skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, it depends; I'd first take a step back and think about my target market.

I'd think about whether or not the market you're trying to make this product for both sees the problems you're addressing as problems (or can be convinced to) and is large enough to support the costs to build it and generate revenue.

While I get that ycombinator itself looks more toward the people than the ideas if you're alone on this and jumping into it it's something you need to think about right away. If you spend your time building a product for some niche market you may be wasting your time going that route as well (although the experience gained and the connections made through doing so may be beneficial).

Does your target market already have a product that does x? If so what are you doing that is better than than the competitors?

If so I'd consider putting aside my work and plunging into it if I could afford the dip in my income as you mentioned you could above. Otherwise I'd either work on my idea as a hobby/side project or over weekends (and some very long nights).

The actual business related activities like advertising and considering how you'd generate revenue itself can wait until you've shipped but if you're at it alone it's a lot harder to gauge when you need to re-evaluate and change your idea if it's not working or there isn't enough interest. We drink our own koolaid per se.

Note: I don't actually need you to answer these questions I more posted them as what I'd suggest you internally inquire about.

Also I get that there is a culture of build first ask questions later so my opinion may be of the minority. I do think though that calculated risks are the best kind and "No wind is favorable to a ship without a destination."
Why Flash failed on Android, and what it means for Adobe
The "persecution" is seen as widely as the stage the actor normally plays on. Here in Pennsylvania, we have Jerry Sandusky; and closer in Philadelphia, pedophilic priest scandals.

The more people can see you, the more people will want to see what happen to you, and the more careful you need to be since people are always looking.
It does help in some sense, but not always. I found that, if i wrote out test cases like i am preparing a test scenario document for someone in plain English it works. If i have to open vim and write test cases, i seem to the hack mode and write out the most trivial cases, causing painfully slow development. Test Document + thinking/visualization works better for me.
Every company that offers "lifetime" anything, seems to mean their lifetime, not yours.

I once had a lifetime free checking account, I still have the advertising flyers from when I got it.

Well they took that away from me last year too.

I guess they just count on you getting a lawyer and lawsuit being more of a hassle than you just walking away.
He is 'two-bit' as in 'not worth a major international incident, neither superhero nor supervillain'. His high publicity only reinforces his relative lack of actual importance against the cost of making a REAL international incident which isn't just talk.

For Ecuador's government he is worth a little more - as a way of proving that they are anti-colonialist and not afraid of Uncle Sam. Other than that, Wikileaks doesn't require Assange to function, which means both that protecting Assange is incidental to protecting Wikileaks and also that attacking Assange is not an effective way of suppressing Wikileaks.
Joyent will keep supporting their Strongspace customers [which we, ExpanDrive, provide the service for - Joyent provides the hardware for their lifetimers]
6 Companies Doing Open Innovation
it's kinda like crowd funding innovation
A central repo for sharing Meteor smart packages
Digital magazines boom too little to grow overall sales
Except that SQL's fundamental abstraction is the bag, not the set.
"your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012"

If you're writing that sentence and don't see a problem with it, there's no helping you. Look, many of us have been there and sold "free" things to early customers who become a pain later on, but you have to honor it. Better yet, never sell something "lifetime" without at least some kind of low recurring fee to cover nominal costs.
My guess is to get America (and other highly corrupt imperialist nations) to show its true colors for everyone to see.

If this WAS a conspiracy, consider this: the folks at Langley aren't stupid, they know that killing Julian or tossing him in Gitmo would only throw a keg of gasoline on the fire. The best way to erase Wikileaks from existence is to make everyone look at Julian as an evil, nasty, vile person unfit to spit upon. What are the most reviled crimes available for this? Setting him up for murder is very tricky and could easily unravel. Child molestation would be great, but this would be even harder than murder. Rape on the other hand is REALLY easy, because people have been convicted of rape with ZERO evidence, in a he-said-she-said dispute. Additionally, even if someone beats rape charges, the aura of it will linger around them basically forever; Julian will ALWAYS be an accused rapist, until the end of time. The analysts at the CIA would have looked this over from a lot of different angles, and known that this would play out as a win pretty much no matter what. What they didn't expect is that powerful conservative civilians in the united states would run their mouths so much about extradition, tribunals and treason that it would give another sovereign nation grounds to protect him.
With all the recent hacking of Bitcoin services, maybe it's this kind of thinking which is causing more problems.
Oh sure - and indeed 3-out puts are about double the price of 3-out calls.
Happy with http://vpslink.com (XEN) for small services, and Linode for bigger things.
Can't agree more. Infact at my current company working alone has led me to slow down on getting stuff done. my solution? Write obsessively, i.e to the extent of opening up 750words.com and putting down whatever thoughts interrupt work even if it is at 30 minute intervals.
This is only true for man made systems which you have written yourself or have been working with for long periods of time.

