skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW, if I had done this before I launched Quizlet, Quizlet wouldn't exist. In fact, if I had even done a google search for the functionality of Quizlet, it wouldn't exist. Now it's 5x bigger than any of its competitors and a top 400 US website.

Just sayin.. :)
Alex, you should seriously consider making this an iPhone app. You're probably aware of how much more your peers are into mobile (instagram? tumblr? etc).

Additionally, I personally find the iPhone to be an amazing tool for ideation.
Suppose you have a system, but for legal liability reasons you cannot have this system be open to users (say it's a medical system, and having untrained people fuck around with it messes with certification.) However, you make it reasonably easy for users to override any interlocks (i.e. put in no protection).

A user finds out about the override, hacks their device, misprograms it, and dies.

Is the company that manufactured this device legally liable for this death? If they knew that it was easy to override the safety interlocks, are they then liable? How about if there was demonstrable evidence that the knew about the specific override? What if they, in an informal capacity, spread information about how to do the override?

Here is a parallel situation: same company makes a device, and has locked it down so hard that it's not possible to actually get anything done with it. Nurses and other trained practitioners know that "the usual way of business" is to override some of the safeguards, because, of course, that's the only one anyone ever gets any work done. However, the company disclaims all legal liability in the case that someone does such a modification. Are they allowed to disclaim that?

It's complicated.
^Total plug by the older brother :p
So as the administrator you can see everyone's ideas? Nice for you.
Unless he's using some sort of unrelated investment or fortune to sell at a loss (which would be admittedly shady and anticompetitive), I fail to see how developing a similar product at a lower price point is stifling innovation or "resorting" to anything.

If your argument is that lowering margins is a move that will slow the pace of innovation (i.e. that R+D money drives innovation in this space), won't the additional capital Makerbot have generated off of their presumably larger margins allow them to compete favorably in introducing superior models?

A lot of innovation in this market is open-source and performed at no cost (i.e. the many RepRap community designs). I don't think this is something like "founder runs off with proprietary technology, undercuts product by stealing results of sunken R+D cost." I think it's just building a similar product at a lower price point, and hoping to drive volume. I'm really struggling to see anything wrong with that. I'd certainly love to have more people in the 3D printing community, especially because many seem to give back with new, open designs leading to better products.
I agree. People often mistake the two domains of reality. Just because the physical reality is given and closer to us, we can't rule out other forms of existence.

And say that, somehow, a percentage of humans had some sort of experience of the supernatural. Then they pass on that information. Some believe them, some don't. It's a matter of confidence. Some of the ones that just believed in the first place, eventually get to also have those spiritual experiences.

One could also make conjectures about the nature of those spiritual experiences: that they were illusions, hallucinations, or real experiences. But it can not be objectively verified.

And there will always be a percentage of people what will not believe.

Taking the exigence of objective, material verification of experiments in Physics to a field of subjective, psychological/spiritual experiences, seems to me to be a mistake.
First, thanks everyone for a fascinating debate on a complex set of topics!

I thought I'd see if I can add some context to some of the questions particularly about our own commitment.

I don't have a view that there's an either-or here on how money can be productively deployed. We have committed to contribute at least half of lifetime earnings from venture capital, in our lifetimes. This is similar to the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and others have signed (including John Doerr and Mike Moritz from our world). So there's no requirement that money be contributed to nonprofits now as opposed to later. Each of our GPs will make their own personal decisions, with their families, on timing. But this leaves open the opportunity for some of us to give more actively sooner (like for example Pierre Omidyar has done), whereas others might plow all of our earnings back into for-profit ventures now and for the forseeable future and become active donors later (as Warren Buffett himself did).

So don't think of it as money coming out of the for-profit cycle sooner than it would otherwise -- necessarily. (We did announce a collective $1 million cash donation to six area nonprofits today, but that's hopefully a small part of what we will be able to do over the long run.)

In my own case, my wife and I are active donors now, most notably to Stanford Hospital. But not at a proportion that prevents us from being major personal investors in each of our own venture funds, as well as investors in several other funds and various other kinds of businesses.

I also agree with the commenter that it's not like money vanishes when it goes to a nonprofit. Nonprofits spend money just like any other kind of entity, and that money gets recycled right back into the capitalist system.
Libertarianism is about people being free to choose what to do with their money. If they choose to give to charity, light cigars with banknotes, spend it on blackjack & hookers, invest in space flight, etc., it's all their right to make that choice.

