skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say Zynga's problem is that they are a big fish competing in an environment that is much better suited to lots of nimble little fish. With fickle customers and increasing offerings in their segment, its going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to produce sure fire hits. The alternative is to acquire the small fish when they have a hit but that can be an equally dangerous game as proven by the OMGPOP acquisition. I just don't think being in the app/casual game business is a great spot for large public companies - there is not a lot you can leverage or ability to lock down revenue streams in any long term manner by being big. I'd be much more positive on Zynga if they had a core product that the whole company was iterating on but from what I can see that is not their model.
Something I have started doing; Whenever I create anything, whether it is a program , website copy and email or whatever is take a step back and say "How can I make there be less of this?" rather than "how can I make this better" or worse "cleverer".

I think education in general rewards complexity, getting bonuses in English class for using long passage of flowery words with many synonyms or extra credit in CS for adding 200 lines but reducing O(n^2) to O(n log n).
I got your back.
Don't buy garbage SSDs, and make sure your system is utilizing them correctly. Putting swap on an SSD = horrible idea.
I think what I would define as successful is a company that made YC wish they had invested in them at the time.
This is more akin to financial arbitrage but my mother did a variant of this for her car payment. The card company would send her 'checks' to use for 0% balance tansfers that she would get 5% rewards on. So she'd use the checks for her 3.9% car payment, get the rewards and pay off the card at the end of the month.
Which companies will be the most spectacular flameouts of internet boom, 2.0? I don't think it's much of a stretch to predict Zynga has a good chance of making the list.
All the govt would have to do is shut off the internet via the telcos and backbones. They don't need the internet, we do.
I do the same thing, prime is great. One thing that does make me feel a bit guilty about it though is the amount of packaging wasted when I'm constantly ordering all of these things from Amazon. I usually have a couple boxes stacked up every week, even if it is just a few small items ordered sporadically throughout the month they usually ship in a box about 8x10"... That's a lot of cardboard being used now compared to going to the store... At least that's what is seems like, I haven't actually measured the amount of gasoline and plastic or paper bags used when buying locally.

Regardless though, Prime still seems like a great business model if it is working for Amazon. Every time I have to order something online that Amazon doesn't carry I always feel like I'm going back to the stone age having to pay $20 for 4 day shipping.
You can also use it to get frequent flier miles - a lot of cards offer 50,000+ miles on reaching a certain minimum purchase.

Here's someone who bought $15,000 in coins: http://advancedriskology.com/the-day-i-bought-15000/
You might also be interested in this (with much more): http://www.futuretimeline.net/
In a growth industry, it's generally strategic to invest heavily in growth at the expense of profit. If you want to have a nice profitable business, within a few years your business will be undermined by the "foolish" guys that burned cash to gain market share. Walmart followed a similar strategy.

Not always. I mean, isn't this the reasoning behind the first dot-com bubble? At some point you have to turn a (operational) profit, and the more money you invest, the more profit you have to turn in order to recoup your investment.

First the publishers ignored e-books, then laughed at them and hated them. Now they're fighting, and some time in the next two years, Bezos will likely win. When you look at the Kindle strategy, you're looking at a business unit mobilised for war. An army doesn't return a profit until after the land is conquered.

Wars are very risky things. The publishing industry (like the RIAA) isn't very large financially, but is disproportionately powerful politically. It's very possible that the publishing industry will lay legal obstacles that would make Amazon's "conquest" a very expensive affair. Let's remember that wars, historically, have not been profitable enterprises.
First version of the Android (pre-iPhone) hands-on
I don't know of any particularly good places but be sure to take it to a tailor and get it fitted for the extra 50-100 dollars. (If they don't have a tailor in the store)
The iPhone 4S algorithm is far less aggressive than YouTube's.
Forum spam is a generally solved problem. And a non-issue for a forum with no traffic.

If you are ever getting hit with xrumer blasts, you just need to rotate your "What is 5+5?"-type registration questions because someone hard-coded your registration process into xrumer.

Beyond that, if you have any users at all, you'll be able to cultivate an armada of volunteer moderators to help you out.
Does it make me a bad human being if I feel zero pity for highly educated people who do not understand the basics of supply and demand in their chosen job market?
My partner spent the last couple of years travelling around a lot between countries and couldn't maintain a normal job. She ended up finding an academic essay editing/proofing service that would send her jobs to do. They gave her some training via skype to start with, and she's enjoyed the work. Look here: http://www.uni-edit.net/
> But the language is the same,

Umm, sort-of. I have relatives whose local dialect is almost incomprensible to me. (They can understand me because they can understand "TV American".)

> Compare that to Europe where there are, what ? 23 languages for 27 countries

How many of them have a significant number of people who are monolingual? To put it another way, how many languages do I need to know to talk to 95% of Europeans?