When you try to "think up" a business then bad things start happening. I think this is a huge trap for us programmers who want to become entrepreneurs.

Nature doesn't "think or do research" it "creates and tests aggressively".
There were actually a number of "VC" phases with TextDrive, starting with the "VC200" in 2004 that raised $40,000 from 200 pledges of $200 to acquire and set up the hardware--

http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-raise-40...

That was followed by a number of upgrade offerings ("Mixed Grill", "3 Martini Lunch") in subsequent years, extending into the Joyent merger/acquisition, that required a larger lump-sum payment.

Their pitch on lifetime service? "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."

http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

Now, you can argue in strictly financial terms that those initial customers (of whom I'm one) have probably got their money's worth, and that the hosting landscape has changed sufficiently that the lifetime products are peripheral to Joyent's main business. The counterargument is that Joyent not only acquired TextDrive's customers, but the goodwill surrounding Dean Allen's original venture, and has traded on that goodwill ever since. Clearly, they feel that's not worth much these days.

Furthermore, giving people who've had eight years of not having to think about hosting options just 80 days to migrate, with explicit notice that their servers will be shut down and wiped on October 31, strikes me as pretty cheap.
The real issue is, to paraphrase a football player, "What do lifetime mean?" Is it the lifetime of the product (typical in consumer goods), or was it the consumer's lifetime (i.e.-until they died)? If it was the consumer's lifetime, if they had a site where someone died and another person was going to take over, would we then be upset if Joyent started charging the successor?

Lifetime typically means expected life of the product (see: lifetime warranties). Death is really, really complicated, so I can't imagine anybody would actually tie their products to a consumer's death.
As annoyed as I am with all of it, I'm more interested to know how to move off of their products and services now.

My lifetime account is where I have several important email servers, and I don't know how to migrate them. All the email says is to contact Joyent about getting migrated to one of their other product offerings. However, if I am only given 2.5 months to sort all this stuff out, I DO NOT WANT to use Joyent services. I'd love to use GMail for Business, Linode or what have you, but I don't know where to start.
Thanks for the heads-up, man. I am checking on Quora now~~~
I have mixed feelings about AuthenTec fingerprint scanners in Apple products. One on hand, I had an IBM keyboard with a scanner and it was terrible. Rarely worked right, often took 3 or more swipes, was just easier to enter my password. On the other hand, if any company would make sure the product actually works before putting it in, it's Apple.

I also absolutely hate how often Apple prompts me for my password. I think I was playing a game on my iPhone the other day and I had to enter my password like 5 times over. Don't remember exactly, but it was something like once to "buy" it even though it had been bought on another device, another time to login to GameCenter or something, a couple other times to buy some coins or something. Very annoying. So if they insist on checking password so often, this is something they desperately need - and need to get working better than past hardware.
I guess that makes sense, but doesn't the mixed content warning make it moot? Doesn't that mean unauthenticated javascript can be inserted?
That has 'been accepted' BY WHOM? How on earth do you get to "PROOF"?
why else write one? -- To provide helpful informative information and/or a neatly compiled opinion that has hopefully been well thought out, going into detail as to why things are or why the author thinks this. Even to rant about things.

Promoting a business doesn't really belong in an article that starts out philosophical. (hence the jarring sensation.)
The US managed to extradite an Australian citizen from his native country, who had never set foot on US soil, over mere copyright infringement. I don't really share your certainty that they couldn't be bothered to extradite someone.
When I look at companies like SpotHero, who are trying to help people have a better (and cheaper) parking experience, I'm happy they're trying to help real people by solving real problems.

When I look at companies like Makr, I simply just wonder "why"? I'm unconvinced many people in "the real world" will use this or need to use this.

Am I missing something?
http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...

Q: How long is it good for?
A: As long as we exist.
The legality of something such as evidence seizure effects how it can be used in court, not necessarily the whole case if they have other evidence they can use instead.
And..... bang! It's easier to pirate it, so I will. When it's difficult to give someone my money, I just won't bother.

I am well aware that the world of international publishing is a convoluted mess (Charles Stross covers it well over on antipope); I'm not sympathetic enough to that mess to be willing to get charged such disparate amounts.
Instagram 3.0 Bets Big On Geolocation With Photo Maps,
In the UK it means any customer taken from the general mass of the uninformed public.

"Taking a punt" means taking a chance, as in gambling. Customers who try their luck at fairground games of chance (find the lady, shooting mechanical ducks etc) would be called punters. While not insulting, it is certainly condescending and using it implies that you view your customers as interchangeable and disposable. A related term is "mark" or "sucker" but that implies specific malicious intent to defraud, rather than an assumption of their inability to properly assess what they're buying.

