skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter and MySpace aren't niche products. What's a niche social product that hit it big. Github is one of the few examples I can think of, but there's an enterprise component that made that product successful. Also content-based businesses tend to have a very rough time because you're only as good as the content you can support.
"Don't delete, disable" is another key.

Even if I'm doing a mass file delete, if I've got the time for it, first thing I'll do is move/rename the files to a backup / marked-for-deletion directory. Watch for strangeness. Then commit.

If it's site accounts or features, disable them, prevent them from being served, mark them inactive in the database / server. Leave them for a week or two. Then nuke.

Legally proscribed deletions (illegal content, etc.) are another matter, but most other content is eligible for a graduated approach.
An idea can be dumb and also profitable, if it makes you feel any better.
Apple Mail has it. I think you can tell it whether you want to see newest-first or the reverse, as well.
Is any of this applicable to non-profits? For example, wouldn't donations be tax deductible, even if it's a donation of material goods for an event? Are there companies even interested in this sector, or is this really just aimed at big brands throwing swag at attendees at big conferences?
And or iPhone app? (Sparrow + Mail Pilot (or .Mail)) Would be my dream iPhone mail app.
Aaand lots of people look forward to those questions -- because they're not bad at programming and the questions are fun.
Indeed and if you click the printer icon you can save it as a pdf
Because friction in upgrading is largely dictated by the price of upgrading?

Adoption of a $30 OS upgrade is obviously going to be quicker than a $120 OS upgrade, just as the iOS upgrades have even larger adoption.
Crank turners
I agree with all of your advice about hardening most servers, but a couple of things...

> In the case of PHP, there is no security concern by it just sitting on your hard drive.

It's a surface area question. I could go into more details of the history of why it was there and configured (if you read further, you'd see that it was part of our puppet manifests, and for a reason). But you reduce the surface area of attack by reducing the number of things that can execute arbitrary code. And if you aren't using PHP at all, "yum remove php" saves you disk space and surface area, even if you have another colossal screw up (like we did).

> The most it could affect a user by itself is due to some temp file race someone might be able to take advantage of.

Well, the most it could do is, if you've screwed up someplace else, execute arbitrary code as the webserver user on the machine, thanks to the backtick operator.
I'm completely ignorant here - is it widely established that there's no link between how we think about things versus the languages we speak ? It seems intuitive that our ability to conceive of concepts would be dependent on having/creating language that can describe them, even in our own minds, but I have no idea how anyone could really know one way or the other.
Instead of answering your question about evidence directly -- the article was very clear in providing evidence that Naturally Curly is investment-worthy -- I think it's important to point out what an arbitrary and arrogant comment this is. (It's a step above mkramlich-level commentary, because at least you acknowledge that you have no evidence.)

What you call "common" sense is a collective set of prejudices you rely on as a sort of defense, or shortcut, against having to constantly question your base assumptions. The strength of common sense is not that it's predictive, but that you can make baseless assertions about the world and expect them to be accepted unquestioningly, so long as you are speaking to an audience whose own core beliefs will be comforted and affirmed by your statements. By forwarding common sense as justification enough for unsubstantiated assertions, you're basically pandering.

But, if we strip away your crutch for a moment and ask another set of questions, the point of this article becomes obvious -- because you have illustrated it with (probably unintentional) hilarity. Instead of asking (rhetorically, because you assume that everyone shares your assumptions) why this wouldn't flop, let's ask:

* Why should anyone believe you know anything about what makes a successful investment and what the predictors of a successful exit are?
* Do you know anything about the curly/wavy-haired segment?
* Have you ever invested $1.4M (or even $14k) to the effect of generating ROI of whole multiples?
* Have you ever sold any beauty or hair-care products?

Or, in short:

Who are you, and what is the evidence that you know anything about what you're talking about?

At the end of the day, columns like this one in NY Mag thrive on people like you, whose reliance on unquestioned assumptions allow them to circulate bullshit like it's truth.
A couple of things.

The ethnic hair care & beauty market approached $3 billion in sales in 2011 (check out Packaged Facts, etc.). Not a small market. And in 2010, that market grew 13%.

There are big trends in social media around natural/naturally curly hair and beauty. I know a couple of startup founders who are building out apps in the ethnic beauty space, and there are already other social networks focused on hair-related issues for diverse women. Lots of high-traffic blogs, too.

All things considered, $1.4m isn't much.

