skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you even know what socialism, capitalism and communism are?

You appear to be stuck in the dogmatic anti-communist teachings that date back to the cold war.

All western countries are socialist, capitalism simply doesn't exist. There is a varying degree of socialism in the west, the US notoriously the least and its citizens suffer for it. A study showed that the UK's poor is healthier than the US's richest and pay less for the privilege. An American citizen pays twice as much as a UK citizen yet is sicker. The US does have better cancer treatment rates, but awful care for basic conditions like heart disease because you have to pay for it.

I moved to Canada and I've noticed one thing, everyone here is happier than people back in the UK and there's still free health care to boot. I would never live in the US because they don't have free health care, I'm a naturally healthy person, but I don't want to worry about falling off my ladder when I'm working.

You site the USSR, however they didn't have a financial crisis, they stopped themselves developing it's a completely different thing. The USSR was a perverted form of communism, they believed that everyone should have a job and then stopped allowing people to lose their job, this meant that when combine harvesters were becoming widespread in the west, the USSR refused because it would cost people jobs. Ironically, most of the people who would have lost their job could have been trained to fix the machines that replaced them!

Similar problems exist in the west. There was mass complaints here in Canada about the closure of a GM plant that produced 4 speed gearboxes. I found this absolutely absurd because I didn't even know 4 speeds existed, I thought they went the way of the dodo! I learnt on a 5 speed, my dad had a 6 speed and Volkswagen is bringing out a 7 speed. People wanted the plant to stay open, producing something that was nearly half as efficient as modern technology! That's exactly why the USSR failed, and exactly why the Chinese are succeeding, because the Chinese are working for the improvement of the whole and if it had to be done the government would close down entire industries.

Thankfully the GM plant is closed, sadly some people are out of their jobs but either they'll begin working in the plants producing 5/6 speeds, in a new plant producing 7 speeds or they'll move to another business.

It's like the phone companies trying to block VoIP usage. VoIP is the next step, instead of trying to block it phone companies should be embracing it, offering 'digital phone' for free when you subscribe to high-speed internet! It'd nail skype and give them great business. Thankfully our system isn't going the way of the USSR and governments are preventing phone companies from blocking VoIP traffic, meaning technology advances even if it will end up costing jobs in the short term.

If you haven't realised, you're already living in the alternative to capitalism!
I don't think I'm exaggerating, although since I'm just basing it off of what I've been told by previous partners I suppose it's possible they've all been compulsive liars even when I don't ask a question, but this seems to contradict Occam's Razor.

There's never 100% coverage. There are times when women act a certain way and I'll have no clue why or will do something I see as so illogical and completely contradictory to every form of reason that I just flat never see it coming.

As for signaling, my solution has been to just refuse to play the game. I'll flirt because it's fun, but I make no attempts to actually figure out if they're interested. This is probably why I am abysmal at actually picking up women in the first place and why I never seem to notice they're interested until they're suddenly making out with me.

Once that hurdle has been overcome, it's pretty easy though. Just because they're more interested in bullshit signaling doesn't mean they're going to refuse to answer questions or lie. Particularly, I've never met a women who wouldn't honestly answer questions regarding optimization of their pleasure. To do otherwise would be kinda silly.

Also, I think this awesome quote is worthy of this thread:

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away
reason and accountability.
Beyond Regular Expressions: More Incremental String Matching
TrackMeNot: Firefox plugin to hide your searches in a sea of automated random searches
I use GANDI and I've never had any problems like those. The fact that GoDaddy is permitted to register domains demonstrates that ICANN has failed.
Farewell to Mike Homer
Delaware C corporations.
I think that in reality there isn't as much brand loyalty as people think. Three years ago pundits said the same thing about myspace.

I think that is the key issue. I'll drop Facebook like a rock if it becomes annoying. That's generally true of most websites: they can only be "sticky" if they are a pleasant experience.
The easiest way to describe it is a lack of respect on some human level; it's hard to say, they have employees come and go and it's just different, the people are almost all pissed when the leave and a lot more leave than do some of the other companies around here.

I don't have a huge amount of experience in this area...but the one guy I worked with was absolutely fantastic to work with. In fact, he seemed so grateful that I was treating him like any other customer that he went out of his way to be nice in return. Of course, I was not his employee; I was a contractor and a vendor of software. This may have changed the dynamic, and perhaps he put on a more polite face when going outside of the porn industry. This may, even, have been part of his formula for success: the ability to play effectively in both the porn world and the straight business world successfully.