You can see the link to bitcoinica.
"You're coming from the assumption that Germany got better"

No, I live in it. And it did. Just think the green or now the pirate party - unthinkable decades ago.

But where did I claim Germany is super free and the best, ever? I was simply responding the claim that Germans are authoritarian/obedient by nature - which, ironically, strikes me as racist - and was taking a wild jab, hoping the poster I replied to might come from the US, and simply said Germany is way more free (and dare I say, laid back) in some respects than the US currently is.

That's all, you can dispute that if you want; but how do "all other countries" come into play here?
Yes, apparently so.
Okay in 21.0.1180.75 (OS X).
> Bitcoins are a real currency with value backed by the interest in silk road products.

If a few big countries legalized drugs, perhaps that would make bitcoins less valuable/interesting, causing a bust? Probably not realistic in the short term, but interesting to consider.
Or Guantanamo for a suspected terrorist, or is that word no longer flavor of the month? I'm never sure these days. These fads come and go so quickly.
One of the things it has led me to do is assume that the everything else is correct and I must be doing something wrong. We do that with compilers, interpreters, the OS, hardware, etc., too.

It's usually a decent starting assumption, but it can lead to wasted hours when the problem really is outside of what you've done.
Think Yelp is Unbiased? Think Again
mobile browsers, yes. they're investing in AIR (which is Flash packaged as an app).
I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit.
"Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room! And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!" —Steve Jobs, 1981

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E...

Also: http://interuserface.net/2011/06/own-a-shape/
CU-Boulder wins Gates grant to build super-toilet
It's worth noting that the "clever hacks in to get things working and move on" has proved to be a fairly decent business model for smaller projects or smaller companies. Creates ugly code, sure...
The US would certainly not do a drone attack against a first-world nation, as the political fallout would be immense. They do have a great many other levers to use that the public would never see...
This meme of grafting political meanings to software development practices needs to get put down.

...or should I borrow another bad meme, and say it should be "considered harmful"?
No, it seems the UK is really serious about embassies not being used to shield people pursued by its criminal justice system who are not diplomats of that embassy.

Perhaps the UK is serious about its relations with Sweden as well.

There are many things for the UK to be serious about short of alleged sexual assault in Sweden (not that one shouldn't be serious about sexual assault, in general, in any country...)
Interesting. I should try using that. That is mechanical models. I have come across it(using a mechanical device analogy/metaphor for thinking about something) in other fields(http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/06/30/the-philosophers-abacus...).But never really used it in code/design consciously so far.
Had an account with them back around then because their site made them seem technically proficient, but dealing with their customer service was like dealing with bad sys admins - grudging help and lazy. There were also a lot of unfinished nooks and crannies in their system. An overall lack of craftsmanship and care. The email brought back not so fond memories and is indicative of their attitude in all their interactions. Partly you are paying for company culture and theirs is not good.
I don't think in code. My mental model is the process, not the series of functions and objects that make up the process. When the process breaks, I'll dig around to see what code makes up that step of the process.
>If users aren't willing to opt in to your data collection, then you're not offering something worth the trade. Facebook and Google rely on peoples ignorance to make money.

Ignorance or apathy? And if apathetic, then for those people, it likely is worth the trade. If they're not willing to opt-out, then they don't give a shit. Right? Cuts both ways.

Regardless, I think it's hard to effectively argue the idea that you have a "right" for others not to know something, in this case personal information. If you don't want somebody to know something, then don't tell them.
It seems to me that the main reason those two pages look so similar is that in the TouchOfModern page the product displayed somehow happens to be the exact same shade of red used in the Fab.com interface.
Look to Somalia to see how the removal of government opens a power vacuum which creates chaos and ultimately new governments.

Unless you have got a sustainable plan for maintaining a vacuum, you can reasonably assume that nature will fill it.
My understanding was that the blockchain itself contains a Merkle tree. Thus while users currently store the entire blockchain, they only need to store log(n) blocks locally to validate the entire chain.

Of course, analysis of transaction history will require the full chain, but this isn't necessary for the average bitcoin user.
> The day after the accusation of rape and molesation Ardin sent a SMS saying : "I've just spent some time with the coolest people in the world".

Really? that doesn't say ANYTHING to you?

the day AFTER. Very few people go out of their way to advertise how cool their rapists are.
Things Your Customers Wish You Knew About Them [Infographic]
I'm just going to leave this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
I never suspect conspiracy when incompetency is much easier. Men with badges hiding behind organizations often forget the scope and source of their vested powers.
Tobin's mutual fund theorem states that all investors should do their best to buy the market, and that risk-seeking investors should add leverage, while risk-averse investors should hold more cash.