ETA: Many women are very social around beauty, especially hair. I have naturally curly hair, and I can't tell you how many times I am complimented or asked questions (in person and online) by other women (and the occasional man) who are interested in chatting. Having an online network seems a natural next step.
New coding style? (geek desk - standing)
Except WebMD has a massive, broad based appeal and thousands of pages of content. The amount of content to support a curly network can only be so much. Even sports social networks fall short and there are games constantly. Ultra niche products can be profitable, but certainly not at the numbers to warrant VC interest. I am not knocking the site, I am just questioning it as an investment.
I have an app in the gallery, so I am interested to see if this gallery will drive any downloads of the app.
Current Potential Habitable Worlds
We've already worked with a few non-profits, many of which use events as a way to fundraise, and we're in talks with a few larger organizations to see how we can get brands interested in caused based donations in a few unique ways. Sorry to be vague, but it's still in the works.

As for your second question, this is definitely not just aimed at big brands. We've had dozens of small brands who are entering a market for the first time, and have no idea where to start, approach us about putting together a sponsorship campaign for them.
I agree that it's a somewhat arbitrary line and limiting yourself to 100$ bikes is probably overkill for most people on HN. However, I would be shocked if the extra 60$ over a great 490$ bike really made that much of a difference in terms of utility. Still, averaged over 6 years it's not really worth worrying about, but you don't get to guess how long you will use the bike ahead of time.
Top Basic On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips
Lesson 0. You are not a child anymore with your mother nagging you to clean your room. If something is doing no harm, don't delete it.
You pay a premium over refurbished to buy a used Air? I'm I reading the last graph right?
You're right. When Apple introduced the notification system I was like... I have seen that somewhere.

TouchWiz itself is similar to most other OSes. I has a "desktop" with icons and a "start menu" with more software to put on the desktop.
You nailed it. While we've started with events and conferences as they were the most obvious, and where we had past expertise, the bigger vision includes exactly what you just described. Glad we're not crazy in thinking that's the future!
Highlighting is red on my end...
What is their mobile native app story (if one has been announced)? -- I'm not sure how I'd integrate the meteor backend with a native client (can't use a phonegap-like sdk in my case).
breaking news!
Can't wait to see what features the new Paid (Enterprise) version will have over the Open Source (Community) version...

These guys deserve to make a good living from this product as its made a profound difference to the Ruby community which i think sometimes gets taken for granted.
So do you make games ?
Thanks. But make ˚C -> ˚F an option! Many of us don't have the faintest idea what 100˚F is (I must multiply it with 5, divide it by 9 and subtract 32 or 23 from it... too much work)!

(as a side note: for the benefit of others, ˚ is typed with option-k. I had to try a million different combination until I found it).
Web-based client to SSH for tasks across remote servers
Google search nerds out, adds full-button scientific calculator
Viddy’s Plan to Win the Social Video War
I think it's more of a neat hack, not a replacement for anything.
Siracusa really does an outstanding job with these reviews.
Open message, "Create filter from this message," add an appropriate label, check skip the inbox and automatically label and your folders are good to go. I wasn't keen on gmail's insistence that labels were all I needed either, but I find this workflow agreeable.
Looks like Mail Pilot will have apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
My company iCouch, addresses a $20 billion dollar market growing by 20% -- but that doesn't mean that market creates profitability for companies in the space. Cheese is also a multi billion dollar market, but a Cheese social network doesn't necessarily make money. The market size isn't determined by the market size of the particular niche. The question is what's the market size for people that want to share articles about curly hair. People buy hair products, but it doesn't mean they want to join a network to hang out with other people buying those products. The "XYZ" market is X $billion per year doesn't mean anything to investors, the question is what's the addressable market for your particular product. There is a very big difference.
Anything that is sitting around doing nothing is likely doing some amount of harm. For example, making backups longer, increasing the learning curve for a codebase, etc..
We make some trivia games and simple word games. However our 3 top sellers in the Apple App Store make about 120k per year each and are simple reference content. The key is that it is branded with a well recognizable name.
for me refurbished means it was tested for real. always buying refurbished laptops from dell outlet and never had problems outside of minor cosmetic issues :)
How does Subnetting work?
Ask HN: Can single founders build successful companies?
So recently i applied for a UK accelerator program called ignite100 in the hope of gaining valuable mentorship and investment for my latest product idea inquire.ly, i've built the MVP, signed up a few hundred (unpaid) customers and have a list of beta testers.

So i got through the first stage (140 startups applied), i then managed to pass two telephone interviews (40 startups) and get to the final interviews (20 startups), and actually think that process went fine, i answered all the questions, articulated the ideas and woo'd the investors :).

Unfortunately it wasn't enough, it came down to a choice between me and another team. The downfall? being a single founder, it seems that most single founders buckle under the intensity of an accelerator, and ultimately a startup. I personally didn't have any fear of this having started my first business at the age of 17 in 2003 and running several businesses since - i'm used to working 7am - 11pm Mon - Sun (i've got a wife and 4 kids too, so come on! stress - i laugh in the face of it).