It isn't about the relative virtue of doing this or that.
Just a bunch of quotes. Amass enough quotes and you'll have one for every situation. Well, no, you'll have at least two for every situation. Then you'll realize that when it comes down to

If something feels wrong, it probably is

versus

1) Be humble

2) Shut the fuck up

the quotes don't help you figure out the difference. They don't help you figure out whether the people around you are assholes or you're just depressed. They don't help you figure out whether the customer doesn't appreciate your work or you don't appreciate that their emphasis on speed at the expense of quality actually makes business sense for them.

But once you make up your mind, you can pick a quote that makes you feel cocky about whichever way you decided to interpret the situation. So there's that.
How We Can Get More Followers To Twitter
Hey, I built something similar to this a while ago. Find it at http://openthought.herokuapp.com/ Figured you might want to see it. I am also 16.
Technically yes. If I knew how to hide that I would. But seriously, I have enough ideas on my mind, I don't need yours.
Show HN: Hackful Europe iOS App
Hi guys,

I have been working on a iOS app for Hackful Europe lately. Since the API is now ready to access it is time to show you guys all I have got.

The app is really simple and puts everything from hackful.com into your pocket.
You can

* login,
* up vote,
* coment on something,
* reply,
* submit and
* share the articles

The project is fully open source under MIT license and is also in the App Store by now. You can start reading my code and contribute to it on GitHub if you like.

Please tell me what you think. What can be done better?

Hope you like it
Oemera
> ...it would be much more interesting if they took part of their money and created grants for companies doing good in the world that would have trouble sustaining profitability.

That is a very interesting idea but I suspect hard to apply in practice. I'd love to see someone try.

One example is that a number of local VCs support our local physical bookstore Kepler's in that way (it would have closed long ago if not for their grants) -- they feel its presence makes the community a better place.
Hi,

I'm the developer of the app. I have been working on a iOS app for Hackful Europe lately. Since the API is now ready to access it is time to show you guys all I have got.

The app is really simple and puts everything from hackful.com into your pocket.
You can

* login,
* up vote,
* coment on something,
* reply,
* submit and
* share the articles

The project is fully open source under MIT license and is also in the App Store by now. You can start reading my code and contribute to it on GitHub if you like.

Please tell me what you think. What can be done better?

Hope you like it

Oemera
Some people will make the claim that alcohol is treated "just like fat" in the body, and that this is why people have beer bellies. While at the same time studies show that people with high-alcohol diets and low carb intake actually weigh less than their non-drinking counterparts. The metabolism of alcohol is quite complex, so it becomes silly to make over-generalizations like "alcohol metabolizes to fat" (ex. http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/images/642alcoholmeta...). I think a lot of people end up taking this as gospel, such as the people who parrot that "alcohol kills braincells." Well yes it does, but not much more than will die naturally or due to other causes, more studies have shown. The real danger lies in permanently damaging or killing your liver from which there is no coming back.

When I see television pieces done telling me there is a single simple culprit for a huge problem like obesity, my brain tells me that this is probably not the case. In fact, most of the people I know who are obese don't seem to be eating handfulls of cupcakes or sodas. They're eating chicken wings and burgers and fries and nachos and big macs. Not to say fat is another single cause of obesity, but it's clear that an overabundance of fat, or perhaps simply just over-eating, is another simple cause for obesity which needs to be weighed with all the rest.

Technically just drinking alcohol could lead to diabetes as it lowers the blood sugar and insulin swoops in to fill the gap. Sure, sugar can be very detrimental to your health, but let's not make it out to be the devil. Promoting nutritional balance and moving away from non-fresh foods would probably go a lot farther towards preventing diabetes than never eating sugar.
> The other thing you should understand is that top VC firms such as AH (or YC) are not capital constrained. Dumping in twice as much money won't produce twice as much innovation or profits.

That is, of course, correct.
Making the positive statement that the 'Universe is uncreated', is just as intellectually justified as saying 'The Universe is created'. Not very justified, if you ask me, but just as much in both sides. One can only get subjective if saying that their hypothesis is more justified, although unverified.
Hard work pays !! This is very impressive..
And that's fine, assuming the user wants the app to know which ideas belong to them. From a UX standpoint, it's so much better to let the user kick the tires before requiring them to register.
Can you tell me how you reduced your fructose consumption? What foods did you eliminate and what did you replace them with?
Sorry, but from a UI perspective it's really not "horrible." I'm actually very happy with the UI/UX of Gmail. I think the default has become less than optimal, but when you do things like enable high contrast, disable web clips, use "Compact", etc. it's still pretty great.

The problem with this piece is that a lot of those products the parent is referring to were discontinued by GOOG: "more wood behind fewer arrows", etc.
> Having capital to invest in more start-ups reduces risks and increases the chances of the VC earning bigger returns.

That's true up to a point, but only up to a point. You hit the point of diminishing returns pretty early. I wish it were otherwise but there's 40+ years of history that support that theory.

