skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Timing _is_ important. For example, even with fast DSL, it takes an hour before you can watch a torrent while stuff on Hulu or iPlayer starts right away. The files are larger, but who cares? Most people are time limited, not transfer limited.

It's not inconceivable that a high bandwidth broker that trans-codes large static files into streaming media (especially if coupled with a quality down converter) would be beneficial for some uses.

However, the bandwidth and computational power required, plus the difficulty of explaining what it did and how to use it, plus the availability of services like Megastic, Hulu and iPlayer, would probably make such a service a good candidate for the dead pool.
- But it won’t be because of the competition

Pretty sure competition can be the reason for all the others.

Don't have an audience? Your competitor has a better product.

Running out of cash? Your competitor is hogging up all the audience, preventing you from making money.

Getting frustrated? Your competitor stops you from being successful, which causes frustration.

Going through emotional rollercoaster? Your competitor keeping kicking you down every time you start succeeding.

Getting excited about something else? Once again, blame the competitor, who is stopping you from being excited about your current project
Regulation is everywhere. Let's see who benefits.
Congratulations. You've just created a giant seedbox. That's all this is.

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to stream HD movies (or standard def movies for that matter) over a 56k connection.

So I download my files remotely and have them be searchable by anyone else on the service. Privacy much?
Introducing fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.
Thanks for the history lesson, but it doesn't backup your statement that everybody uses Windows because "everybody uses Windows". Obviously there's not an objective bone in your body, but I'll continue the charade anyway just for fun.

Do you remember the lines of customers waiting to buy Windows 95 the week that it was released? Do you really think that was because "everybody was already using Windows"? No. It was because of all the improvements. Nobody even used Windows 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0. It wasn't until Windows 3.11 that anyone seriously used Windows. And it wasn't because IBM handed it to them on a silver platter.

"Microsoft has always been a "Me-too" player..."

FYI, That's complete and utter bullshit. If they were only a "me-too" player they wouldn't have a huge R&D department. They wouldn't have been the ones to make the mouse wheel popular. They wouldn't have come out with the XBox. They wouldn't have invented LINQ. Do you have any idea what you're talking about or are you just a hater with a tin-foil cap on?

"Microsoft is alive because they have the best system for people in power to control those that they employ."

Wrong. Microsoft offers the best platform for developers and users to control _the computer_. Where did you get all of this stuff about people controlling other people? You are starting to sound like a crack pot conspiracy theorist.

The reason that I use Windows, quite simply, is that it generally lets me do what I want, the way that I want to do it. And that's the same answer you'll likely get from anyone who enjoys using Windows. I can't say the same for Linux or for Apple although I have used both extensively. All that Apple offers is ultimate lock-in and Linux is way too fragmented and unorganized to be useful on anything but a server which is where I put it to use for my company.

I also love Vista _because_ of all the improvements. It runs on 3 of the HTPC's in my house because Vista Media Center pretty much kicks the ass of XP Media Center, Apple's Front Row, Linux MythTV or XBMC. So, there are definite improvements over past versions. Of course trolls like yourself won't have anything to say about that, will you?

"When Microsoft runs an ad campaign instead of fixing Vista bugs"

Gee, steal lines from Apple much? Exactly what bugs are you talking about? Can you even think of one? Like I said...I use Vista everyday and I don't have a problem with it, so no I don't think of it as a failure and I feel just fine defending it.

The horse and buggy metaphor stands up just fine because there were many failed attempts at making an automobile before someone actually did it. There's nothing wrong with failure. I love failure. I love failing. If nobody ever failed, we wouldn't know anything.
There are at least twice as many i could pick, but here are some of my favorites.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219804 - Poor people consume more conspicuously than rich people, wealth measured relative to peer group

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133282 - Story about SR-71 Blackbird crash

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303666 - The "Luke Arm" for amputees

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318827 - How to bribe your way into expensive restaurants
only started keeping stats 4 years ago, I would think since then any decline would be windows lowest; not to mentin the decline is less than 1 percent
Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.
Sam Schillace came to a Bootstrapper Breakfast last year, he has started more than a dozen firms (some of them more short-lived than others). He felt that they got a huge boost from Tim O'Reilly putting them on stage before a Microsoft keynote to set up a number of questions about "Word on the Web" and that they were in the right place at the right time to trigger a bidding war. They definitely had a lot of experience but there was a considerable amount of fortunate timing involved. There is a short interview with Sam here http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/blog/2008/10/01/sam-sc...
Their robots.txt shows they allowed Google (at an extreme 3-minutes-between-fetches crawl-delay), but no other search engines, nor the Internet Archive.

