skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook as a photo sharing app is a fascinating example of the service being generic and the context for the service being the main focus of competition. A bar sells drinks, but providing a competitive lineup of drinks is much easier than providing a competitive context in which to consume them. Coffee shops sell coffee and wifi, but they compete against each other as contexts within which to consume coffee and wifi. As a photo sharing app, what distinguishes Facebook from its competitors is the context it provides.

The context is nothing by itself, of course, and this is what is rarely mentioned about social networking. A bar without drinks would be dry and boring: a Boys and Girls Club for adults. Similarly, the essential, defining factor of social networking -- the network, the web of connections between people -- is lame and reductive by itself. But it's the perfect context in which to share photos.

Social networking is also a good context for non one-on-one communication. (For one-on-one communication, it offers nothing except a convenient way to initiate a conversation with other Facebook users, a small advantage that can't make up for the fact that it isn't as universal as e-mail or texting.)

I suspect the growth of Facebook as measured by users and usage will depend on discovering other services for which social networking is the perfect context.
Two things:

Both facebook and google are playing catchup on social. Facebook with monetization, google with popularity. This leaves them wide open to disruption from companies that nail the fundamentals from the get go and bring significant value-add to the table.

Second, both companies view users like cattle. Just headcount to convert to dollars.

Overall my hunch is that there's a 50/50 chance that neither google nor faceebook will be king of social in 2020. There's a lot of potential for disruption right now and both of these companies are so focused on each other I doubt they'd even notice a successful upstart until it was too late. The real risk to both, I think, is small companies which don't have billion dollar obligations on their backs already.
Kicksend (YC S11) launches on Android for privately sharing all of your photos
I've been doing side-projects while supporting a family for over 8 years now and I share a lot of your experiences. One of them led to being acquihired at a funded startup in the same area. It was a lot easier when there was one kid. Now with 3, like yourself, I find it's near impossible to get any kind of consistent focus. However, I know the hours are usually there, so that's my problem more than anything.

However, I will say this. If you're thinking about starting a startup on the side, don't. That's my advice, don't do it. If you're a young hacker without kids, make a full-time go at it. If you've already got kids, save until you can. While I admire the poster's ability to juggle so many things, this cannot be maintained for more than a year, maybe two before you will come to resent one or more of your job, your family, your partners.

If you do go ahead, make office hours and stick to them. That's the only thing I've ever found to be effective in terms of relieving the need to work on it.

Of course will I take my own advice? Probably not, once you start, it's hard to stop, the allure is too tempting to scratch an itch, solve a problem, or learn a new technology. But, don't say I didn't warn you.
Falcon Heavy rocket, Dream Chaser vehicle move forward
But they were connecting people years ago. Facebook, from the perspective of their core features, has gotten only incrementally better over the last 5-6 years. And in doing so they've sucked up a huge chunk of talent.

Google over the same period has produced a huge amount of stuff, some of it (gmail, android) wildly successful. Hell, Google has even cloned facebook itself (and from a technical perspective, arguably, done it better) in that time period. And they've done it with what seems to be a very comparable talent pool. So from that perspective, yes, Facebook's engineering employees are wasted.
Google cache: http://tinyurl.com/c39mcvt
As an atheist, I just don't see the point in picking a religious fight and insulting people for their religious beliefs in a thread about managing a personal life while also creating a startup.
And that's why I explicitly said "self-contradictory bible and religious dogma". Of course the vague hippy-dippy handwaving and misused pseudoscientific buzzwords of Deepak Chopra is pretty stupid and illogical too.
Odd that you'd state that. My flickr-feed is dwindling because photographers are moving to Google+ for picasa's quality service.
Who works the longest hours?
There will be and I'm going to jolly well be the person writing it :)

(I'm going to try - 10 years of embedded followed by 10 years of business facing is a good foundation and I've spent the last 15 years on the problem in my mind waiting for the technology to arrive)
Oh, I'm willing to be surprised. And I'm willing to give Google a lot more benefit of the doubt than I am most entities at being able to execute on this stuff. But still... Glass? Seriously?
That's pretty much true, distribution for content will be a nightmare -- but that's due to the content-distributors being crazy and not so much due to the device being crazy.

So, like, just to be totally clear, the business which doesn't have this problem with videos is porn. I don't know how interested they are in Project Glass in particular, but if Project Glass becomes a way to shoot amateur porn, you can bet that there will be web sites which cater to it. Distribution rights problems will not be a main concern because it's just not a general concern in that industry -- at least, it doesn't get in the way of the day-to-day transmission of the vast amounts of data.
I was thinking the same thing. I think one of the biggest issues with the Newton was timing. We are a different people now than then. The timing is right. If they don't mess it up with weird looking hardware, then it will probably be a success.
the blocking of TPB is not an inconistency.
The net neutrality law has explicit exceptions for allowing blocking IPs / hostnames / sites via court order.

