skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hipstamatic chose the revenue-first approach (they apparently made plenty of money) and Instagram chose the adoption-first approach. Which one is more valuable (and you must include strategic value in this evaluation!) right now? Clearly Instagram.

Not necessarily. You're assuming that had Hipstamatic chosen the adoption-first approach they would have been a more valuable business. That assumes that both products are basically identical and the successes and failures turn only on whether the app is paid. Conversely, you're assuming that the only reason Instagram got such widespread adoption is because it was a free app.

> Yep! That's what people are doing.

Um, no they aren't. Most companies in the social space are valued based on how much hype they can generate, not how much money. A lot of people assume that an app like Path must be worth at least a billion. Is that based on money-making potential? I'm not buying it.
Spot on. Piracy is not because people are not willing to pay, it is because it is the only option to get content without waiting months after it's US release. When is Game of Thrones on Aussie TV? I would pay $5 to download each episode legit, if I could.
Yup, also animated status bar text.
I believe this effort came about primarily to provide a safe interp for the Tcl plugin:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/

http://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/safetcl.html
Ask HN: Re-inventing an acquired & closed Startup, Need Advice
Me & my co-founder started working on an idea 4 months back we are 50% into it. And two days back I stumbled across a post about another startup/product which had a same product(approximately it is a 90% overlap). This previous start-up ran for around 2-3 years, and was eventually bought by Google for rumored 10+ mil $. Google had shutdown the product(tech pundits commented that it was basically acqui-hired), Also founders have a patent about how they technically implemented the idea. The product was widely used and had an install base of 100+ mil.
Me & my co-founder are not co located, and are working. This weekend I am travelling to meet him and decide the future course. Thought of getting some advice from HN community first. Please advice if you would continue with development, or start looking for another problem to be solved(Idea).
Yeah, there are many apps that do this in reverse. I was surprised at this, because I find it so much more useful to get someone's location than to share my location.
Why The Next Big Ideas In Education Will Come Out Of New Orleans
All this "look at that. now look at this. We're in a bubble"... is this an Old Spice ad?

Edit: oops.. I forgot to add value to the conversation. Yes, we are in a bubble. Is it as big as before? probably not. Is it going to deflate (or even burst) eventually? yes. Is it going to be tragic? yes... a fool and his money are quickly separated.
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1883984
Hungry Academy reading assignment notes
It does not have to be a lie, he could be a prodigious talent and not know it. Some people learn certian things much faster then the general population. He may have a naturally high amplitude for learning language, add a very efficient learning method, and it is not far fetch.
Watch Man Utd vs Everton Live Stream - 22 April 2012
Watch Man Utd vs Everton Live Stream - 22 April 2012
Lou is my boss. I could try to get him on here to answer any questions people may have if enough interest.
The story of my new iPad HN client, news:yc 1.2, and open-source HNKit framework
5 gigs on a 10G port. $5000 one time setup for the 10G port. $0.65/mbps on the commit, $1.15/mbps on overage. That's my cost, so i guess I'm losing a tiny bit on my time, setup fees and equipment, but right now, I just want someone to split some of the monthlies with me. I really, really want that 10G port, though, as at those overages, I can oversubscribe my own commit, and if I oversubscribe too aggressively or one of my customers grows unexpectedly, just paying the overages won't be that big of a deal.

Bandwidth gets cheaper all the time, and I've been pestering them forever. I actually haven't inked that deal, and probably won't if nobody takes me up on it; I really only need about a gigabit, and I can get $1/Mbps bandwidth all day long. I have to decide by Tuesday or so. So far? nobody else seems interested, which tells me this isn't all that unusual of a deal. One guy I asked went off and is now getting his own line from Cogent.

Oh, also note, Cogent just wants the 5g commit from me. If I'm willing to pay the setup fees $2500 for a 1g port, $5000 for a 10G port) they will let me have 1G ports at that price; I just need a lot of 'em.

Turns out, though, selling bandwidth is harder than I thought.
Rims And Wheels
Our department which currently runs a 1000+ core machine and 2500+ core machine for MD simulations is still waiting on jumping onto the Amazon/Cloud bandwagon mostly because it's still not cheaper than owning a cluster for a few years. Granted, being at a large research university means they're not the only clusters on campus and there's an infrastructure already in place to maintain it.

In terms of speed, I would assume Amazon to be faster than most clusters since they probably offer the latest and greatest computers. Lastly, MD is an embarassingly parallel problem (don't ask me how it is) so latency isn't a major issue.
Anyone who uses Windows 7 is definitely not used to having to reboot their computer all the time. Most updates don't need a reboot. Heck, it's even possible to install the entire MS Office Suite and even some Visual Studio components without rebooting.