> the newspapers are the same,

No, they aren't.

> the political parties are the same.

Nope. They merely have the same names, and sometimes not even that. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Democratic%E2%80%93Fa... .)

Yes, there is a national Democrat party, but there are also 50 state parties and they don't take orders.

There are "national coalitions" that don't cover all states.
There is no point to doing this. It's a waste of cycles. People believe what they want to believe, and will only change their mind when they want to.

Your own point, that the ones that bug you are the "willfully blind" ones... do you expect to be able to change someone's mind when they are very intentional about not doing so?

What has worked well for me in dealing with this is to just recognize that we're all at different stages of life, and maybe someday these "willfully blind" will gain perspective and see the broader truth.

The best thing is not to try to force them to see reason, but to demonstrate reason yourself and recognize that at any given point only some people are ready to see reason.

Others may be ready in the future, but they simply aren't now.
The Forbes article definitely isn't praising Zynga. But, I also didn't read that it stated the loss of users had anything to do with Zynga. The article writer actually infers that the loss of users would have happened regardless.

"but they must know that if they had waited just one more month to sell, they wouldn’t have been able to command anywhere near that price after losing so many users."

It just references the omgpop acquisition because it was very recent which makes the story more interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Ameri...

Not vouching, just citing. (I haven't read it.)
Same with buying links from private blog networks and similar, Google is cracking down on this but people are still using links from vast blog networks and ranking well today.
Makes me a bit worried for pinboard.io. It's not free, which puts it in a better position than its competition, IMO, but it's a 1 time only payment. I hear they're profitable now, though, and have vowed to not go away like delicious did.
First of all, I don't think that PG will answer this question [1]:

Q: Have there been any startups you've later regretted rejecting from YCombinator?

A: Sure, several. But I can't name names because it's not for me to disclose that they applied.

However, YC keeps track of the successful companies that they initially rejected and here are some of them of them that are known to have been rejected who have gone onto raise funding etc:

- http://sendgrid.com/ (went through TechStars and have raised a series B)

- CouchOne - http://www.couchbase.com/

- AfterTheDeadline - Acquired By Automattic

- Light Sail Energy - raised money from Khosla Ventures - http://lightsailenergy.com/

- SignPost - https://www.signpost.com/ - Raised $1MM off Google Ventures

- MyFit - Raised $1MM - http://www.myfit.com/

- Storenvy although they were kicked out of YC [2]

- Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Was Also Rejected To YC [3]

[1] http://askolo.com/pg#4f6d068aa499a758250003aa

[2] http://joncrawford.com/post/20378314843/how-i-got-kicked-out...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-arielle-zuckerbe...
I'm massively curious about how you got into farming and how you do that alongside software development.
TBH i was more impressed with the vid than the game :)
I'm not a CL expert, but the existence of multiple implementations of CL doesn't appear to have caused much fragmentation. The language did evolve beyond the standard (e.g. threading and the meta-object protocol), but if I'm not mistaken all popular implementations of CL (SBCL, Clozure CL, Allegro, LispWorks, CLISP, CMUCL) implement the full meta-object protocol, and even if their thread implementations use different libraries, isn't that pretty common among programming languages that aren't considered fragmented? Different implementations of C are certainly like that. Unless the OP really meant to ask why some languages have one main implementation and others have multiple, but that seems like a very different question (whose answer in the case of CL is obviously not that it broke off into multiple languages but rather that it was designed as a standard without any official implementation to begin with).
Interview with COO of Drchrono: iPads + Medicine = The Future
Perseverance Be Your Only Friend
Spot on. Nowhere did it read that users left OMGPOP because of Zynga.
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Newsblur's UI is really excellent. It's the first (and so far) only RSS reader I've paid for.
It takes a few tricks, but it is possible to attach a gesture recognizer to the keyboard window in an App Store-compatible fashion: https://github.com/rpetrich/SelectWithSwipes
>Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence

Not necessarily. Check your local laws, and be aware that they will almost certainly differ from those elsewhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking
That was Google's old story. The new story is that Milner discussed the idea of running analytics on the captured traffic.
Which operating system? On OS X Lion, you can make the system hibernate when the lid is closed, writing encrypted memory to disk. Slower wakeup times than suspend, but quicker than a full startup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785762
The racial overtones of the article confuse me - should I be more sympathetic because the literature professor is white?
The first poster in this thread made the statement: "If I need a quick dynamic page on my server, it's much easier to do this in PHP than in Python or Ruby."

So yes, it really does matter in the context of this thread. On the whole I agree with your philosophy that frameworks are there for a reason: you get many features for almost nothing.

But sometimes you just don't need a framework, you need something quick-and-dirty that just works.
Does that factor in compounded interest?