But it certainly makes me weigh up my choice of starting it alone:

will that ultimately prevent success?
is having at least one co-founder a must?

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this, i'm not against having that person at all but i'm struggling to find someone so grotesquely addicted to work as i am!
Here's what I learned when doing this research for Meteor.

* You can sell training, but it's low-margin. If that's all you do, it probably ends up looking more like a consulting business, because you have to recruit armies of teachers if you want to scale up the business.

* You might think you can sell support, but it's hard. There's a catch-22. If your product is good enough that people want to use it, it's probably good enough that they don't use their support incidents and end up not wanting to renew their support contracts.

* You can sell some kind of management software or application server that only big companies need. This has been a sweet spot for some other projects. Developers at small companies don't have any money, and developers at large companies don't have any budgetary authority. But, the operations teams at larger companies have a budget, and if you have an offering that's useful to them, they're able to pay what it's worth.

* You can sell long term maintenance of other people's software. This is the Red Hat model. They put their LTS stamp of approval on a collection of packages, and guarantee that those packages will be maintained for N years. People will pay for this. The investors I talked to seemed wary about this model. "Yeah, Red Hat got to $1B of revenue, good for them, but man, it took a long time."

* Platform-as-a-service is harder than it looks. Small customers will pay incredibly huge markups. But that's only if you look at it on a percentage basis, rather than in terms of absolute dollars. When someone gets big enough to be paying you "real money," they tend to leave your PaaS, either because it's too expensive (it becomes financially reasonable to pull the function in-house) or because you don't give them enough control or security.

* If you make your software GPL, you can extract a few million bucks from big companies that can't use any GPL software, which sometimes happens for complicated reasons involving, eg, patent cross-licensing deals. If your software is truly universal and something that every developer must have, they will write you big checks for GPL exceptions. But these are one-off deals and you can't really build a business on them.
> A temporary monopoly is indeed granted, but the disclosure received in exchange is worthless information.

Given some of the frivolous patents granted these days, and given the application process itself, I wonder how many companies spend more to obtain the patents than they do for the R&D on the technology that's being patented.
I can't upvote this enough. For bonus points, tar the items in question so there's no possibility of access by processes that are holding a file open. If a file is kept open by a process, simply moving it on the same filesystem may not be enough to identify problems.
The article and most of the comments on here are arguing against a straw man. The original Dumb Money article [1] is about "dumb ideas" -- and let's be clear that an idea can be both dumb and profitable.

As to as whether or not NaturallyCurly.com is a bad financial investment, I'm leaning toward yes. It's an advertising play with plenty (2MM) of page views, so this site should be printing money. Plus the site's been around for what, a decade? Why take investment money now, shouldn't 10 years be enough time to monetize? I can't see a reason why an investor would be useful to them -- if they're not making boatloads of dough by now, VC money is useless. If they are making loads of money, why take VC cash?

[1] - http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/dumb-money-techs-stupid...
By the time these models are buyable as refurbs they are also on amazon for a similar price.
mutt's index view, ordered by thread.
Show HN: Kayak for Colocation & IP Transit
LABjs quietly succumbs to AMD
I read your SO post but wasn't quite sure what you were trying to get at, because I wasn't quite sure how you perceive the MVC structure in Rails to be.
Great, thanks so much! In particular, I was thinking of ways to use this to help pay for some of our training events (e.g. "Lunch today is provided thanks to the generous assistance of sponsor Acme Inc!"). Depending on the size of the event, even buying water for all participants can really add up.
Sure, re: skipping inbox, me too.

But tagging allows you to have a folder-like appearance but removes to 1:1 relationship. I can have a folder of 'emails sent to me specifically' and an 'emails from my accountant' that happens to have the same message. This is super useful.
First thing, please read the actual article by Norvig, it is excellent,

http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Second: I found it astounding that the article never mentions Skinner. Surely this article is trying to do to Chomsky what Chomsky did to Skinner in 1959 ("A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior", http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm ).

Chomsky basically marked the beginning of modern era of cognitive psychology with that essay, displaing the previous paradigm of behaviorism. Norvig's article has similar form in some ways to that article, and similar goals (to argue for a new paradigm over an older one). As I was reading it, I was sure Norvig had that context in mind. So I was surprised to read

> So how could Chomsky say that observations of language cannot be the subject-matter of linguistics? It seems to come from his viewpoint as a Platonist and a Rationalist and perhaps a bit of a Mystic

Well, no, Chomksy explained very well why he opposed observations being the subject matter of linguistics in his 1959 essay. Skinner's behaviorism looked only at observations and experience, and did away entirely with internal mental states. That might seem bizarre to us today, and the reason is in large part the shift heralded by Chomsky's article from behavioral psychology to cognitive psychology. In the latter, the goal is to understand the internal processes that are involved in psychology (or specifically language).