But maybe Apple uses a toolkit that is supposed to be compatible with older versions of Windows as well. In that case, just reboot that dinosaur.
Yes, you are obviously right. They obviously didn't want to put up with error handling, as you can tell by the crappy error messages they implemented. Basically, they said "fck it, just reboot".
What about where it simply isn't available? The question isn't about the different ways to give HBO money, it's about if they'd accept that money.
Confirmed global DNS error connect.facebook.net down.
Facebook like buttons everywhere are down: https://connect.facebook.com/en_US/all.js

A DNS error - facebook reports, they are working on a fix.
Definitely possible, though you would store those tweakable variables in special MyVariable objects (rather than have them be normal C++ variables). With Circa you could grab the object that holds then variable's data, and then have C++ code that reads it as often as you want.

Game devs love to have tweakable variables, so there's a lot of libraries that will help with this. One example: http://www.antisphere.com/Wiki/tools:anttweakbar
I commute just about daily on the Chicago 'L.' Lately, I find myself doing very little for the 45 minutes, aside from sitting quietly and loosely observing my surroundings (e.g., scenery outside the window, flowing of passengers in and out). I suppose there's some meditative quality to it all, in that I only concern myself with the present moment.
Delwin, on the keystroke front, adding support for processing the text "//google.com" as a likely link does not impact users like me who type "google.com" into their URL bar.

I'm not proposing that we lengthen "hipmunk.com" into "//hipmunk.com". Just that we shorten "http://hipmunk.com, where and when it appears, to "//hipmunk.com", or enable support for such shortening in as many major consumer web applications we can collectively reach, through a top-ranked Hacker News story.

//url is already supported by every major browser.

I don't know how to format or title an HN post to attract attention. I'm starting to regret titling this "BATTLE: //url.tld" instead of something more like, "It's 2012. Why do we still need to write http:// to tell a web service we've written a link, when // will do?"

Should this not or never reach the front page, if you or anyone you know has an idea of how to get the short //url proposal somewhere it gets considered for a moment by the webdev collective and YC participants (and aspirants), I'd be greatly appreciative.

//news.ycombinator.com (<- press me, I'm a link)
Neither was I. Come on in, the water's great :)
Indie developers hand build their own PAX demo booth
It Gets Me Every Time.
While the typical answer of "to prove your time investment to a third party" is a good one, I don't think that aspect would be relevant for me.

For me the answer would be so I know where I stand.

e.g. I come back after a year or two and I know what material I have covered and what steps are next in the learning journey. I don't want to get three lectures or more in and realize I'm rehashing material, or, alternately, that I am hopelessly lost because I've skipped a pre-requisite and have to go digging for the missing piece.
This is very weird, because the internal style guidelines say 2 spaces, not 4 spaces. This bugs me quite a lot.
I must say that for no-frills hosting, prgmr has really done right by me. I was broke and didn't pay for a few months and they were able to set my vps right back up once i had cash, despite the fact i was no longer using the same credit card or email address; they really went the extra mile in terms of taking time to check who i was and once my identity was established, helping me out.
> However I find it amusing that people think the large population of the rest of us to be 'crazy' or some such because we all seem to experience the same problems and can reproduce them very easily.

That's not the reason. It's because you choose to bitch about them instead of attempting to solve them, even though they are completely solvable problems that don't happen in a clean setup. Reproducing means nothing, except that you didn't bother to try and solve the problem.

> If you have an even slightly large library, it becomes a slow behemoth writing it's awkward binary-xml-shit files every time a change is made.

This is just patently false. See my other comment for a detailed explanation. Long and short of it is iTunes doesn't even use the XML file, it exists for 3rd party apps to use. If your machine locks up every time a 30MB file is written (written, not even accessed) then there is something wrong with your storage media, not iTunes.

Perhaps you have some sort of 3rd party syncing app that immediately accesses the iTunes XML every time it is re-written? That's more likely than Apple not noticing that their media player locks up every time when accessing a large library.

> And no offense, you did not move your library across all those spots without issue.

Hard to take offence to something I didn't say. My iTunes library has existed on all of those locations at one time or another, it wasn't the same library every time. Like I said, last time I recreated it was in 2009. It still existed in those locations and didn't randomly reset itself as you claim.

> It's frankly not possible. Moving those files causes iTunes to lose it's absolute references to them and you have to do a reimport.

Oh no! Exclamation marks everywhere! Click the song, browse to the song, iTunes asks if you want to check the folder for any other references. 5 minute scan later, all pointers are fixed. It's not only possible, it's dead simple.