I do know the music industry a lot better, having spent a lot more time in it, and I kinda suspect the attitudes are similar in all "talent" based industries (e.g. businesses where you have a very clear line between the people who have and make the money and the people who are the "talent", whatever that talent might be). It breeds a very contentious working relationship, generally, with not a lot of trust or respect going either direction. So, I guess I can see working on the business side in the porn industry leading to the same sort of attitude that rock and roll club owners usually have (pay as little and as late as possible, treat the "talent" as expendable and interchangeable so they don't get uppity, etc.), and the other side being quite mercenary, with no loyalty to their employers (and with good reason).
Another question along the same lines is the question of email signing. As a sysadmin I receive large amounts of email asking me to change something on various systems and almost none of them are signed. How am I to know that the real person wants some configuration change or not? I see it as a big security problem. Doesn't mater how much I complain, no-one changes their ways.
Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge was absolutely hilarious. Like a comedy, with free porn.
Although reading this book changed my life, you will get a lot more benefit out of it if you do a bunch of exercises instead of just reading it.
Hey Andrew,

I'll actually be heading back to my old stomping grounds (Georgetown) in a few weeks. Perhaps we can meetup, grab coffee and talk about your experience with LaunchBox.

Let me know if you're interested. Email: HN username @gmail.com
One-Click iPhone App Cracker Released to the Public
from your data, it seems that the denser the road is, the lower the GDP is

but of course, only 3 data points, past data don't ensure future and it's only correlation, not causation
I really like the "group purchases" idea. It could only work within a social networking setting like Facebook. Also, it feels like Facebook's users are more likely to participate in that than Myspace users.
It looks like a clean simple design, I hope you do well!

Traditionally clones seem to perform quite well, especially when the design is aimed towards its own user base. I mean look at the difference between Japanese forums and imageboards (4chan as the english clone) and English forums. They're vastly different, which helps clones be highly successful and non-competitive.
Response to Alex Payne: In Defense of "Everything Buckets"
I have no problem with that assessment at all. So long as you're not extrapolating that into "since big corporations are dishonest and fraudulent, then it's ok for me to be also"

I think that sort of one-downsmanship would spiral into even worse issues for our economy.

And, for the record, I think debt is an obligation for whoever makes it–individual or corporations.

If you don't like the way such corporations act a) don't patronize their services, b) work to change the way they are regulated/operate, c) create a startup that disrupts their business model ... but for goodness' sake, don't act like them.
I actually tried a few years ago since I routinely sent patent applications, business plans and other sensitive information in e-mails. Unfortunately I couldn't get anyone to install encryption software at the other end (PGP) so I had to give up. Not even our patent attorney seemed to think that it was worthwhile to encrypt his mail.

I could probably have gotten a lot of really good patents by sniffing his mail and sending in applications before his customers got around to it :-)
Yeah my experience with GoDaddy was terrible too. I switched to 1and1 about 4 years ago. I have been very happy with its domain handling. I don't always use them for hosting, but I haven't found anyone better for domains.
How can you say "I don't know the effects (no one does)" and "it can't be anything good" at the same time?

Compared with children who receive regular recess, the children who were cooped up during the school day were more likely to be from public schools... from low-income and less-educated families and live in large cities.

Perhaps there is zero direct correlation.
I knew the game once being reminded of it, but I didn't immediately make the connection reading about Duck Duck Go.

I'd throw another hat in the ring of, "Yeah, a better name would help."
Two months ago, I met a second-generation Nigerian-American woman. She's one of the most refined, intelligent, and kind-hearted people I've met-- truly a lady. She's also beautiful.

I'm dating her now. :)
The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.
Money As Debt [video]
We do, for obvious reasons, but I get why people don't. Email isn't going to be encrypted until email encryption is automatic and transparent.

There's also two conflicting standards now; S/MIME and PGP. We have to use both, since roughly half our customers are married to each.
I just wrote a response: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=461711
I just use SSL to access the IMAP and SMTP servers. Anything more than that, I couldn't particularly care less. It's not like I send credit card information over email.

Email was designed to be a relatively simple way to send basic messages. In itself, it's an insecure platform. If you want security, use something else.
Forgive me if I misunderstand, but couldn't you just look at what people click on and assume they had clicked next for all the results before it?
What a nonsense article, why did that get voted up?
He's uninformed at best, what a waste of time.
If you are worried about ruining your rep by getting into porn and your startups are not making any money then just get a job.
screencap woulda been nice..
I think in the back of most developers heads is a little voice that says "My GUI tool set sucks" that most programmers ignore. People seemed to hate VB 6.0 because it was easy to use which is stupid.
> Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is.

