skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, the monetary aspects of the second scenario justify the 'neurotypical' interpretation.

We assume generally that dollars are valuable to people, and they prefer more to fewer. So this is always in someone's 'intent set' even if something else (satisfying thirst) is their primary intention.

We further assume that in a voluntary exchange, the buyer 'intended' to pay the agreed price (even if they are in practice simply a price taker). They could have chosen another purchase after seeing the price; some potential buyers do. Another 'bundled' feature about which the buyer credibly declares indifference ('commemorative cup') gives no information about 'intent', but willingness to pay a certain price always does.

It's fascinating that such a simple scenario is often interpreted differently by Aspergers-style thinkers.
"You know what good developers do when a competitor launches?..."

Good Internet entrepreneurs might do this. Good developers might be good Internet entrepreneurs but then again , they might not be. I know I'm a pretty good developer and I have some ideas about cool web applications which might make some money and some ideas about the most effective ways to compete. But, you know something? I won't kid myself that my development skills or my native intelligence would automatically tell me how to respond to competition. I respect marketers, managers and investors who literally make it their business to know how to compete.
Good support staff ignore the rules in situations like these, and good managers let them.
Seconded. I have google alerts and it seems that twitter (and github) are indexed almost instantly.
like on hacker news?
Not really keen on this post. The "minimalism" that 37signals preaches has to do with feature creep–NOT the difficulty of the core problem you're app is solving.

If you choose to build an app that is a "simple solution to an obvious problem" then, yes, obviously it will be easy for competitors to emerge.

The author starts on the right track, but ended with an extremely weak conclusion. Of course developing RoR has helped them. That doesn't mean another developer can't reap similar benefits from releasing open source software. Heck, I bet there are developers who have benefited from releasing rails plugins.

IMO, 37s hit home run by (a) building and releasing rails and (b) initially creating products that are targeted at many of the people who use rails (basecamp & campfire are for developers/freelancers).

If they built rails and then came out with an app for insurance agents, well ... there obviously wouldn't be the same amount of overlap

Instead of articles like this, I'd like to see someone say "here's how to translate Getting Real methodologies" into X industry.
Could be selection bias. People who got a better offer at Google tend not to trumpet it, they just work there and keep quiet about salary. After all, why make your employer think that they're overpaying you?
That is right. It has been good - better than anything else in Tipjoy at that level of pledges.

I think the UX is part of it. It's clearer how to use the twitter widget and how to pay than our other widgets. Also, the advocates behind it like @Pistachio are really active. That helped a lot, but is difficult to measure, aside from retweets.
What I care about are the limits of products which are ready for prime time, or that we can easily get to that point.

I haven't heard much about H-Store but it doesn't look like it's ready for production use.
VCs need to stop investing in tech personally, and instead get a reputable tech savvy brokerage house type deal that understands tech and will keep the money out of lemming startups.

as long as there's money in lemming work, the lemmings will exist...
Google Testing “Preferred Sites” Personalization
Tokyocabinet and its ancillary bits are nice, but lets not pretend that master-master replication makes a database _distributed_. Once you can get that number of masters over three we can talk...
Genetic Programming: A Novel Failure
Would this method scale? As in, if I spent $8 in advertising, could I make $12?
It happens even if the comment I'm downvoting was posted a minute ago.
I would kill for some Jeopardy torrents.
Cocoa with love: Demystifying NSApplication by recreating it
Heroku Garden
Interview with Matt Gallagher (Cocoa with Love) on Programatic UI Testing
I much prefer this multi-perspective article:
http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/01/20/13-ways-of-lo...
He does not bother mentioning that it does not work with internet explorer. It would be nice if ie already was that irrelevant.
I'd like to add ...
How to watch all your downloaded shows on your TV:

1. Get a DVD player with Divx playback support (I have a $50 one from costco that also includes a usb port)
2. Convert your downloaded file to Divx using ffmpegx on a Mac
http://www.ffmpegx.com/
3. Burn converted file to a blank DVD or copy to USB memory stick
4. Enjoy
Millions of people still use Windows 98. What's your point?
Try adding some content to your reply, axod. Start by responding to these:

* IRC runs its own custom protocol, which firewalls go out of their way to block.

* IRC has archaic limits like 7-bit clean text and short lines.

* IRC requires custom client software.

* IRC can't natively include binary data, images, or rich content.

* IRC can't provide transcripts without more archaic software to log in and watch channels.

* IRC's authentication support is significantly worse than that of the web.

* IRC's authorization features are limited to chankeys and +i.
AMD to build fastest supercomputer for... games
I agree with your criticism - it is a simplified model, and models only give a simpified view of the world. As you point out, ideally there are lots and lots of criteria that should be considered, and that probably have a measurable effect.