Otherwise, a tool like 'Warrick' might get back a significant portion of the content -- especially any that was old and well-inlinked. As it stands, maybe they can scrape a little from Google's cache.

Warrick: http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/
True, but I am more a mouse type of guy. If I am mousing around, I hardly ever touch the keyboard, so this doesn't help me.
Especially one that only contains two drives...
I've bought a few presents on Etsy. Currently the customer experience is good (particularly nice personal touches from the vendors).

I worry about its future (will it fill with rubbish when the bulk vendors find it?) but at present I give it a warm recommendation.
Oh, hey - I remember Twistori from when it first came out :) Great app, really like it.

Twhoops works the same way - it's just that using Rails made a couple of things easier for me. It's not really an app at all - but if I did ever want to add serious functionality to it, all the fiddly bits are in place thanks to Rails.
CEOWORLD Magazine
Want to reach millions of passionate readers and make a difference!

“CEOWORLD.BIZ is the only magazine written strictly for CEOs and their peers. As the leading source of intelligence for and about CEOs, it provides ideas, strategies and tactics for top executive leaders seeking to build more effective organizations.
Group Releases Tool to Unlock iPhone 3Gs
Gödel's ontological proof
The Code Book by Simon Singh
The biggest flaw I see in all of this is... you can't download files at 1gbps. It's not that there isn't 1gbps speeds in the world, it's the fact that most datacenters (and by most I mean 99.9%) don't have more than 100mbps uplinks. They have multiple uplinks, but these are usually spread across dozens, if not hundreds, of servers.

You can only download as fast as the server puts out.
i don't think going WHOOSH as he hit send qualifies it argument as a straw man. Irrelevant at worst. Tangent at best.

What if he had just decided to call you an old bag. Would that be a strawman? It's not implying that you presented not being a bag as an argument.
He's got some good ideas, but most are politically intractable.
The last time I saw something like this was way back as a LiveJournal meme. It reappeared two months later as "Pay $5 to see all the people who wanted to hook up with you".

That's when they made all their money. Sinister.
Haha, that'd just be hilarious.
Indeed, Blaine Cook was one of the founders of the OAuth protocol, while he was working at Twitter two years ago, presumably for Twitter.

So yeah, I'd like to know what happened as well.
"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. "

Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.
Nothing is ever bug free. The only thing the Big Table team can hope for is "statistically unlikely to contain a serious bug in the code paths commonly executed by our high traffic products".
I can't believe that they didn't have any backups. It's not hard to do.

My operation is way smaller, and I have a cron script that runs once a week to dump the database, zip it, and then transfer it to a backup server.

This is one the first things that I set up. It really should be the first thing any company with user-generated content to do.
(because everyone believes their shit will change the world)

I've never done anything that I felt would change the world. I just want to create something that makes finding tickets easier and more enjoyable. Somebody else can change the world.
If I were head of product development in Apple right now, what I would do is:

1. Change the behaviour of Mac OS X to match Windows in terms of Window Minimizing, access to desktop, file sorting and so on. Simply, make the transition a lot more painless

2. License out Mac OS X for specially designated high end machines by big vendors. For example, make a VAIO version of Mac OS X that works only with those laptop

3. Expand the Apple App store to also become an OS X App store.

4. Add a feature to the iPod and iPhone that only works with Mac OS X. For example, some type of 3D file manager that 'requires' OS X to work

5. Offer some type of open source framework that allows virtualisation across platforms like the iPhone, Web and other OSes
IPhone/Web Mockup PDFs
True; on the other hand, you don't exit beta if you have a known data corruption bug.
A reminder also to keep a local copy of your blog, or whatever, that, for all you know, is hosted like this.
The problem of "fat tails" has been known in finance for a long time, and there are plenty of models in which the distribution of price increments has a higher kurtosis than a Gaussian distribution. Interestingly enough, fractal models are not commonly used at all. Stochastic vol models are a lot more widespread. I'm a trader, not a quant, so I can't comment on why fractals were never in favor -- anyone else know?
If were to drive carelessly and make this happen to these two guys, i'd have to pay to fix it, and likely go to jail. For some reason, we're not allowed to simply suspend a company's business license, so we have to make due with fines and fees.