On the other hand, if you don't price out the lifestyle you want (in terms of money and time), then you have no metric to determine whether a given business will be viable for you.
Let me export my raw hit data so I can run my own analyses, or switch to competitors if GA isn't gooing to add features.

And track clicks on AdSense ads as my goal.
Let's hypothesize that hyperbolic discounting is a good model for how market research people will value focus-group information: they will pay twice as much if it takes half as much time to perform a focus group and digest the results.

If it currently takes two weeks to do a focus group, and it takes 30 seconds on Facebook, then not only does it become reasonable to ask questions that you need only five minutes to digest the results of --- but you'll be willing to pay 4000 times as much, say, per question. Or, more likely, ask questions that are 4000 times less valuable, and pay the same amount.

That's not plausible --- there's probably some other limiting factor. But it could easily be bigger than Gartner.

Doing a poll on this thing could have the same relationship to traditional polling and focus groups that Google has to library research. I do maybe 100 Google searches a day, maybe 100× as many as I ever did card-catalog searches in a library. Can you imagine marketing guys and politicians doing 100 opinion polls a day?
Instant Web 2.0 Cred with the Vanilla Application Icon Designer (VAPID)
This is an indication that they are going to blow it. Actually Beacon was an indication. This is the confirmation.
Encryption is all mixed up with PKI and certificates and that whole bundle of (overly)complex stuff that I really don't want to have to bother with any more than I have to.

I think I have GPG running somewhere, but know only one person who used it. I like that they pushed me to use it, but haven't needed to email them since.

Whatever it was would have to work on all the ways I read my main email (iPhone, Browser, Outlook), and not involve typing a decryption password for every email or even every time I check for mail.
How are you to know I didn't sit at someone elses PC and send an email automatically signed as them?
I printed out labels for all those names, and my entire family (myself, wife, and three children) put labels on the envelopes, licked stamps (I sent them all first class —- at that time I didn’t know about bulk mail) folded the brochures, put them in the envelopes, and licked them shut. I licked so many envelopes and had so much glue on my tongue, that I don’t think I talked normally for at least two days.

Bob Parson seems to have to made many honest mistakes and learned from them. One of the thing i liked about him was Persistence, he kept trying and trying until he succeeded. A true entrepreneur.
The one point that I agree with the author on is that it is exceedingly hard to write a non-trivial closed-source application that is easy to install and works on all Linux distributions (or even just the major ones like RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Gentoo, Mint, Mandriva, CentOS, Xandros, and Slackware).

The app would have to support at least Gnome and KDE, and ideally should work with XFCE, Enlightenment, and [flux/black]box. And then you have to deal with the nightmare that is linux audio (oss, alsa, esound, arts, jack, gstreamer, phonon, etc).

I mean, static linking, autoconf, etc. all help, but it's still a lot of work. But testing each release on every (even major) combination of distribution, CPU-type, Window Manager, graphics tool-kit, and audio framework quickly becomes untenable. The return on investment for this sort of testing for a software author is staggeringly small.

And this is from someone who uses Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) as their primary OS.
Aside from the primary message of this post, which is a good one, something else fascinates me: almost everyone I know hates Godaddy. But Bob Parsons seems to think that he's created a great company with strong values, full of brilliant engineers, known for having great customer service. None of those things are things that I've ever heard anyone say about Godaddy. So why the discrepancy? Here's a few possibilities:

1. My sample is not representative, and many people do feel great about Godaddy.

2. Bob Parsons knows that Godaddy sucks, but he's a salesman and he's selling the brand as he'd like it to be.

3. Bob Parsons actually thinks that Godaddy is an amazing company and a strong brand.

Which is it?
Sure, but he's from Valleywag (he launched the site and eventually got fired for being too gossipy even for Gawker and Valleywag), and he's starting a site to encourage people to keep a visual online diary of their sex lives. He'd have to post thousands of fantastic comments here in order to compensate for the damage to civility he's done in his life so far.

(I know this is kind of harsh, but if you think I wouldn't say it in person, you probably haven't met me.)
Ask HN: Stats on freemium services
Anyone know where I can get hold of useful stats on % of users who upgrade to premium/paid for accounts on services like Flickr and Last.fm.

Need some decent stats for benchmarking and have had no luck getting anything of use.

