skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few things:

1) It makes user management stupid-simple. I can authenticate with Facebook/Twitter/signup easily (not that it's really that hard, but still), and the user info is automatically saved to the cloud.

2) I then use it to store game state, retrieve a list of active games/previous games.

3) Push notifications are really easy. Each client opens a "channel", and the other client sends a push to their opponent's channel after their turn is complete.

I suppose I should clarify that I am building a turn-based iPad game, where the game state needs to be stored between turns.
Self respecting graphic designers won't create these awful "info graphics"

Disagree! Kelli Anderson is a fantastic designer and makes all kinds of infographics (although I imagine they cost a lot more than $200): http://www.kellianderson.com/projects/infographics.html
It's only pro-gay when it's trying to be anti-religion/anti-government. Any other time, the site is hostile to the LGBT community (and women, and people of color, and ...).
Your comment makes no sense. I didn't say never.

Anyway, I found what I was looking for; I had read an excerpt of a book called How Doctors Think, where the author discusses the availability heuristic:

In the theory, "availability" is defined as the tendency to judge the likelihood of explanation for an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. In a clinical situation a diagnosis may be made because the physician often sees similar cases in his practice — for example, the misclassification of aspirin toxicity as a viral pneumonia, or the improper recognition of an essential tremor as delirium tremens due to alcohol withdrawal in an indigent urban setting. Groopman argues that a clinician will misattribute a general symptom as specific to a certain disease based on the frequency he encounters that disease in his practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doctors_Think
RIM has around 16000 employees while Facebook has just 3000 employees. Even if Facebook buys RIM I think it would really difficult to integrate the two companies.
Same position for me. Hopefully I'll find something as good--I just need a personal account and most of the other offerings are a lot more expensive and featureful than I really need. sigh
At that point your requiring about as much effort to authorize the transaction as you would be to enter a card number.

Also not sure how secure that would be , how difficult would it be for a would be attacker to find out who was in the images?

I imagine a reverse image search could be fruitful.
Consumerization of IT - What it means for the Architect
Since our move to multicore over faster processors, I'm sure we'll see a lot of this sort of thing, that is, people suddenly realizing that their code will be some multiple faster if they can find a way to do operations in parallel. I imagine that the compression itself might be slightly less optimal however since similar blocks that could be compressed are on different threads? I didn't dig into how this might or might not be a concern with this project, however. Long of the short of it, however, parallel is the reality. In theory one could arbitrarily split the file, and then compress each of the splits and get a speed up that is roughly comparable?
Reading this headline sort of made me want a taco.
You're absolutely right, payment processing is incredibly profitable, but I don't see what that has to do with Facebook attempting to be even more efficient than Visa.

Facebook has already shown they're not even as efficient as Visa; despite being so young they're more bloated than Visa already. And that lends credence to the notion that they wouldn't be any better at payment processing than a company that has specialized in that for a very long time and is the best in the world at it.

Certainly a company like Microsoft could have just published Windows and had 90% margins. But no mega company ever does that, so it's not a realistic scenario. They don't do that because they're seeking growth, which is something shareholders always want to see.

Companies that had extremely lucrative margins and dominant positions, that didn't sit still: Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, Nintendo, Sony, Google, and on and on.

I've not aware of any major tech company that has ever just created one extraordinarily profitable product, and then did nothing else but collect their 85% net margin. Facebook isn't likely going to be the first.
Oh sure, a bit like the endless "PHP is terrible", "No PHP is great" cycle of link bait that pops up every two months. Or "All developers are sexist", "No programmers aren't sexist!" which slips into the gap when we're not talking about php. And last week there was the fan favourite about "Everyone should be a programmer!", "No everyone shouldn't be a programmer!".

There's the endless cycle of "No I won't be your technical co-founder, here's why" which I have read on this site at least 10 times by different authors.

Now, I am not knocking any of that, that is the nature of user submitted content, what I find irritating however is people who believe that just because they are talking about their particular speciality (programming, marketing, startup, e.t.c) on this site it gives them the right to look down their nose at people who enjoy reddit.
I like the way that Toms shoes are magically generated from pixie dust at their headquarters, then get transported to their "one-for-one" drop sites. No mention of where the rubber in the soles comes from, or the canvas, or the colors, or where they're actually assembled, or anything about the distribution of shoes in the United States.

It's a little hard for me to take the site seriously as a product supply chain information site when that's their idea of a featured supply chain map.
Yes, we agree. Really Facebook is not fitting to be a social network, but at the same time it has such a huge number of users at the moment. Hopefully real social networks like Diaspora which are built for social interactions and not for ripping users off on their privacy, will eventually gain more traction.
Wow. Making money is anything but commoditized. What is commoditized is often the business itself. That's the problem for these guys who don't make any money. Twitter has taken $1B in investment. Google makes three times that in profit in a quarter. It's cheap enough for Google to keep at it with G+ for the next century if they have to.