I tried asking wolfram alpha but it keeps trying to calculate a mortgage.
Cool, thanks. I wanted to give them a shout-out but haven't followed the business enough lately to know what they use.
"When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children"

He is clearly speaking to what he perceives as being an adult female demographic.
I've noticed that hasn't been updated in a while... we're on FF12 now aren't we? And Chrome 18?
Discover rotates the category of things that give 5% back every few months, which is generally easier to take advantage of than just gas. 5% for everything would be way over the interchange fees, so it'd require some sort of catch.
I this bizarre problem that whenever my fridge turns on, it wakes my laptop from sleep, even if the laptop's not plugged in.

The joys of student life!
About two years ago before I started programming I posted this on the what-wg mailing group about a real use case that is financially useful in reducing costs:

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-Jan...

Back then it wasn't really technically possible, but technologies like WebRTC may change things since they make browser-to-browser communication possible.

Check out btapp.js for an implementation of bit torrent in the browser:

http://pwmckenna.github.com/btapp/docs/btapp.html

Besides that you may want to look at this html5-filesystem api polyfill:
http://ericbidelman.tumblr.com/post/21649963613/idb-filesyst...

At the end of the day, something like this is only really going to be useful for file types that likely can't be modified to be malicious. e.g. css and images.

I know of a few people looking into stuff like this. Personally I think it is only a matter of time before we see it applied to more things. I don't really think it's a matter of the technology being available at this point. It's more a matter of someone building it. After all it took almost 5 years from the time the Mosaic web browser was introduced to the market for blogging to make an appearance in 1999.
Heh, perhaps some Joyent staff may have something to contribute to this conversation. They offered a "lifetime" hosting deal with shell access a while ago for a one-off fee, and I have heard that this is becoming a bit of a millstone for them. Certainly my brothers 'lifetime' account with them is not getting a lot of love and feels a bit like it's being left to rot on decrepit hardware.

I wonder would they do it again with the benefit of hindsight, or did it serve their purpose?
But even something quick and dirty is longer than "hello world". I've written a couple pretty dinky things with Flask, and the minuscule overhead of typing `import Flask` was definitely worth having e.g. a solid template language and XSS protection ready to go.
> Are you saying that it's genetic or that it's cultural (e.g. food, exercise and lifestyle choices)?

I don't know why it's different. I'm just pointing out that it is, so any theory that predicts otherwise ....

> I find it hard to imagine that immigration is as high in the poorest regions.

I'm often surprised at where I find people. For example, there are lots of Vietnamese on the gulf-coast. I was treated by a Thai doctor in the middle of Ozarks.

> I think in America you also have to account for socio-economic status more than in other first world countries.

Why? Are you assuming that health insurance affects life-expectancy? (The effect, if any, is almost in the noise.)

I'd expect that rich people in New Orleans would have the same exposure to carcinogens as the poor as they drink the same water.
> And yes, it is completely ridiculous for a company that is losing close to a billion dollars a year to occupy a multimillion dollar office building that looks like a children’s museum.

Where does a billion dollars a year come from? They lost 86 million last quarter. Is he equating operating costs or reduced market capital with loses?
Doing It Right, Not First
Restoring app last state? Like terminal emulator recreating tmux session wrapping screen session with package manager working under sudo? SSH unHUP-ing processes on remote machine? Python VM resuming all scripts in a precise place and state they were stopped?

The problem is that there is no such thing as isolated "application" on Linux or any other real OS.
True. I should have added "[...] in the UK".
What the hell is that part about kids and breakfast?! "Could be used to monitor and train kinds to use the right implements to eat breakfast". That is just messed up.

In all seriousness this is freaking awesome tech. Will definitely be huge, unless they fuck up the licensing or patent it to death.
Your comparison between normal and social economic models within these games is interesting, especially how you equate it to ethics. But if you're going to gripe about people who spend enormous amounts of money who may not have it (ie. addicted players) you also have to consider people who spend enormous amounts of time as well.

Because if you're going to go there, then its equally as harmful spending time away from your friends and family in front of a computer screen, especially when you consider the fact that you don't need any money to do it.

"Yes StarcraftII, I will gladly give you $50 and hundreds of hours of my life away, but thank god you're way more ethical of a game than that one that takes up 2 minutes of my bus ride and cons me into spending $1.99 on my way to work"

Addiction is everywhere. Its a sad fact of life. There are people who are addicted to shopping, but Macy's doesn't turn away repeat customers. There are people addicted to food, but Olive Garden/ McDonalds doesn't turn away morbidly obese people. There are people addicted to drinking, but Safeway doesn't do a health scan and deny these people from buying liqour. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Zynga or Blizzard to be like "hey, you've spent $10k/1000 hours on my game, why don't you go see your family or put your money to better use".
I'd venture that Zynga's problems are more critical than that - and not unique to Zynga. IMO social gaming (in its current format and incarnation) is a space that exists only temporarily while consumers figure things out.