Statistical language models are not behaviorism. But they do share a lot with it, they are based primarily on raw empirical observations as opposed to deep models, so it is natural for Chomsky to oppose them on similar grounds (and not due to Platonism or Rationalism, although I suppose you can speculate that those motivated his 1959 essay too).

Side note, we can speculate that if Skinner had today's computers and statistical modelling methods, the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism might never have happened, seeing as the statistical approach is so successful.
It's probably that way because Apple is buying so much stuff from Samsung that losing the contract would be a major hit on their bottom line.

So Samsung can't really afford to lose Apple's business. Apple, on the other hand, does have the freedom to switch suppliers.
Lisp Hackers: Luke Gorrie's interview and video
http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/07/lisp-hackers-luke-gorrie-his-eclm-video.html
Needs a new name. Otherwise, terrific.
Read the article. Read the highlighted statements. 404 Apple stealing from Samsung not found. This whole patent battle is idiotic.
Funny, the first article you quote is written by one of the prime ClimateGate perpetrators.

And saying "allegations of ClimateGate is not sufficient" is not sufficient in the face of clear evidence of tampering and suppression of data that conflicts with their preconceived notions.

The real problem is that climate scientists are dependent on public funding for their research, and the most direct way to get more funding is to make a case for just how urgent their research truly is, at the expense of the truth.

Claiming "most scientists" disagree with him is just another attempt to stifle dissent. There are plenty of reputable scientists who disagree with the current orthodoxy.
2014 Mercedes-Benz S Class
So far it seems like Meteor is focused on data syncing and live UI elements. That's neat when done well, but the main pain points for client-side heavy apps is the mismatch between the server and client and between the traditional URLs structure of web pages and the MVC structure of apps.

I'm looking for:

* Complete parity between server and client-side rendering for content. This is required both for first-page performance, caching, and SEO.

* URLs as the foundational organizing principle of the app. The mismatch between clicks, back buttons and external links makes code hard to organize and apps behave strangely without serious work.

* Database agnostic. Relational datastores remain incredibly productive and proven for the vast majority of apps.
I love the text right below it.

> This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.

Oh so sweet.
You are not a child anymore: you have become a parent and it is now your responsibility to keep everyone's room clean - with or without their cooperation. If something exists, it consumes resources, even if it is just attention - so it can only exist if it has a purpose, however insignificant. So keep the rooms clean - and enjoy the bonus of spotting cracks in the floor more easily.
As an intern I rolled out a shopping cart upgrade to 150 of our subsidiaries. On Friday afternoon. Without testing it.

Monday sucked.
Datomic is, as far as I'm aware, a general purpose database. What it isn't designed to be is a familiar database.

SQL is what people are familiar with, and even some NoSQL databases have distinctly SQL-inspired query languages (e.g. SimpleDB). The problem is that SQL is a godawful query language, and if we want to do better we need to do something different, and therefore unfamiliar.

SQL tries to look like natural language, which has resulted in a syntax is complex, inconsistent and monolithic, just like the language it tries to imitate. If we want a syntax that is simple, consistent and modular we need to throw away the idea that a query needs to read like English.
What does trademark protection (which they are legally required to do) have to do with patents?
Specific data on YC companies: http://yclist.com/

Even more datap[1]: http://ycpages.info/

Some more activity on Angel list: https://angel.co/y-combinator#activity

[1] Hn dicussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273898
Well deserved! Congrats to the team.
EMRio: Optimize your Amazon EMR bills
Parse is one of the best abstractions for modern programming I have seen in a while. It's a kind of abstraction that goes beyond a single programming language. Very innovative. I have an app in the gallery (also here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/movie-groovy-free/id527097117...) that I had absolute fun developing with the beautiful Parse framework.
Why the NIH package system instead of npm? That's the main showstopper for me w.r.t investing time into meteor.
That's not our thinking :-).

I'd say our thinking is threefold:

* Meteor needs to exist. There needs to be a great way to build modern, dynamic client-server web apps. Meteor is a real breakthrough and deserves to be fully built out and supported.

* As Geoff notes, the market is actually very large. Much like we think Github can eat a lot of the market for source code control systems and developer tools (a multi-billion-dollar market today -- IBM/Rational etc.), Meteor at scale should be able to be a great business on top of a great technical and open source phenomenon.

* There's a lot of historical resonance for me personally -- I was the guy who kick-started the Javascript project at Netscape 17 years ago (originally called Livescript) -- the goal then was a single scripting language and framework on web client and server. Client worked great, server not so much. (Java was the opposite -- server worked great, client not so much.) Given that Javascript has become the most widely used programming language in history, I think the original idea deserves to be fully implemented, and Meteor is what we should have built back then had we known everything that we know today.