In this case the judge has decided that TPB mostly facilitates illegal downloading and that therefore a block is allowed.

This is a, technically, correct decision because the net neutrality law gives judges enough room to block websites.
The Limitations of “X for Y” Startup Descriptors
See, this is exactly the kind of comment I'd expect from Reddit.
1. i don't believe in paying third party charity

2. you think all that for the same reason I also think all that: Wishful thinking... but deep inside i can see the truth. we are the hippies-yuppies who will buy it :)

put yourself on the shoes of people hearing about the newton back then: handwriting recognition!! how wouldn't want that instead of a 3x4 phone keyboard? Turned out 99.9% prefered T9. it's all the same. we are thinking as if the implementation and day-to-day use would be perfect on such a new concept on the first try. well, odds are it wont. but in one year can get back to it and see if my money goes to one of your charities or if your money will buy me something shinny (that's one bet i'd like to lose...)
Yeah -- but I think a service that offers to handle all the server stuff for you that also requires you to set up a server has missed a step somewhere.
Up-vote, purely for not misspelling "Lose".
The language doesn't do something, so it's the developer's responsibility, and thus the developer's fault when it goes wrong.

This is a strange way to judge your tools.
No, I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is that, for whatever reason, Basecamp & 37 Signals in general doesn't strike me as having a lot of enterprise-scale customers (500+ users for me), probably because they don't go out of their way to attract that crowd.

Because of this, I don't imagine they've had to deal with issues of lots of users consuming massive amounts of resources, hence their perspective.

But I'm completely speculating here ... they do factor GB of storage in the pricing for basecamp, so there's that
Obigatory mention that the DG Nova http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova was the star of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine The Soul of a New Machine.
Man-to-dolphin conversation? Scientists can now talk like dolphins
Good to see I'm not alone! I'm 33 with 2 kids, working on http://www.koonsolo.com in my spare time. I have the advantage that my hobby is my startup: creating games. It's still hard to find the time though. My advice: get plenty of sleep to stay productive. But with a small baby, even this is sometimes hard to get.

Best of success to every spare time entrepreneur daddy! :)
I don't have the statistics in my hands, but I'm willing to bet that the transaction volume of nondigital goods is at least two orders of magnitude larger than the transaction volume of digital goods. A 1% cut of tens of trillions of dollars worldwide is worth quite a lot more than 30% of a few billions.

Granted, a worldwide payment scheme is a Very Hard Problem To Solve for many nontechnical reasons... but this is exactly the kind of problem that large, ambitious companies with lots of street cred should try to attack. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
If your data is a User object with maps and arrays, and you design a data structure which gets you the result in exactly that format, you _are_ giving up the ability to ask other questions of this data. You are giving up the ability to ask _many_ different kinds of questions (expressive) in a relatively simple way (concise).
This might be like the third blog I have read about the east coast 'doesn't get' or 'can't do' startups. The last article said the east coast could not make a facebook. Check your facts. Facebook started on the east coast.

Anyway onto this article. How can you call yourself humble when your saying someone else 'doesn't get it' or 'cant do it' That does not sound humble to me. Other then that there is no substance to your argument.

Here is my prospective:

On the west coast, your startup fails, go work at another startup, get a real job at a profitable company, that fails, sleep outside in a tent.

On the east coast your startup fails, get a real job at a profitable company, or freeze to death.
That makes sense, and speaks to me (I'm more of a Ruby guy myself.) Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Edit: and, "it looked like it would be easy" made my day :-)
Marketing.

apple made walkmans cool again. After the 80s. with marketing alone.
Author here: I'm with you. The steady success of the self-driving cars has made me take some of these other projects much, much more seriously.

Maybe it's simply the Thrun factor?
Walt Mossberg takes "patent troll" Nathan Myhrvold to task (Video)
I've heard this same quip a lot, and I don't understand it either. I pored through a lot of PHP documentation to write an angry blog post about it, and it was unbelievably painful; documentation for simple extensions was broken into a dozen tiny useless pages, obvious cross-references were missing, similar items are documented in radically different places, etc. There's a lot of text, sure, but it's poorly organized and not all equally useful.
Nobody is arguing that we should discard bad infographics.
Fine fine. Let's just say that the last "blank-slate" OS to acheive commercial success did so, what, 35 years ago? If I'm assuming too much transparency in the NVRAM technology (and honestly, I don't think I am -- DRAM is hardly transparent already, c.f. three levels of cache on the die of modern CPUs), then you're assuming far more agility in the OS choice than is realistic in the market.
Fixing the Middle East, in 75 words or fewer
Sorry, I'm a bit confused. Before we point fingers to look at others, mind clarifying a few things for me?

These are honest and serious questions, if you feel more comfortable talking by email I welcome it.