If you think being connected is worth something, AT&T had 99.9% of the nation connected to the rest of the world with a dialtone for a century. And then they got completely owned within the span of 5 years. Long distance is worth exactly zero today. The copper itself is worth more. Being connected in itself was worth nothing to the company that did it. Someday maybe people will look back at Facebook and say the same thing. Who knows.

BTW, non-search-related ads are a fight for eyeballs. There is a limited amount of eyeball time in the world. The graph of growing internet presence is nothing but a pyramid scheme is this regard. Ad money is not endless. Ask NBC (now, Comcast).
What measures does Kickstarter have to prevent scams where people take the money and run? Easy money will attract scams. It's only a matter of time before we hear someone made 500K and heading off on a vacation.
Not sure if this is legit or not, but here is a post from Reddit from someone claiming to be a ketamine researcher giving advice on how one could approximate this methodology on one's own:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/h3lbk/ketamine_as_a_p...

It addresses the issue of how one would do this via insufflation instead of IV. For reference here is the methodology of the actual study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22297150
And how many of these "great products" will survive for 2 years? 5? 10?
Oh god.

I just mentored at a startup event this weekend. Half the teams had no idea how they were going to make money. None. They were building products, not businesses. Many of them were subconsciously hoping that the VC fairies would visit them, and then 18 months later somebody would buy them. "Instragram!", they cried. And then I cried.

Facebook is the worst possible business to use as an example here. They are an outlier, a once-a-decade company. Building an actual ad-supported business these days requires you get massive amounts of traffic quickly, and that means that a very large percentage of your brainpower will be devoted to user acquisition, ad network optimization, and trying to decide how you feel about auto-play video ads and popunders. That is, you will always be thinking but how will we make money?

It also kills me that when talking about ways one makes money he mentions Stripe, Boku, and Kickstarter in the same breath with ad networks. Those are not business models. They are just ways that money travels. It's like saying one's business model is accepting checks.

His post, if it's relevant to anybody, is only relevant to a very small number of businesses that will take $10m-100m in venture funding and are doing something so trivial that nobody is willing to pay money for it. It's ridiculous.
This would be easy to game and would also encourage snobbery "I'm not going to friend him , he's poor"
Announcing The new bitly - must see backlash in comments
The IPO was overvalued in my opinion, but I don't think the stock price is a great indicator of the future of the company. That said, I think a decline is possible, but will it happen soon? I don't know. Maybe the backlash will come from kids whose parents are essentially building profiles for them.
I think they tried Apple tried their hand at social with Ping which has not really been successful.

However, doesn't iOS now have some kind of special integration with Twitter? That must be pretty bad for Facebook.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang comes to life off screen | Vietnam Travel News
If you're going to use a flashy javascript popup mechanism to view image links, please make sure at the very least that people whose screens aren't as wide as the image can access the close button!
Agree with some of the article. However proving that the product can make money is fundamental and validates your business. It proves customers will buy from you.

User base is only part of the problem. The question remains the sane.

So maybe the new question is:
"have you made money?"
Allowing the viewport to be user-scalable would be a helpful option. In Nexus S browser, the cube is stuck off to the side in portrait and covered up by the explanation panel in landscape.
$16bn says they wont be collapsing anytime soon. . . .
Arduino + Minecraft + Nike Fuelband
A proof of concept on linking Minecraft to a Nike Fuelband. As you play the game, a Arduino controlled swing arm moves the Fuelband.
I really, really dislike Khan Academy. I'm in high school and at least one of my teachers thinks that it's a substitute for actually teaching us. He just puts on a Khan Academy video and we watch it the whole time. Usually we watch a few of them. That, and Sal's voice makes me want to rip my hair out. He repeats things, over and over, like:

"If the box moves five... five meters... five meters per second... five meters per second."