The big problem is getting the data to do so: You'd have to take some statistically significant amount of projects from the very start (which is where the most interesting part happens in relation to living or dying) and follow them closely until they either die or become successful. It would be an extremely interesting project though.
I have a low opinion of pirates, and an ever lower opinion of lazy pirates.
Have you ever used Spirit?

They are hilariously low budget. Being a cheap man I used their service from Detroit->Vegas (it was about 100$ round trip). They have one of the lowest level of services of any airline in north america (but thats why the prices are so cheap).

They also are the only airline I have been on that offered bulk discounts for beers.
IRC is proven. It has kick ass features to deal with abuse, spam etc. (You know, the things you need when you actually have users)

It's in use on millions of websites. It's the most used groupchat protocol on the internet.

So I'm not quite sure where you get your data from.

Maybe you personally hate IRC for some reason, but to say "I can't imagine why anyone would waste time using it in 2009." Is just idiotic.
New Year's Resolutions from startup CEOs
The issue is on both sides - there are both "lemming" entrepreneurs and "lemming" vcs who deserve not to be funded/funding others and there needs not to be finger pointing.
I wonder how this judge would value the damage of stealing fruit from a grocery store considering wholesale price, retail price, spoilage of inventory, that the thief might not have bought the fruit if he hadn't stolen it, etc.
You're on crack. IRC is not the most used groupchat protocol on the Internet. Most Internet users have never heard of IRC, but the overwhelming majority of them have an IM address somewhere that does group chat.

By "in use on millions of websites", I presume you're cheating by saying that any website that mentions IRC is "using" IRC.
It was enough 6 months ago.

Today, the only extra thing you need to add to secure funding is that instead of your data coming from Excel, it must come Google Analytics.

Replace projections with reality. That's all it takes.

http://fairsoftware.net - geeks and businesses combined
Pascal's Wager and Climate Change
Obviously the big ones - ustream, jtv...

Here's a few more.

http://www.quantcast.com/p-1as4Vqt4eFyrI/traffic/syndicators
The author seems quite happy with his daily morning routine of classifying user agent strings, exemplifying Milton's satanic logic: "The Mind is its own Place, and there within, can make a Hell out of Heaven, or a Heaven out of Hell."
A new 'pair of eyes' in space
Guess you don't click on peoples profiles much...
"Now if you had said that there was a correlation between a particular data access pattern and the interest in a non-relational datastore you might be onto something," - actually, that's what I was really getting at here with my comment that "They know what they are doing, and why they are doing it." These are not people who are puttering around with a few million rows and throwing up their hands in disgrace because they screwed up their keys. These are people who have tried everything to make RDBMS work, and RDBMS just couldn't do it. Repeatedly. (Seems like every major web site tells that story.)

RDBMS are awesome. They are not the absolute last word in data storage. (Heck, RDBMS as they stand today aren't even the last word in relational data storage.)
This is significant for entrepreneurs. Apple was absolutely on to something when it said: Think Different. Why think different? Because the masses are wrong. (In fact, the masses are asses. =) ) And this is why many startups and entrepreneurs are perceived to be pursuing inane, crazy or irrelevant ideas. Prevailing wisdom isn't, and it takes a crazy dreamer to ignore the massive and overwhelming tidal wave of group think.
Try clicking the "demo page" link - it can be animated :)
EC considering removing Internet Explorer from Windows
In a preliminary ruling, the European Commission told Microsoft that linking Internet Explorer to its dominant Windows operating system violates EC rules.
But everything else is not profit, its 120-80 = 40k left for all the other costs, including a wage...
It's not my fault you're building a company on a protocol from 1989. =)

You know, I made the same mistake in 1998; we started (and got funded) a company that basically took IRC and:

* Added arbitrary TLV encoded data to messages

* Used link state routing to solve the netsplit problem

* Used FEC to provide reliability over the resulting mesh network

But even though you've kept current on IRC and I wrote it off a long time ago, I'm pretty sure I can still win an argument that IRC is archaic and ready to go.
Oh come on - this is just automated systems gone nuts. Happens all the time - people are used to it but it releases all sorts of stimulants in the brain to get upset and worked over something.
HAML Brings Seaside  To Ruby
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on your front-end work, but why-oh-why would you use IRC as your backend? Icb is "proven" too.
See items

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440276

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437333

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438639

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439233
Graph Visualization for Apache log files
I don't really want to argue about this all over again but I would be remiss to not mention that property and data are not easily equated. To answer your supposition, he probably would value the damage of stealing fruit as the market value of the fruit and possibly the loss of sales from not having the inventory. It's pretty clear that the second consideration does not apply to music.
Welcome to finance!

Seriously though, when I worked in finance I only saw _one_ model that understated what actually happened (Projections Vs. Actual). The rest were "optimistic".
Django: Setting Up an Experimental Verison of Your Site Using Multiple Databases
Anyone who bitches about this is NEVER going to be a good entrepreneur.