Are you saying:

- All belief systems are identical, incomplete and short sighted as the one you are speaking of?

- How much of what you believe is based on judging your own experience with one belief system and applying it to every other belief system?

- Have you actually learnt about each belief system yourself?

- Is there no other way to see things except how you see them right now?

- Is there no way anything can exist outside of your understanding?

- People compartmentalize themselves but it's different if you compartmentalize anyone who has a belief you don't agree with?

- There is no interpretation of any teaching that is remotely religious or spiritual that could have any scientific backing

- If a particular experience of a group involves a bible or a dogma, any other group that doesn't have a bible or dogma is as well painted with the same brush?

If you're curious where I'm coming from I'll try to clarify up front. I'm not a particularly religious or non-religious person. I don't have a clue what kind of trauma you've been through with the bible or religious dogma as it's not a belief system I've first hand experienced. I guess one could say my religion is curiosity that leads me to have insight on myself.

Fanatics look the same to me when they say their way is the right and only way.
My tiny Canadian province is know for mussels, lobster and potatoes none of which appear on the map.
I'd imagine it's an exaggeration of some aspect of his real creative process. I wouldn't be surprised if he does whistle into a tape recorder while watching a rough cut of the film, I'd just be surprised if that's all he does.

Actually it seems like a damn good way to write music for a film. First you figure out the basic themes at leitmotifs that you want to use. Then you watch the film a few times and whistle or hum basically how you want the music to go, so that you can match the music to the moment on a second-by-second basis. Hand over the tape to an assistant and let them worry about turning this vague musical shape into the outline of a complete score; once you've got the score you can worry about the details.
Reid Hoffman: Social Innovation isn’t Over
>Most aren't ready to be co-founders, technical or not.

I think this is the crux of the matter. Most people aren't ready to be co-founders.
How can you argue that both "tied to the web" and "frameworks" are benefits, yet keep a straight face?

Frameworks in any language plug the language into the web—that's what they exist to do.

And if you're using the parts of PHP that are tied to the web, then you must not be using a framework, or those would surely be wrapped.

...but those parts of PHP must suck, or you wouldn't need to use a framework!

So then... PHP is good because it solves the problems it causes? I don't get it.
I think the chart would do better if removed from the arbitrary constraint of XKCD's page framing; if, for instance, a suitably large canvas was used, so that the eyes could immediately grasp the comparatively minimal exposures from common radiation sources to (say) the gigantic exposures from Chernobyl.

It's clearly within Munroe's capability to make such a graphic; he did this one on a deadline. I'm not criticizing Munroe (though: not an XKCD fan), just making an objective assessment of the graphic.

And, like I said: here's a case where a graphic, even an imperfect one, probably communicates rich information more effectively than prose. Unlike the "relative sizes of data" infographic upthread.
> Which is the reason I upvoted every single of your comments.

And yet people have down voted.
Amazed that one of the biggest changes is something she missed. How mobile tech changed the face and effectiveness of protest, from Egypt and the Mid-East to Occupy and ongoing (current protests in Quebec).

Also missing is how effective live video -- especially Ustream -- has been in bypassing the MSM TV news to show the actions of police directly. And how such footage has been used to void arrests of protesters by perjuring police.
You must mean Scala and F#, which I haven't used. Haven't seen this feature in OCaml or Clojure.
Filmmakers don't work with compressed video files (which I picked precisely because they're inherently a stream, and because I'm not kidding when I say that they're basically all the data there is in this world). And seem to be doing quite well with DRAM anyway.
> one can imagine those structures being just as transparent and ready for inspection as modern filesystems

Then why not use filesystem APIs to talk about these structures? There's nothing about opendir() that requires it be backed by a block device instead of nvram.
This reminds me of a Google Doc found on the /r/keto reddit: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFFXn_Uve5uh0qtqdAa0HvpE...

I really like the concept of being able to spend an afternoon cooking meals for the week. Especially if the recipes are simple and office-friendly. So I can definately tell what FounderMeals is.

As far as buying the product, I would rather pay $20 for this as cook book with the recipes than a monthly fee. Or maybe $10 for a "Starter" book and $5 each for different "addon" books (different cuisine, new recipes, etc).
bugs happen. sometimes the cheapest bugfix is to reboot.
+1 for saying "key/value" instead of "key-value".
1.) Fair enough
The biggest technical achievement of Facebook has been scaling Facebook. They've solved a lot of difficult technical problems to do so. And News Feed, Connect, and Open Graph are all huge steps forward in Facebook's ambition, although the third-party ecosystem still leaves something to be desired. Thank god that Facebook killed Evite, but now I'm hoping for someone/something to kill Washington Post Social Reader.
Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold: I’m Not Ashamed of Suing People
A couple of weeks, probably, depending on how much I feel like working on it. It was designed to be modular and easily extracted, but still needs some cleanup work and has a few nasty bugs I'd like to fix first.
I'm sure you wish to make a point -- please don't make everyone guess what you mean, just spell it out.
I believe luminaobscura is referring to the following position: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...
Striving for Civility in the Ruby and Rails Community
I like that quote. But conquering complexity also leads to competitive advantage, differentiation, and barriers to entry. It's nice to be able to defend your products and services from imitators.
Well said crusso, I'm not sure of the point of militant secularism either. How the hell does it have to do with startups?