It's almost like you could have discovered that with a simple Google search. Or hell, just actually trying instead of jumping immediately to whining.
We got tired of "things".
Come join us for the biggest hackathon in New Jersey
Which is akin to saying that, while doing their Phds and writing papers, they didn't publish all their accrued knowledge in the field. And instead when on to apply that to Google. Obviously, algorithmic intelligence was key for Google, but systems implementations where also very important.

The secrecy they exercised was not only regarding to algorithms, but also to capacity, os design and infrastructure partnerships. They really did a good job at hiding the scale of their operations. Perhaps this secrecy was their biggest advantage, but take into account that they hid much more than algos. And still, the have a huge base of secret IP.
Facebook connect is down
Twitter users are reporting downtime from around the globe.
Depending slightly on your font size, 3 80-column lines fit side-by-side almost perfectly on a 30" monitor.
Facebook Connect down worldwide
Lib-Ray Video Standard: Using Google/On2's VP8 Video Codec
It's worldwide: http://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/connect.facebook.net
Armies of Magic - Facebook Game - DotMMO.com
Just put the stress on the O rather than the U in Grouper.
He should consider operating out to China then, they are considering limiting copyright to just 3 months.

http://www.china.org.cn/arts/2012-04/06/content_25077760.htm

I personally commend their collective efforts.
The first lesson is free in most (all?) languages, so you can give it a try if you want. You just have to give them an email address. After the reviews in this thread, I decided to give it a try, and it seems like a nice product. I'm planning to buy the first level (Italian), and I'm now just trying to decide between the audio-only and the "Unlimited" that they've introduced recently, which throws in flash cards and some reading material.

It is "one way", but if you're able to dedicate time to it, the "they pronounce", "you pronounce" will probably work well. If you're halfway listening in the car, then it probably won't work.
none of these. I would rather see http:domain.tld or just domain.tld
It needs to run on PyPy for completeness.
How strange is it that Eric Schmidt guided the development of the very software Google is now accused of copying?
Simple Node.js Express MVR Template
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There's a great collection of free books at: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

I found the following particularly useful: 'Smalltalk by Example', by Alex Sharp; 'Smalltalk With Style', by Edward Klimas, Suzanne Skublics and David A Thomas.

This is a great book for beginners in any OO language: 'Smalltalk, Objects, and Design', by Chamond Liu

Also surprisingly useful (terse, but well structured): 'On To Smalltalk', by Patrick Henry Winston

Finally, there's the excellent ProfStef interactive tutorial that's included with Pharo (http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/01/learn-smalltalk-with-profs...).
This is a point that I take to heart but I find it difficult to make that last step to show others what I've learned out of fear of being factually incorrect. How do you overcome this hurdle?
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here's a report similar on March 7th: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/319769098081462
> When is Game of Thrones on Aussie TV? I would pay $5 to download each episode legit, if I could.

Not at all, unfortunately. Even shows like Mad Men are a year behind[1] at best. If you're even remotely interested in these shows, the huge delay--and eventual risk of spoilers--is incredibly frustrating.

I'd love to be able to buy a season pass on iTunes or subscribe to an IPTV channel/service if it mean I could watch these shows on the "same day" (i.e. within 24 hours) as US viewers.

[1]: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/madmen/
It's too bad he's taking freedom away from other people with these views.

If he thinks music should be free, he should get artists to sign up with his label and give the music out for free.

On the other hand, I do really like Grooveshark. I wish it was a legal service.
I am always disheartened by the notion that anything beyond text is needed to express emotion or sarcasm. That's what writing is. By properly combining words, good writers can express almost anything, and more fully than with emoticons or tags.

However, the example you give is dark humor, so you win me over there.
Yes, growth is a factor... but there are only 7 billion people on Earth. Most of them aren't going to pay for Evernote - heck, most of them don't have a yearly income large enough to pay for Evernote.

The valuations are getting to the point where they only make sense if Earth had many, many more people on it. Or if you are no longer looking at the fundamentals and are only betting that there's a "greater fool" who will come along after you and take the shares off your hands for more than what you paid for them.

I would guess "greater fool" is in operation, and not any belief in value or growth.
Hey! Thanks for asking. We got about $4.2k in funding in 3 days. While this was a pretty good start, we realized a few factors.

1) We weren't going to make our Kickstarter goal at the rate we were going because at the rate the pledges were adding up, we would be short by a large sum of our initial asking $48,000. A good part of the pledges were actually from friends and family so it further adds to the possibility that the Kickstarter goal wouldn't be reached anyways.

2) With the feedback we've gotten on HN and other sites, we've realized that we really really need to cut down on our description and go over it again with the copywriter to rewrite it so that it's absurdly simple to understand how our product is different. Nobody is going to read 5 paragraphs of how why you're different and if people keep asking us why we're different, we're doing something wrong with our copy.