When you have to watch fourty-five minutes of these videos, it starts getting old. Real quick.
Thanks for the securelist-link. It's indeed a better source for some technical details, also from a Kaspersky expert... But in the RT-interview the Kaspersky's chief malware expert says things that concur with what you share: "There is no reliable relation between Stuxnet and Flame as we call it…they are completely different. Because Stuxnet was a small application developed for a particular target with the specific objective to interact with industrial control systems and break them down. And Flame is a universal attacking tool kit used mostly for cyber espionage."
maybe.

if mobile ads means using geo, then the ads revenues might be better. Think "check out this new bar near you" or "here is a deal a block away". There is a lot of money chasing foot traffic in urban areas.
To me it seemed like the front page got a lot worse when the mods got rid of the reddit.com subreddit. Did anybody else observe this?
Rackspace Mail is nice, but I found the interface and features a little lacking. FastMail is extremely useful when dealing with several email accounts filing into multiple folders with multiple personalities. The new beta interface has some sleek JS and threaded messages, which puts it on par with GMail. I also trust Opera enough not to meddle with FastMail, and there haven't been any problems with the merger.

That said, I'm also not keen on Facebook owning them, but I will most likely stay unless Facebook starts trying to integrate with FastMail or something ridiculous like that. 90% of the people I email use GMail, so its not like I'll ever be completely free of Facebook or Google anyway.

If you only have one email account and/or use a desktop client, the choice gets a lot easier.
what i find interesting is that despite the large number of speakers of sub-continental languages (hindi, bengali, etc.), the use of these languages on the internet is miniscule. I suppose this reflects the fact that the subcontinental elite with internet access are comfortable with English.

I wonder if and how this will change as internet use becomes more widespread via cheap smartphones.
They have cash (quite a bit, post-IPO) and revenue. Companies with cash and revenue don't collapse, even if their stock is overvalued. Myspace didn't "collapse" either, though ultimately it lost in the market to a better competitor.

It's possible Facebook will ultimately lose too, but it won't be because of their stock value or their being "overhyped". Hell, statistically it's much more likely that they'll be beaten by a much, much smaller company (though I guess G+ might do it too).
This is a great question. I'll be quick but a lot about teaching entrepreneurship isnt teaching at all; at least not in the traditional sense. "Teaching" entrepreneurship is really teaching innovation and thinking divergently. Listing problems, figuring out solutions, finding users, selling, and yada yada yada. The important thing is to start something. A close second is to fail... A lot.

As a teacher you should focus on developing the innovator as opposed to the innovation. This happens by building self confidence in a person, something I will iterate over and over is paramount in innovation: taking risks, learning from failure, seeing opportunity in difficulty. These are the traits to have. It starts by having your 6 students start something. Right now.

I'll recommend two resources I've personally used. One is the Founders Journey class at MIT taught by Ken Zolot. I TAed this class after taking it. In a nutshell: bringing in guest speakers to talk about their experience in the context if a theme (raising rounds, pivoting, etc).
http://founders.mit.edu

The other resource is Start Labs, a non profit I cofounded over a year ago to "develop the next generation of technical entrepreneurs." We had hack nights, hackathons, pitch nights, career fairs and the "bread and butter": a 4 week accelerator called Concept to Company which took 7 teams with ideas, gave them space, a small bit of money, mentor ship, and the networks of the SF, NYC, and Boston ecosystem. It was definitely a structured program because unlike YC or TechStars we wanted to develop the people and that was our focus. We built a lot of curriculum for MIT and expanding leisurely over to Harvard as well. In any case great program tackling exactly your question.
http://startlabs.org/

To close, teaching entrepreneurship really is about taking down the curtain of this world by having experienced guest speakers and a culture supporting you as well as starting something. Just do it! Fail often, fail fast. Out failure rises new ideas, thoughts, and opportunities. Finally, through building and doing, you become more confident in yourself - a necessity...
Dream Big. Think Limitlessly. Do Fearlessly. Start Something.
I won't even get into Reddit's more serious developing issues like the explosion of casual racism.

Heh. I call it "Family Guy Racism". Or the "it's okay, I voted for Obama" syndrome.
I'm surprised this got so many upvotes. Does the author really believe that Facebook hasn't thought about this? Or that the ways they make money now are the the only ways they ever will?
Not to mention SQL isn't technically a database type, just the query language most commonly used for relational DBs. Baby/bathwater and all the usual tendencies to ignore true meanings of terms when we use them...
We want to add both of these features. It will just require a slightly different design than the native mobile versions - files because there is no "binary" type in Javascript, and Facebook/Twitter users are different because integrating with other Javascript libraries is slightly less straightforward than integrating with other native libraries. They should both be possible, though, so stay tuned!
But you don't need the lanes to go 100mph - during the morning traffic jams, they could just go 100kph (or ~60mph), taking a tenth the time and half the normal fuel consumption of a commute.

Once that happens, you can be damn sure that every new car purchase by someone that commutes will have the system.