Bringing it back to discussion and finding relevance..

It's fine and wonderful to have different points of view to be able to discuss and learn from... but when one brings a "you are a _____ so i think everything you say is ____", it seems as presumptuous and blind as the blindness being pointed out.

It just reeks of the kind of closemindedness no one likes to see or put anyone through, and is frankly kind of embarrassing to have to read through. Respect as a currency gets so much further, no matter what the subject is.
Agreed as it sits now... but maybe the current form factor is the limit of today's technology. And maybe the insights they get from even attempting to develop that kind of interface puts them 5 years ahead when someone invents a holographic projector that clips onto your shirt collar. But if you don't even try it, then you don't even get the "maybe".
Join the rest of us Luddites. It's a liberating world out there.
Crazy! I was looking into how much it would cost to get 500GB of RAM, looked like it was going to be around $3500. I hadn't even considered this...
> How do you make wearing a headpiece cool?

that's simple, you ask apple to make it.
But... many people think they're doing the 'whole new paradigm' thing, when really, it's just a regular business/idea/service/product, and they don't have the insight or experience to know that.
You'll have to talk to tych0 about that. I'm just responding to the idea of setting aside maintainability in order to produce working code.
It's effectively impossible to avoid being visible to Facebook, since hundreds of thousands of websites implement the Facebook "Like" button which makes huge amounts of your browsing activity visible to them (by IP address if you're not logged into Facebook).
That's a tough question. To me, it seems like it would come down to social life (including dating) and the startup. I know that when my wife is out of town, once the kids are asleep, I've got almost a full work day's worth of uninterrupted time to work. But, I'm free from worry about socializing.
I briefly read the chapter on persistence -- basically you're doing what RRD originally did (one file per metric), except without actual round-robin storage, before RRDcache was born. The long-term performance implications could be worrisome. Unless you're backing this with solid-state storage, if you have many thousands of metrics, the seek capability of the disk may not be able to keep up with the I/O flush rate.
> In an organization with 30,000 people using BaseCamp you're still not likely to get > $150 worth of COGS in data storage, compute, or bandwidth since all of that data still has to be intentionally, manually created by a person.

I hadn't actually thought about that. good point. However, I think you forgot to factor in consumption of said resources. Just as a wild example I can upload a 50MB video by myself, if 1000 people in my 5000 person company view that video, thats 48GB in bandwidth that somebody has to pay for.

> I don't know if a flat / capped price model like Jason's will work for a more service-oriented product that integrates deeper into the organization and touches parts of a company's automation, like a payment processing gateway or a web analytics system. What type of COGS would a web analytics service incur for a website with millions of uniques a month?

I think this was more along what I was (very clumsily) trying to say. A resource intensive service wouldn't work that well with this capped pricing model.
How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making
While I look forward to that future, realistically nvm ram is going to be at least as pricey as ssds or volatile ram, which means that a more likely in between approach that tries To minimize the amortized io between fast nvm (our ram replacement) and cheap and relatively slow nvm (hd or ssd).
There's a doctor named Paley in Florida who specializes in lengthening limbs. I've talked to many of his patients and their parents.

Most doctors, when presented with a child who has one short leg, recommend amputation (the difference in length causes hip and back problems down the line). I'm sure the doctors could easily find out about Paley if they looked into it.

The parents I've talked to are the few who have refused to accept that they have no choice and have done their own research. My heart aches for the kids whose well-intentioned parents didn't question their doctor.
Should Facebook Buy RIM? Inside Tech's Hottest New Acquisition Rumour
Why seriously? Why build a web browser? If Chrome is to make the web a better platform for serving ads, then Glass is to make you a better platform for receiving ads. And in the process, they trade you some utility for being a marketing sponge.

And also push computer vision and pervasive HCI further forward. Sort of a weird deal, but overall... not wholly awful. Those patents will expire eventually!
It's not the device, it's the applications people will crave. Think about these apps for your glasses:

- adBlocker to remove ads from your view

- first person shooter missions with google maps integration. All you need is an empty cow-pasture.

- architects/renovators guiding people through their new/renovated house before the contract' signed.

- ...

You're suffering from a serious lack of realism if you discard them based on the camera quality. The iPhone drove R&D for cameras we have now, same will happen for these gizmos.

Edit: The only real opposition I see is another wave of reports on the impact of having a non-stop wireless RF device next to your skull.