It's not even that there aren't enough potentially great startups. It's that the venture business is a business that scales mostly with people. Each GP can credibly be a primary investor and board member in maybe 10-12 companies at a time. I don't think arbitrarily taking that number up to 20-24 would generate twice the returns, at least without the GP's head exploding in the process.
Wow. Definitely worth watching.
> 1. The best people are not going to join a firm that's giving away 50% of their management fees and carried interest income.

True, but that's not what we're saying. We're saying that the GPs as individuals are going to do that, for the income we would have received in any event. This doesn't affect how the firm allocates fees and carry, and doesn't reduce the incentive for anyone to join the firm who would have joined before.
Buzz was an experiment. The lessons they learned from Buzz were applied to Google+.
+1 for this. I'm a big fan of the pocket notebook. Having this as an iphone app is a natural extension of that idea.
Nice! Our apps are definitely very similar (actually the same). I really like the prompt you are given when you want to delete an idea. It's very... bold.

What is it built with? How does Heroku work?
I'm a big fan of lemon water. I personally use a lemon press to squeeze half a lemon into a tall glass of water. It tastes great and is quite refreshing, and often does the trick when fighting a sweet tooth craving.
We do like to think of ourselves as magical unicorns.
DKarl, did I advertise it as anything else?
I identify with them for one reason or another, they made my list.

One of the disclaimers on the about page is that from time to time I remove them, or edit my own, because I don't feel that way any longer. Convenient, hey? :-)

Hope you found it interesting all the same. Just sharing for the sake of it. I enjoyed them.
Where would the idea be assigned if it doesn't know who the user is?
The government is, actually, extremely slow. I don't remember exactly how it was, but I think there's only one state in US in which it is illegal to have plans to smoke weed in Netherlands. But even that has taken years to implement. My guess is that the market must not be too big, so as to stay reasonably under the radar, and not too small, so the businesses in another country can be profitable.
Ahhh ... you're the guy that started Visitor Boost :) Worthless pop-under traffic :) This must be a real money spinner though. Lots of resellers.
This is good - .10 for non-demographic targeted and .50 to target a demographic. But, the fact that the question types are all multiple choice / ratings and don't allow respondents to give short answers like Pickfu is a downer. The insights from people saying why they chose an answer is the most valuable info.
Yeah I like storing my ideas on my phone too. I'm hardly ever near a computer when a lightbulb turns on! I use noted! http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noted!/id504164257?ls=1&m...
Follows the same keep it simple stuff but with better tracking than the iphone notes app.
Didn't want people deleting their stuff accidentally. Built it with Rails. Click the "Github" link at the bottom to see the source. Heroku is really smooth (though expensive) Rails hosting. It's a little like magic.
Another very cool take on this idea: https://github.com/nathansobo/space-pen
Interestingly, many of our investors (LPs), and many LPs of our fellow venture firms, are nonprofit institutions such as universities and foundations that were originally started by people with names like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Stanford (a "robber baron" of his age), Yale (a governor of the British East India Company of all things), Hewlett, Packard, and the like. Money earned through capitalism that got plowed into nonprofits that invest in modern venture capital -- it's a wonderful cycle.
UK based payday loans and their conditions
It's just an affiliate site for another company, basically, that I set up in a few days years ago. Nobody resells it AFAIK. Most of my revenue's from W3Counter and W3ROI.
> By giving half their profit to charity, one could take them as implying that profit is bad, that they don't deserve everything they earned, and that they are appeasing the irrational anti-capitalists (if not siding with them).

One could, but one would be wrong :-).
No it's not. At the doctor's office you should be told: "Don't fuck around with the machine. If you need to change the settings, come to me and I'll change it. You also have this hand-book of how to override, but if you do you might die."

It's simple. You were warned.
> sustainable competitive advantage

I think this is what so many commenters struggle with when it comes to "the bubble" so many of us speak of now. We see so many companies' births and deaths without ever having seen a clear "sustainable competitive advantage" and wonder why these companies existed in the first place.
Although it's a relatively recent arrival, wget has to be one of the top-ten command line tools of all time.
Money, Power & Wall Street (Video)
thanks for the bug report, it got fixed :)

an ahem miscommunication between coder and artist...
What do you mean people overriding their morphine machine limit? Sorry but that doesn't make sense. If some one wants to they can always take an extra perceset or for that matter go out and buy some heroin. Education does much more good than "protecting" people from themselves. Blindly following any doctor's directions is a recipe for disaster. Not all doctor's have your best interest in mind, and even if they did they still make mistakes like any other person. It's much more profitable for the medical industry to throw very addictive pills at the symptoms over treating the underlying cause of the problem.
I'll consider it greatly as my next weekend project, although I have another project I'm working on ATM.