For high-net-worth individuals, it's usually not worth actively managing most asset classes, but it might be worth scouting talent to run private equity, venture capital, and tech stocks, all of which are areas where the top quartile investors substantially outperform the bottom quartile.

For non high-net-worth individuals, it's almost never worth actively managing any asset class. The costs of management equal or exceed the probable excess returns.
I am surprised the NZ courts didn't have the evidence to begin with. How could they decide over the validity of the extradition request without it?
I imagine the comment was aimed at those who already have pandaboards. It wasn't a salespitch.
Designing a Better Google IPO Auction
The allegation for one of the cases is approximately this: they were going to have consensual sex, but the girl required that he wear a condom. One was not available, and so she refused to allow sex. They stayed in bed together, and fell asleep.

In the morning, she woke up to Assange on top of her having sex with her. She asked if he had obtained a condom and he said no. She told him to get off, and, well, he got off, but not in the way she meant--he kept going, came, and then withdrew.

That would arguably be rape in the US.
So ars have confirmed the photos are no longer publicly accessible from the CDN URL.

Do we have information either way about whether the photos and associated meta data are permanently deleted, or are they just not publicly accessible?
Actually, the prevailing attitude when Diaspora was announced was that it had as much chance as a bumblebee's fart in a hurricane.
There's pretty much guaranteed to be a temporary dip, because there will be some people who own facebook stock that just came out of lockup and need to sell at any price (perhaps they've just got divorced or something). Holding on for at least a couple of days until the market settles down is the rational move for everyone except those few who absolutely have to sell now.
This is a duplicate. Makr.io has been discussed here not too long ago and heavily criticized.
Instagram 3.0 – Photo Maps & More
I doubt the US would seek the death penalty. It would be way too public, instead they'd probably just put him in a black hole like Gitmo or some super max. And that would be that.
Very nice article.

Just a remark (which does not disagree with anything you've said):

Flash has not failed. The Flash Mobile Web Player has.
Something from here?
http://adafruit.com/category/105

I like the 'Cobbler' and the 'Prototyping Plate' but I haven't got around to buying either of them yet.
Fair point, I guess I was reacting to the depth in which the article went into the issue. This sort of detail would definitely make a difference, I just feel it's more subtle and less noticeable than perhaps the author indicates it is.
Parent: "There's nothing wrong with promoting your business in a blog post --- why else write one?"

You: "why else write one? -- To provide helpful informative information"

And to promote yourself of course. Which is good for business. Even if that is not your intention.

While many people prefer to comment anonymously on HN anecdotally I'm not aware of many bloggers that blog that way. (Even Fake Steve Jobs came out of the closet eventually).
If he doesn't want to talk, that's within his rights

This is true in the US. It's not quite true here in Australia - a refusal to talk to police can be used against you in a court of law. It's not going to make or break a case, but you can't just 'plead the 5th' here and have no consequences. I imagine it's similar in the UK as our law is quite similar to theirs.
Didn't they cease to exist when they were acquired?
Why would you be running Chrome version 20? Just restart your browser.
S&P 500 Price has returned -1.5%/annum on price alone since 1999, while S&P 500 dividend return has been 4.9%/annum over the same period.

Longer term, since 1971, S&P 500 Price has returned 6.3%/an, while dividend has returned 5.6%/an.

So, yes, if you are a lucky soul who was 21 years old in 1971, bought the market, and held it to today, you would be slightly better off than you would be with dividend.

But what if you were a 45 year old in 1999 who started their retirement savings and are nearing retirement with over a decade of negative returns?

Time horizon and suitability of your choice are often more important than what you actually pick.

Having other people manage your finances may be problematic if the fiduciary responsibility has been misplaced as you have pointed out.

When you go to a lawyer or an accountant, you do not question their advice, largely because they have been positioned as a services experts rather than sales folk.

Properly diversified portfolio will carry you through the ups and downs in the market, because it hedges your risk against those fluctuations. And for that kind of portfolio, you need a bona fide, unbiased expert's advice. The kind of advice that is currently NOT available to mid-networth market, and the kind of advice that the rich are paying a premium to obtain.

The article pointed out that the financial services is broken and investing in broad index is a band-aid solution,
but wouldn't it be more appropriate for us to have a solution that solves the problem rather than the one that patches it?
Meet the Guys Who Started Stanford’s Facebook in 1999
Now they're doing Screenleap (YC W12)
If you look at the offer on the waybackmachine: http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

It has this Q&A item:
How long is it good for?
As long as we exist.

The footer states: a Joyent company

Nothing complicated, Joyent still exists. shrug
The original product specified that it was good for "as long as we [Joyent] exist". NOT for as long as that product exists.