Thanks.
Overall, I can't help but think that their time would be better spent working on a premium consumer offering.
I think the key problem (no pun intended) is that email encryption can't be securely implemented on the server side.

Simply put, most of the people who are paranoid enough to need email encryption don't trust Google (GMail) with their PGP private keys. Therefore, they either have to use an offline email client (unacceptable to a lot of people) or install a brittle and poorly integrated third-party solution like FireGPG (which the vast majority of users will never do).
Thanks! We are grateful for the power of the Google Web Toolkit.
I'd like to see that data. Specifically, I'd like to see the data that starting the types of businesses he mentions are less likely to succeed than the majority of the types of businesses started by the people on this site. Almost all businesses fail.
Compared to the others, my experience with GoDaddy has been good, but unfortunately that says more about the competition than them.
There seems to be a preponderance of these types of tenuous studies in social science. Somewhere, I'm certain there is a procedure for generic, shifty research that looks something like this:

1. Think up a hypothesis steeped in your own prejudices, eg. fat people watch too much tv as kids

2. Construct an experiment that doesn't control for any of the MILLIONS of other possible causes

3. Discover correlations in experimental results. Conclude that hypothesis is true based on correlations.

4. Issue a press release and make some tangential recommendations, eg. better parenting is needed
While I am not an atheist the logical argument is simple.

If a god or gods wanted people to warship them then they could demonstrate their existence and define a single world religion. The wide range of religions around the world suggest that the god or gods don't care about warship. So either their is no god or there are gods but it its impossible to tell anything about them which means acting like there is no god is the most rational choice.
Agree on your overall message, but your last sentence seems like hyperbole...5% would hardly be a "drop in the ocean" :)
That usually requires your signing password, which, done securely, shouldn't stay in memory for more than a few minutes. Of course a lot of people probably just check the "remember indefinitely" box.
This is largely off-topic: Speaking as a guy who used to work for a local technology incubator, I really really hate the "most startups fail" factoid because it unintentionally distorts the statistic.

The statistic is that most new businesses will not be going concerns X years after inception. This is true, but it does not indicate failure. I find this to be clarifying: if someone asked you for advice, saying (with wavering voice) "I'm considering taking a... job... where this company, like, pays me money every other week... is this safe?!", would you say "Pfft, most jobs fail"? Because most twentysomethings who start a job today will not be employed at the same job, by the same company, in 5 years.

My second "real job" was with the aforementioned technology incubator. I worked there three years, made decent money and learned a lot, and had a better opportunity when it came to contract renegotiation, so I took it. If I had been a startup at the same incubator, that would have put me in the "fail" column. Is there any sanity in that definition of fail? (Give me another few months and I'll be failing my way forward out of the better opportunity, hopefully.)
For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever?

For better or worse, Google defines the baseline in online advertising. New companies can't compete on ubiquity, so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics. Assuming that succeeds, they then have to then figure out how to leverage that limited dominance into something broader.

It's certainly possible, but it's also certainly more difficult than it was ten years ago.
One link I can give is http://nabeel.typepad.com/brinking/2008/09/theres-been-som.h...

Overall, Freemium conversion rates are way down right now. I might suspect that users are feeling less wealthy, and not opting to pay for anything that's not absolutely necessary.
Ask HN: What is an expected compensation for a startup yet to launch a product ?
I have been in discussion with a founder of a company that is about to release an application for the web/mobile devices in a months time frame. The initial development was outsourced and the rest will be taken cared off by the founder alone. The company is in stealth mode and has no funding. They will be looking for VC money once the product is launched and gains traction to a massive user base. Since, there is no money the compensation will be in Stocks. He mentioned an initial offer of 1000 'options'(immediately vested after 2 weeks) for 2 weeks part time work, before a longer agreement be made and FT after securing VC funding. Does this sound reasonable ? Is it better if I use this time investment for working up on my own side projects

[PS: I am personally not looking for cash, as I am working Full Time, and this will be a side gig.]
like showing a case where having a cofounder gives zero or even negative progress?

there should be plenty
obviously nsfw...

http://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/comments/7qz7t/reddit_please_he...
Remus: possible high availability of apps through replicating virtual machines
So change it every week for a month... and then stop using it.
Not to co-opt any thunder, but we used the same strategy for Stormpulse.com and in doing so have become the #1 result for "storm tracker" http://is.gd/i2C3 and the #2 result (behind only the National Hurricane Center itself, and ahead of Weather Underground, et al) for "hurricane tracking" http://is.gd/i2C8.
nice SEO :)