Good entrepreneurs know that they've screwed up in the past and they WILL screw up again, so they don't throw the first stone.

It's the same way that Lance Armstrong won't laugh at a cyclist who falls off his bike on the Tour de France.
There is actually a company called Tunaverse (http://tunaverse.com) that is doing/working on this. You can stream any of your media files from your home computer to your phone or any other device with an internet connection.

I have no connection to this company other than I met one of the founders a year ago and he was telling me what they were working on. I haven't talked to him since and don't know how far along they have come, but their website is still up (just checked) and looks like they have the client running for Windows Mobile devices at this point.
Meh seems to be working fine for me thanks :)
Plenty of people are building companies based on HTML also you know. I don't quite see your point...

Those problems you 'solved' are not problems any user cares about though. They want IRC to be easy, and usable as a webchat.
Probably, every time you see some crazy customer service story like this, the culprit is an ill-considered rule pushed down on service staff.

Telemarketing (outbound sales or inbound sales or support) is the standard I-don't-want-to-bag-groceries job for kids and young adults in a lot of midwest cities, and I did my time. The truth of this is not to be underestimated. It varies from company to company (and number to number within a company), but very often the call center employees are given rigid, obsolete support systems, scripts, and no latitude to do anything to help. In fact, it's also common for the care reps to not be employed by the company you're intending to call for support, rather a telemarketing firm that specializes in grinding out phone calls. I worked for one agency, representing three or four big name companies (names anyone in tech would recognize) and I don't think I ever met an employee of the companies we were representing.

I also don't get too wound up about international support for this reason. If these companies wouldn't give any power to people three states away with no language barrier (upstream or downstream) there's no reason whatsoever to expect that a company has given someone in another hemisphere the ability to flex in any way at all.
Digital Needle - A Virtual Gramophone
The comments he's referring to are hilarious:

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/experiments-in-philoso...

I can't imagine spending hours writing essays with elaborate 'rational' arguments to defend one interpretation. If somebody told me that my interpretation was abnormal I would just shrug my shoulders. It's clear to me that there's no logical reason that one answer is correct.
Oh I totally agree, the world did not need a BitTorrent/IRC combination in 1999, or in 2009.

But the world certainly wants to be able to upload files and images into group chats. No user cares about IRC; they want group chat to be easy as using a website.
While it is important for SEO, I think it is more important to not be locked in.

If there was a policy change on a 3rd party platform, you are forced to accept it or lose all existing links. This is important for usability! As a user, all existing links ceasing to function would be bad. So the ability to move becomes VERY costly.

If it was on a subdomain, you could move to another platform, add redirects if needed and not have a substantial part of your online presence controlled by a 3rd party.
For those of us who cannot watch it: what's the scoop?
Agreed, if you are already a programmer, you'll love this thing. Digital electronics is a fairly simple gap to bridge if you are already a hacker.
As already pointed out, you severely underestimate the value of winning the hearts of IT. If you are an IT guy at some company, and they want an internal chat app, they are going to ask you.

Even if what you are saying is true, you've missed an all-important middle step. They won the hearts of the nerds. The nerds wrote blog posts, subscribed to their blog. They got picked up by the nerd media outlets. This turned into actual media attention. Their page rank is high. They have numerous "real media" write ups. They have their own wikipedia page. To your average "boss", they are "legit".
I have yet to see a good case made for when abstracting HTML back is a "really great idea".
Probably wouldn't work in the US, too many mashups.
Run your MacBook without a battery and throttle the performance?
Capture a webcam video through browser-based flash app?
Anyone know of a standalone flash SWF or hosted solution/api to seamlessly integrate webcam video upload through my browser? I have an idea for an app that would let users upload a video of themselves and I'm wondering if anyone has had to build something like that.

Similar concepts are the Youtube QuickCapture interface, Face In Hole, Snap.io, Facebook's 'Post Video To Wall' feature.

Please let me know if you've come across a good solution. Google searches are yielding null.
The research calls into question decision-making bodies that operate by consensus, Berns said. For example, in the U.S. legal system, many cases are decided by the unanimous judgment of the members of a jury.

"You can't separate those judgments from the fact that you have 12 people who have to come to a unanimous decision, and have to conform their opinion to each other, so of course it will distort how they view evidence," he said.

I wish the article expanded a little more on that point... It's both interesting and terrifying.
Data Analysis and Visualization with Excel, R and Google Tools
Why not create a framework that is not platform specific, like AIR?

What are the great hooks into the OS that are so necessary that a person can't write an app thats run on all three major platforms (or at least have the option to)?
Good support staff eventually move out of support roles. Very few companies value support employees and consequently, very few support employees feel obliged to help the company and their customers.
If you were building a website, would you use HTML, which completely sucks and is an abomination, or would you create a fantastic new system with its own browser?
CNN And Microsoft Labs To Capture "The Moment" With Photosynth
I would use HTML, but I really don't think HTML is an abomination. Whereas IRC clearly is, and it's not hard to replace, unlike HTML.