So while you may be right that 100mph lanes aren't a good idea, the idea has a lot of merit.
Businesses need money to survive. You can't really scale your startup to 100 million users without having to pay for your servers. Product engagement and retention does not automatically bring in the cash.
العاب مكياج 
العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج العاب مكياج
This is true, but at least if you control your own backend you can do some sort of rate limiting on the server side
How do you do that without first having the users make the API calls, at which point you are already using the service and the estimate is useless..
At Storylane, we're making a platform for people to share their life stories. Everyone has experiences that give them a unique perspective on this world and we want to enable a community of asking and sharing these stories.

We would love feedback from the HN community!
I wonder if there is a service that will sync a local folder on my PC with more than one cloud service. For example, all my files in a folders are synced with Dropbox, GDrive AND SkyDrive.
"The new question to ask[...] Could this product engage and retain 100s of millions of active users? For the first time ever, hitting 100+ million active users is actually realistic."

Where the author goes on to list a small handful of internet hits and misses as examples.

Realistic? Maybe for the top of the top apps and services. The "get a bunch of users and then solve the money problem" model seems the path of the apps that hit it out of the park, oftentimes fortuitously. Choosing it as a model doesn't seem prudent.
I discovered reddit 10 months ago and was amazed at the community. Then I quickly grew tired of the boring submissions and comments. Then I discovered reddit's secret - the lesser known subreddits.

The front page of my internet looks pretty interesting to me. It has a Tolkien article, a documentary about rainforest birds, some black-hole-milky-way-gamma-ray article, a usability article (Video captioning techniques and best practices), and a ton of history and grammar discussions.
AFAIK the scalable SQL work from the 1980s was actually shipped by Tandem.
I went into the article thinking that he had written some old software bugs that are inadvertently making it difficult for some evil organization to consolidate its plans and carry out its schemes.
Parse lets you develop apps without writing any server code. For mobile apps and now also web apps, you can just write frontend code. We have a number of large apps in production using Parse - check out the testimonials at http://parse.com - so you could definitely consider it for significant use.
Good observations
For the sake of the yc brand if not for anything else, its better to put some numbers out there on what would be a reasonable stake & salary for joining a yc startup as an early employee.

val (stake,salary) = f( valuation,employeenumber)

What's a reasonable f ?

Yeah I understand its a hunch wrapped in a gamble floating in a bubble etc...but quasi-phony numbers are still useful.
"At the first one I automated some testing for them what would free up 3 people they were having to hire for that job. They didn't like it. Thats because they don't have to bear the cost associated with hiring them."

This happens because client wants automation for free. If you keep doing it manually client pays for the man power happily but once you automate despite seeing a recurring cost eliminated, they do not even want to pay for one time effort of automation.

Everything exists for a reason. These practices are adopted because of clientele.
In general I agree. Note that this is only one post of a blog about the difficulties of starting up in Greece, and it's the post that lists the positives to draw upon. It does not claim that someone from Germany should move to Greece to start his company. It claims that despite the difficulties, there are upsides one could take advantage of, and they are not negligible.
iOS does have the twitter integration. I'm not sure why Apple(or Google) and Facebook haven't worked out a similar agreement, because it's really a win/win for everyone involved.
Facebook does have data that can be used to fight fraud; e.g. "which of these 10 photos if your friend" or "which of these 10 cities did you visit last year".

Visa/Mastercard/Amex only have your transactions to go on so naturally they have spent billions building fraud tools around this data; that's not to say there are not a lot of other data points to build these tools.
For the longest time, I thought stupidity was the gravest sin. Then I discovered these Hacker News commenters and realized that middling but self-important minds are far more vexing than dumb ones.
She was one of the biggest proponents (maybe the originator?) of the 'eyeballs' valuations of internet companies.
Searching for substrings in a massive string
Abusing Forced Inline in C
Server-side logic. The difference is that traditional data flow is UserControlledCode (i.e. client-side JS) --> MyServer --> DataStore, whereas this is UserControlledCode --> DataStore. In practice you may often choose not to have the code in MyServer do anything beyond act as a pass-through, but not having that option at all seems scary. The only recourse I see is things like database schema constraints (e.g. max posts per user = 10), but that doesn't really solve the problem.

Edit: And I should add that the problem isn't just a user creating new many objects. The problem is that without code controlled exclusively by me somewhere in the middle, business logic (i.e. anything not codified in your database schema) becomes unenforceable. E.g. pull up firebug and type player.levelUp(); player.save();. Now there may be some subset of applications where business logic like this is completely unnecessary, but I can't think of many.
BTW, bz2 is kinda over. Check out xz and the parallel version pxz.
_“how will they make money?” isn’t an interesting question. The answers are all obvious._

Reminds me of the famous misquote: "Everything that can be invented, has been invented."