I don't think punitive damages should go to the victim. I do think punitive damages are worthwhile. It's not any one person's fault, it's the fault of the organization as a whole. The organization as a whole should suffer as i would suffer if i did something similar.
I've always thought the combining doors way of explaining this made the most sense - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Combining_do...
Interesting comment that points to why economics is such a hard disciplline: Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government. - So does this indicate that small government is a cause for successful Swedish companies? It might, but since you can't recreate the experiment you will never know for sure, all you know is that there is a correlation. There are probably many other things that could have caused these particular companies to be successful. The Swedish system of education is one.
just make sure you've accounted for any finite write limitations built in to your solid state drive. sure, it's not likely that'll you reach the limit but if you're successful & relying on a random sector distribution you could get there. and that could be just as problematic as a bad platter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Limitations
YouTube transmits the absolute minimum amount of data required to display a video at your client. The guy and his Microsoft friends can intercept the data all they want, but unless they are lowering the quality of the video, no win.

There are some examples where this will work - long websites with lots of content, pictures and ads - e.g. news organisations etc. The Opera browser on my cellphone runs sites through an image compressor, so I only get a colored rectangle at first, then a very low quality version once I scroll to it, and finally, I can activate a function to get the full pic. It's basically the same thing happening.

Another thing, especially older Wordpress blogs don't rescale images server-side, they do it in the IMG tag - that hurts on slow connections. Unfortunately, fixing Wordpress is already happening.
Good research: invent new problems or explain mysteries
"Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the February 1999 edition of Scientific American. We are posting it in light of recent news involving Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch."

And Mandlebrot's original research was done in the 1960's before Black, Scholes and Merton were getting prizes and destroying hedge funds in the 1990s. Moreover, Mandlebrot was certainly renowned by the 1970's. You would think people would pay attention to his ideas.

Just goes to show the appeal of research which tells people what they want to hear..
That was a parody. This appears to be real.
The secret to intellectual productivity
I totally disagree - there are lots of females who are lonely and want dates, and would be willing to try something like this. After all, lots of females use dating sites like match.com
If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded".

Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options.

Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up.

For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range.

If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on.

So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is:

(A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer.

(B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?".

There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork.

If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.
2 — Why? To make ~$129 instead of ~$1000 on every Mac OS X capable machine?

4 — User experience is this feature.
Greenspun seemed to be talking about public high schools, and that's what I was talking about as well.

Standardized testing is just a race to the bottom. As soon as everyone agrees upon the standardized test, anyone who teaches anything outside of the box at all gets punished because an hour spent on something that's interesting and happens to catch the students' fancy on a given day is one less hour spent preparing them for the standardized test.
Multiple Streams of Income for Digital Nomads
I won't be surprised if we see 10 different sites with the same basic concept. The details in each implementation will ultimately determine if anyone of them finds success.
The warning about RAID is well-founded, but I'm finding it hard to imagine what sort of backup plan could defeat deliberate sabotage by a former insider. I keep coming up with ideas, and immediately thinking of problems with them. Short of visually examining a substantial number of backed-up files to confirm they contain genuine and correct data ... but then wouldn't it be possible, with enough effort, to create data that looked superficially valid but was in fact, on much closer inspection, mixed up beyond usefulness?

RAID isn't a guard against filesystem bugs, carelessness, or extreme physical server damage, but it seems to me this is more of a warning against bad blood.
February 15, 2005:

"So I said, narrow the focus. Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" — jwz @ http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

FINALLY IT'S COME TRUE
I've been playing with a business idea for a while, that I think would be appropriate for a situation like this:

For ease, I'll call my product, "the processor" and my client "the seller". I define a microformat on top of HTML that defines a product. Name, price, maybe options/attributes, very simple. This can be added to a blog-post, myspace-page, anyone on the web with minimum HTML access. Place a link to my service on that page that says "put in basket". The processor examines the referrer, creates a session with a cookie, adds the product, and returns the visitor. On the seller-page, there's a bit of javascript that pulls the basket from the processor and displays it, along with "show basket" and "checkout" links. Checkout runs on the processor, on an unbranded page, maybe even with some "magic" pulling the layout of the seller-page, and integrates the sellers Paypal or Google Checkout or whatever payment service. Business model is to charge some fee or percentage on all orders above a certain threshold.