Notice the explosion of FarmVille when it first came out, how everyone was playing it, and its subsequent death. It exploded into the mainstream very suddenly, and faded into niche obscurity just as quickly.

The "glorified slot machine" format of social gaming (which IMO is a perversion of the word, there's nothing social about this sort of gaming) does not have a permanent, mass-market future. It will fade and become a niche (profitable, perhaps), but it will not justify the market cap that investors have saw fit to pour into Zynga et al.

If anything, the industry in which Zynga plays has more in common with the Tamagotchi than it does with WoW.
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The Sunkist Principle
"Not always. I mean, isn't this the reasoning behind the first dot-com bubble? At some point you have to turn a (operational) profit, and the more money you invest, the more profit you have to turn in order to recoup your investment."

Yes. Very true. Amazon is one of the few survivors of the dotcom bubble. For every Amazon there's a Boo, Pets.com, Webvan.

My response would be: those companies failed because they grossly overestimated the size of their markets, or were too early, or there was no market at all. If you overspend, you risk being the next Boo.com -- but if you underspend, you risk being the next Books.com. It really is all dependent on the market you find yourself in.

BTW, I am not personally attracted to "get big fast" cash-furnace type companies. The startup ideas I'm considering tend to be those in non-winner-take-all markets (ie, lots of small competitors, no one big competitor) where it's possible to turn a profit quickly.
Hey I don't watch a lot of movies, but I love tv shows. Any thoughts on incorporating metacritic as a backup when rotten tomatoes isn't available? That would be amazing. Also preferably use the user score, because critic reviews are pretty bad. Take for example Firefly, there's not even a critic score for it, however there is a very accurate 9.6 user score :)
He gets it probably from extrapolating the average of this past quarter and and the quarter before. In the quarter before the last, net income was around -435 million although I doubt their annual net will be -1B
I've been reading guides on getting lion to do just that, snow-leopard supposedly supported it, with filevault.

Unfortunately, lion/filevault 2 no longer supports it, and if you try to force the options, the computer simply crashes on resume.
I remember a Coca-Cola & 7/11 promo about a year back, where if you "Liked" the 7/11 page on Facebook they would give you a printable coupon for a free Coke. The first problem was that the barcodes on the coupons didn't scan so well after being printed out on a home printer and crumpled up in somebody's pocket for a few days (which undoubtedly cost 7/11 thousands or tens of thousands of man hours) and the second was that you could simply refresh the coupon page to get /as many coupons as you liked/. Needless to say, the promotion ended not soon after.
Airline security agents. It's doubtful that the passenger was required to follow them to the private office if he/she didn't want to, but it's also doubtful that the airline employees would have made this clear to him/her.
The article didn't mention people that bought the lifetime pass and then died the next day/month/year of a heart attack or what-have-you.

Presumably AA made some good money at that modern equivalent $900k rate on those that didn't optimise their usage.

We're not seeing the full story financially here.
Haha, glad you like it :-) Let me know if I can help with anything.
Most community colleges with any sort of health programs (which are most) offer medical transcription programs. They're usually only a semester or two long and typically are very affordable. That said you may be able to find faster private/for profit certification programs.
The only reason why I clicked this link was because I thought, how is Pando Daily on the frontpage?
Tech stocks (in aggregate) have declined about 32% in the same time period. What this article fails to mention is that Zynga's stock price was at an all-time high when Zynga acquired OMGPOP. The stock has since floated around it's post-IPO price. OMGPOP is most likely unrelated to these fluctuations.

What is relevant is Facebook. Zynga's stock grew rapidly once Facebook's S-1 filings revealed that Facebook derives 12% of it's revenue from Zynga. This news cause a flurry of interest in Zynga, but the excitement has since waned, and both Facebook and Zynga have been scrutinized heavily since. This is to be expected, but I also expect that both company's stocks will perform well after May 18 and into next quarter.

Last, and possibly most important, is the misconception about how easy it is to launch a profitable mobile app to millions of users. Zynga now hosts about 80% of their games on their private cloud (the zCloud). This infrastructure separates Zynga from a group of 15 hackers who want to make the next Angry Birds. Zynga releases games in dozens of foreign languages; they have games on every social network and in dozens of countries, as well as in many emerging markets. The point is, it's easy to take pot-shots at Zynga's business model and claim it's a house of cards, but I think the reality is that Zynga is a well established company, with far vaster resources than many of their competitors. Mobile and social games are a clear-cut example of economies of scale.
Eh, I hadn't thought about that, that sucks.
Why not? 'This' is just like 'me too' or '+1'. By itself, it's a waste of a comment, but since harlanlewis elaborated, the "This." was just a prologue to the rest of the comment.