You could probably change Mibbit to use the MibbitChat protocol and most of your users would never care.
Weren't Apple's first machines built by two guys named Steve in a garage?
Why do you assume that's not my longer term plan?

I already layer things ontop of IRC such as typing notify, recent chat on channel join etc...

IRC is a simple, solid chat protocol. It's about as ugly and broken as HTML IMHO.

You don't get users by forcing them to use some swanky new protocol/system off the bat. That's a recipe for quick failure.
Fair enough, although it raises the question - is its obscurity its entire comparative advantage? I suppose additionally, since it is a paid product (with the free version having severe limitations) it is unlikely to be popular enough to draw the ire of the IT folks, and everyone has a client installed already (browser).
Poll: Do you OpenID?
I've noticed a few sites using OpenID as their only source of login -- you can't register on their site, you have to use an external OpenID provider.

I'm curious HN: How many of you guys have (and use) an OpenID account?
I have an OpenID account, and actively use it.
I have an OpenID account, but do not use it because ....
I don't have an OpenID account.
The real amazing part of Seaside is how is uses continuations to turn the http request/response cycle inside-out. HAML doesn't appear to do anything like that, so comparing it to Seaside seems misguided.
I wouldn't call HAML "really great", but after using it for a few months I can say it's a pleasant improvement over writing straight HTML. It's just a matter of taste.
Could you make it less "push", so that when someone sent a special message to http://www.textmarks.com/ service, then textmark was configured to fetch the info from your URL, and respond ?

Are you sure that in West Africa receiving text messages will be free, and that you will be able to do international text messages ?
Congratulations Elliott, you've invented a new ad product.
Needs another option in my opinion: I have an OpenID account, and sometimes use it.
I have an OpenID account via Yahoo - but I have no idea what my login/username/URL would be.

I think its a usability issue, here is a great document discussing the usability hurdles : http://developer.yahoo.com/openid/bestpractices.html
I have an OpenID account, and sometimes use it.
added. I'm really interested in seeing how many users have OpenID - I'm skeptical that even the technical savvy crowd of Hacker News uses OpenID much. Sadly.
Ask HN: How many ways can I fail?
First, I respect the readership here, have learned it the hard way, the way I learn anything at all. Before any digg or reddit or twitter SEO advisory board, or even AdWords, I want to run my probably illegal site by the toughest crowd I know, all of you.

Over the past month I've written the site at http://pandawin.com. My question is simple. I am not asking for how to make it work, because I can think of one or two ways. I just wanna know, if anything, the first number that comes to mind as to the ways it can fail. Not asking for moral support or validation.

If the foremost way I can fail is that this is spam, please remove it. I don't really want to field insults over this.

I ask because, either out of honesty or ignorance (you be the judge)-- if I can possibly do it, then why isn't everyone else, already?
can't you just add a person in your phone book called "fuck"? thats how I taught my iPhone "twitter" and "flickr"
Microsoft to take to the “sky” with App Store, MobileMe competitors next month?
when you're writing HAML, you're programming more and marking up less . . .If you like programming and you don't like writing markup, then the advantage is you have more fun.

I second that. I used Sinatra and HAML when I wrote Feedstomper.com and the whole thing just felt lighter and more fun than some Rails apps I've written (when I was also using erb).

Granted, the whole concept was lighter than those apps, but still -- I like HAML.

One issue: sometimes you can stumble over javascript:
http://b.lesseverything.com/2008/2/19/haml-doesn-t-like-java...

Oh, and if you're interested in Sinatra (and why not, while we're waiting on Mrailerbs), you can learn it from just this page:

http://github.com/bmizerany/sinatra/tree/master
It makes a lot of sense. Some of Cisco's recent products, the ASA comes to mind, are essentially x86 servers to begin with. Also, while the VMWare Infrastructure client is pretty handy, an IOS-like virtual machine management console would be a real win for us command line aficionados.
A few of my friends who use this site were surprised when I told them how it works. I bet you'd be surprised how many people here use both technologies separately but not together.

But, I could see it being off-topic here too. Not entirely shocked or offended that it was killed.
sorry for the duplicate. i posted just as hn went down. as i clicked a second time i wondered whether it checked for double posts (no duplicate siblings). guess i have my answer.

i don't see a "delete" option, though i've seen '[deleted]' before. maybe that's from moderators.

[EDIT: so I see the 'delete' option for this comment. must disappear after time passes.]
It wouldn't be a depressing party until Microsoft shows up, and throws something mediocre into the punch.
See, that's the common misconception with PLT. While it was built for education, it's really a nice full featured system for any use. Just use something other than the "Beginning Student" language.