Does it make sense? Could it work? Does it already exist?
It's a good thing that stuff like this doesn't happen too often, or people would be more wary of trusting all their data to web services.

I mean, we assume Google has a really amazing backup strategy for Gmail. We hope they do, because, jesus, I have a lot of irreplaceable information in there. But we don't actually know.

Hmmm... does Gmail have an "export all" feature...?
That should say "dramatically reduce downtime". A small number times a small number is still not zero, and it is possible, though highly unlikely, to suffer a second drive failure while operating in degraded mode. My understanding is that's not what happened in this case, though.
All great stories, but unremarkable comment threads. What I want to know is, did anyone here actually try to bribe their way into a restaurant after reading that article?
Hotmail does have an API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463989.aspx (looks complicated but is fairly easy)
I dunno if you've tried using and implementing OAuth, but it is a gigantic pain in the ass. A big factor driving the bewilderingly huge number of twitter mashups is how easy it is to use their API. Not implementing OAuth was a great move.
Free Web Analytics Tools
If the students are doing well, spending an hour on interesting side topics won't hurt the test results. If students are doing poorly, then sticking to the basics is the way to go. Walk before running, and all that.

As far as the race to the bottom, standardized testing prevents it. The race to the bottom is what you described; make your test easier than others to avoid problems with whiny parents/students. A standardized test puts a floor on how far down you can go.
Weird Logos That Work (and Why They Do)
Take-aways: Cliff's "Buffalo Theory" as it relates to neurogenesis. "If you're a programmer stuck in a drab cubicle, you will never grow new neurons."

"And if that wasn't bad enough, a controversial study done in the United Kingdom noted that if you constantly interrupt your task to check email or respond to an IM text message, your effective IQ drops ten points."

And more things to revive your brain.
It's no problem at all. What the fuck is anybody going to do with 5000 twitter passwords? Post something profane pretending to be you? Create link spam, when everything in twitter is rel=nofollow anyway? There's no way to make money by stealing a bunch of twitter accounts.

That's why it's no problem to hand over your twitter credentials. There's no point in stealing your twitter password. It's not useful for anything.
Sending SMS - The best option for a startup?
Hello,

I'm wondering if anyone's got any advice on the most affordable way to send SMS messages. I know there's a lot of providers out there, but if anyone has any advice on specific providers, I'd appreciate it.

I would need the ability to send messages under a couple different numbers/names, and in the beginning I'd only need a couple thousand SMSes a month, but over time, I'd (hopefully!) need a lot more.

Thanks in advance for any ideas....
It's nice concept, because it's immune to the problem of whatever it's called that dating sites have, where they need many profiles to be popular, and to get profiles they need to be popular. A service like this has zero-to-little barrier to entry, it only takes a few minutes to tag who you would want to hook up with, and once you do, it can sit there for months without requiring any maintenance. Once it starts working, word will get around, and I believe the word viral is more than appropriate here.
What a brilliant way to make use of Facebook. I can see this being great for the High School and college crowd especially.
So, three points:

First, liability is clearly a structural disadvantage of the aviation industry. But that doesn't make it a crisis for business in general.

Second, the story you've cited seems not to be a clear cut case of tort abuse. The plaintiffs built a case around an FAA finding that implicated the carb, they were armed with a record of unanswered complaints about the same carb part, and the carb company staged an ineffective defense, blaming ice, oil changes, and pilot errors in ways that were apparently easily refuted.

Third, even if this was a clear-cut case of tort abuse, it doesn't really answer my argument. I concede that tort abuse is an issue. I just think it's ludicrous to respond to it by eliminating the concept of punitive damages. Companies really do factor predictable liabilities into their business plans. Look how every health care organization handles HIPAA.
While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.