Too many ideas! :)
> I honestly don't see the problem for things like this, primarily diagnostic based equipment.

It's a similar situation to giving financial advice. You are theoretically making a decision based off of the diagnostic tool, therefore it ceases to become 'harmless.' What if it's out of calibration? What if you forget to do some maintenance procedure and it goes out of calibration?

With software you can put an "IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES" clause. What do you do with medical devices? The best you can get away with is "for entertainment purposes only."
The App app
Encryption maybe where the key would be something set by the user or something?
Election year.
> It's simple. You were warned.

laws don't work like that
I actually really like how it looks.
Musical CISPA
Très légère baisse des prix des carburants cette semaine selon l’Ufip
L’Ufip annonce une très légère baisse des prix des carburants cette semaine. Les consommateurs devront toutefois payer aussi cher cette énergie non renouvelable.
The latency can be significant for TOR, as your connection is bounced through various hosts all over the world. This prevents a single country from putting all the pieces together. This is what you notice while browsing.

The raw bandwidth on the other hand is usually pretty good (not great, but it's not intended for large downloads anyway as they tax the network...).

TOR is meant for the cases when anonymity trumps convenience.
> You can find this sort of opinion in the Ayn Rand book _Why Businessmen Need Philosophy_. You might want to read it, and make some effort to reply to its arguments, before dismissing it as wrong enough to dismissively insult in passing.

Like a lot of people here, I read Rand as a teenager. As a slightly older teenager, I concluded she was an extremist who I think would have hated living in the world that her philosophy would have led to had she been wholly successful (Hobbes' phrase "nasty, brutish, and short" comes to mind).

The point about business transactions being mutually valuable and societally value-add is generally (although not always) true, in my mind, but that doesn't eliminate the need for either government or philanthropy if one wants to live in a civil society.

But, to each her own...
Great product. Getting surveys filled out is an impossible task. After three months only 2 people completed our survey. You can offer incentives but you risk creating bias.
Added to a public feed?
Stripe does a great job at this. You should look at how they do this, its a very well executed implementation.
What like zerobin?
Why I'm Sticking With Dropbox (Over Google Drive)
Actually, I think there are things you could call a 'social layer' that can be added to any product, for example:

1) Identity. Moving each product from having a silo'ed identity profile to having a centralized social profile.

2) Contacts. Many many products need to know not just who you are, but who you will be collaborating with. From sharing, to basic ACL settings on documents. For the consumer side, Social contacts replaces the previous layer that was used: Corporate LDAP servers or Mail servers (Notes/Exchange/ACAP/etc)

3) Sharing. Pretty much every app features some form of collaboration, even if it just means sending a link to someone.

4) Activity Log. Moreover, it is useful for many apps to keep a history of recent actions you've taken, either for the purpose of rolling them back, or for allowing you to search and find knowledge, either about what you did, or what a collaborator did.

dcurtis is basically repeating Zuckerberg's claim that social is something you can't add later, and I think this is hogwash. Sure, you certainly have to re-design the API. But that doesn't mean you have to invent a whole new product.

YouTube for example, doesn't have to throw away their entire product and start from scratch vs a product that may have been built from scratch for sharing videos on a social network.

I believe far far too much credit is being given to all kinds of hand wavy arguments about designing for social, or 'social dna', and not enough given to simple market timing, niche targeting, and network effects with respect to Facebook.

At this point, Facebook could produce really terrible product addons, they'd still continue to gain users. And competitors really can't differentiate themselves enough to siphon off users, because the marginal gain in utility isn't worth the switching costs.

Social networking, if it is as important as everyone says, is a commodity. Facebook's wall-garden has a substantial network effect of making it costly to choose other networks. If Facebook had been invented as a federated, distributed, open social network in the beginning, then, and only then, could you make all kinds of arguments about their user base being related to mythical 'social dna' or superior design ethos.

It's like looking at Microsoft Windows user base in the 90s, and saying it indicates that Apple "doesn't have desktop DNA" design chops, because clearly, all those users use Windows purely based on design decisions Microsoft made.
Thanks again for the reply. So far namecheap has been quite helpful (even though messages are few and far between).

It's been tough sleeping this week and pointing me to the ICANN process makes me feel a little bit better that there is hope!
Why would this differ to a normal note taking webapp, apart from the fact if you break into this database you are guaranteed only to see ideas?
That was soooo amazing!
You're referring to this survey?

http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/project-mackere...
Regardless of the controversy issued herein, I firmly assert that one has nothing to gain by consuming fructose, the sole exception being if that fructose just so happens to come bundled with some other necessary nutrient.
Taiwanese Nationals Charged in Military Technology Plot