3) People are interested in the product but not willing to pledge. I got an email from a few people that it sounds like an amazing app but they don't want to pledge because they needed more information (our fault again- our video only showed a very basic view of the app because we had just finished a quick prototype without any features when we shot the video) and so they wanted to see if they could have a beta test or more screenshots of the app before they pledge. If they have to request this of me, again, we're doing something wrong.

I've learned a lot with the whole Kickstarter deal in the 3 days it lasted- we're going with an even better marketing plan. For now, we're looking at alternative funding and have actually applied to YC late. As you said, it's not just about the funding. We lack advice and guidance in many other areas. We also lack the connections that YC can offer you with the tech community. If need be, then we'll do Kickstarter again when our point is clarified and people understand what we're about.

Meanwhile, we're just improving, revising, and making our overall product ready for launch. It'll be amazing.
I think his point was that the time it takes to be agreed to and the time it takes for the trade to clear are two different things, and that it's OK for those to happen on different timescales.

Having the trade agreed to quickly is a big deal even if it could take days to have any tangible assets to show for it.
Again, I love the fact that you, just like the people I talked about in my first fucking comment, treat me like I'm stupid, despite the fact that I know what I'm doing (hell, enough to reproduce 90% of iTunes's features in my own media library/player). You even imply that I run to whinning instead of Googling. Why don't you Google these issues. You'll find dozens of other people with the exact same issue.

You wasted a lot of effort typing that reply. One of my more infuriating replies I've gotten here.

edit: Annnnnd a quick look at your other comments in this thread tell me everything I need to know. You're even running around telling other people describing the exact same problem and acting like they're crazy. You realize that something working for you doesn't mean it's bug free, right?

My media library takes an arbitrary number of sources, takes 2 minutes to parse my library, works with more file formats, doesn't store an incomprehensible, incompatible format that no one else can write, doesn't require inane Terms of Service and more. I'm very, very happy that iTunes works for you. For a ton of people, it's a damn headache.
The guy who went and implemented is a true hacker. He deserves applause. Everyone has those conversations where people say wouldn't this be funny. That guy did it and will forever live in the annuals of HTML. I should unleash a practical joke of my own...
I always thought the main barrier with international money transfers was the cost. If your backbone is something like WU, how do you reduce costs?...and can't Western Union roll out of bed one day and decide to make it even easier to send money?
If there's anyone from Firebase here, I have a few questions that should interest everyone:

1. will you support mobile platforms (especially interested in Android and iOS) ? The TC article says Tamplin says it has also partnered with a yet-to-be-announced company who can package those websites for mobile app stores. , but that sounds weird and vague.

2. do you have a release schedule available? This looks like it would match my needs perfectly! When should we expect to have a stable release?

3. pricing ?
Exactly, therefore torrent gets a workout and I watch Game of Thrones the day after it is televised in the US.
I am absolutely paralyzed by this. Even the possibility of making a statement that might be arguable on some minor point seriously concerns me.
Television stations and cable providers are locked into a business model based on selling advertising, not programming. They don't want your $5. They want you to watch ads. They want to charge millions for those ads.

The problem is people don't want to watch ads, and people don't' want to have to schedule their lives around a television show. If you can't time-shift it and skip commercials, what are your legal options? Wait four years for the DVD to show up in your region? That's hardly an efficient marketplace.

If these dinosaur companies could get the rights to sell the content directly to consumers, per-episode, the would make a lot more money in the long run. People that ditch their cable television for cable internet would be paying for content directly, not torrenting everything out of necessity.
This is the entire point of Google Latitude existing.

(But I like your idea too! Very useful)
Nice thread, I laughed at this:

http://www.courageunfettered.com/stuf/cheerup/

CHEER UP!
Just because I believe something is so (Andriod == Java) doesn't make it so.

Google do not claim (as far as I've seen anywhere) that Android is Java. They must name the APIs java.x to ensure source compatibility, but they chuck the class file format and the dalvik vm is certainly not a jvm.
Day 4, Oracle v Google
shinratdr has fanboy confirmation bias. You'll get nowhere with them.
It's not on TV. But it is on torrents and Usenet. And a surprising number of people know exactly what to do. I've even considered buying season subscriptions from iTunes, etc and then downloading the ripped versions. This would sooth my conscience AND let me use the content how/where I want. But iTunes is such a ripoff in AU, compared to the US, that I can't make myself purchase anything. sigh
5000? I have close to 8000 in japanese and I consider myself still a beginner.

Native is at least 20000-25000.

As long as you are continuing to learn then 5000 is a nice start, but you are not going to read novels and speak about broad topics with that vocabulary.
Make no mistake, clones are on the way. For example this device: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ is supposedly both cheaper and more powerful than the Pi.
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