could also be because it's hard to get any significant pattern in a 100 move game when the series are complicated. It's possible, though, that the same algorithm would win against deterministic patterns if given enough time.

It would be interesting to try with prime numbers as well. It may be easily hard coded as prediction, though.
Reminds me how learning python took all the fun out of those semicolon and curlybraces loving languages.
Americans (with US keyboards) really shouldn't design a programming language nowadays.
Did you even read the article?

His point isn't that parents should follow the box ratings, its that parents should be proactive in choosing the content that they expose their children to. Especially if they are going to complain about it later.
Sounds like I just found what I'm putting on my next business card!
That's the reality of the cloud though, you're really just objecting to having all your eggs in one basket. There were legitimate users of megaupload that didn't break any ToS or host child porn, but they can't get any of their files back.

If it's like dropbox, though, it's probably the most likely google product that people will have backed up locally. I use selective sync with dropbox, but everything is on at least one of my computers.

It actually would be really cool if Google Drive was the ultimate data liberation tool...even if your account is closed, you already have all of your google account data (emails, docs, etc) backed up in your Drive folder locally.
This is likely true! I was born and raised on Java, crashed headlong into Scheme (with painful, traumatic consequences), and just plain didn't "get" functional programming until I was gradually reintroduced to its concepts via R, Python, and Javascript. Consequently, I've found that the best way to learn a new language is in terms of ones that I already know (and I don't think I'm alone here). If you know of any Haskell tutorials that specifically cater to the mindset of Python programmers, I'd be happy to give it another shot. :)
Being respectful, polite or sometimes even flammable are not contradictory. A well timed flame instance can act as a catalyst for understanding and development, at least that has worked with me. -- well-done many times
Too many people think of scaling too narrowly. They think it means doing more of the same thing, which it can. Or it can mean something like this.

There's no reason a cleaning service can't scale very, very far. Look at Merry Maids.