skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really unfortunate that higher education has come to this. It used to be that Universities were the way to pull up people with buoyant aspirations, to lessen the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots"; now the cost of higher education is increasingly weighty relative to the benefits of having a degree.
All the companies named above are the exception in their categories. I do not know another successful Google, Skype, Craigslist....

By the way Youtube, Facebook and Skype are not profitable yet (at least not to my knowledge so excuses it if I am wrong).

Let me give you a good example of "Pricing".

Take a company such as ClickCare. They provide a web based environment for home care providers to remotely ask questions to doctors, and share photos & videos of patients. The doctors can review the information from anywhere and make the proper suggestions. That is what they do, well they are also HIPPA compliant to ensure the privacy/security of the patient information. Now this video, photo, wiki company charges doctors 20,000 USD a year.

I am not saying that is all to their enterprise, but whatever effort two guys in a garage are going through to build the next Flickr, they could apply their technology in less sexy field and have a significantly higher chance at being successful.

But not everyone wants to build a profitable, not famous business. They want to be rockstars.
Ad revenue is real revenue. A dollar is a dollar whether it comes from a user or an advertiser.

That being said, for every (EDIT:ok, most) struggling consumer startup you show me, I can show you a way they can apply their technology in different fields and charge customers.

We just have to stop being afraid to say "Pay Me Please".
Don't be short sighted. Advertising on the web can be highly targeted and very effective. It's also measurable. Advertising on TV is dying, in papers, it's dying too. Ads on the web are the future, and though it may not seem like an excellent way for now, it's not going to get worse in the future. Compare 5 years ago to now. More companies can survive on ads than 5 years ago.
Use an accountant, doing it yourself is not worth it, since the accountant will pay for himself by catching a lot of deductions that you missed
Little known fact -- Fiji bottled water mostly comes as a byproduct of downtown Honolulu's cooling system. They use a process called OTEC: http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/energy/renewable/otec
This really bothers me. California banned bottles for a reason, and now he's introducing more in NYC. If people want tap water on the go, buy a reusable bottle!
I agree that storing passwords in plaintext is an anti pattern. But with a one-way-password-encryption setup you need a password resetting system, which is more than 5-10 lines of code.
Imagine if they would have had the internet with Google, Internet Archive, etc., during the McCarthyism era in the US. That's the type of thing I am most concerned about.
I think this essay also describes a way to get a good number of intelligent people to move to a new country based on an island or seastead. While starting a good university is hard, the new country, probably small, supports the other suggested criteria for a startup hub.

The feedback of the system would be excellent too, as the companies that move to the new country would hire people that are interested in freedom and startups.

The startups would have a particular advantage after moving, in no regulations or taxes to deal with. They'd only need to pay rent (depending on how property taxes, currency, and private property work on the seastead).

Considering the numbers described here, there must be thousands of people who could bankroll both the infrastructural parts and the social parts like this.
Make it six cents and I'll bet you can get as many bottles as you want.
Understand the concern. We'll have options to dump a backup to various destinations under your control. Your S3 account would be a good choice within EC2 (no bandwidth charges), but we could also do FTP.
While not enough to leap the hurdle, what I like about big cities like Chicago is how spread out they are. That helps grow subcultures.

And while land mass doesn't create them, it does provide psychological space. A large (but not too large) space matched with good weather and transportation is perfect for cross breeding. You need to carve niches, ask evolution.

I realize a small city can grow a larger one, but some are too limited by location, but I'm not hip to which.

And you want startup cultures. Every city thinks they have a music scene. In some cities that's arenas, in others, ad-hoc clubs. You want rebels. But you want them in the outskirts not the capital. That comes later; it's demoralizing early on, save coup d'etats.

The problem with cities like New York (and Boston) is they have bad habits. Like human habits, they're mini-traditions, they give us expectations, then meet them. The set up is the comfortable feeling. But like candy bars, they taste great in the short run but kill you in the long. And they're addicting.

Boston's addiction is college, and New York's finance (and media). Those industries are going into permanent introspection within the next few decades. That's a while off, but it's still a bad play to have the next big thing near the really big thing it's going to outmode.

Media is badly wounded, but finance and education are still on their tour of duty. R&D and education are going to split eventually, and finance is just starting to get shaken up. There is vitality to sap, so I think we're too early for official sanction.

You set up the pins, we knock them down; That's a political game. We might avoid this with a rich patron. A rebellion can start with a dissatisfied insider.

And don't underestimate the second-rate mentality. I felt it as soon as I moved to Boston; And you can tell through the baseball fans. In New York, no one hates the Sox until they come to town. In Boston, they hate the Yanks year round ... and breed children to. It's surprising how far behind the runner up can be.

Another thing is that in New York you may have to look around longer to get a sense of everything, but in Boston, it's harder to abstract away the details. The city doesn't have to be that as huge. But we're looking for tightness; muscularity, not fat; Quality not quantity.
JsSO - Flash Shared Objects in Javascript
We're starting by targeting EC2 customers and ourselves running within EC2 to avoid this issue.

In future, we'll work with more cloud/hosting providers so that we can stay 'close' to the client, and we do have some tech that could be applied here also.
Something smells funny. We're supposed to believe that tiny, cable-only networks can afford to produce high-quality content (i.e. AMC could afford to create "Mad Men"), but that the major networks are so strapped that they would no longer attempt to pilot shows that are demonstrated to be cash cows (i.e. "Lost")?

I understand that cable providers gain extra revenue by charging for the delivery, but this explanation still sounds bogus. Could it be that the networks are simply unwilling to pay for decent content, and are instead trapped in a cycle wherein they must settle for crappy "reality" TV that's cheap to make, but has the half-life (and revenue-generation potential) of dead fish? Advertisers like to have their name associated with brands like "Friends" and "ER" -- even in re-runs. I'm not sure they're as willing to pay to be associated with re-runs of "MILF Island".
I don't have a new favorite. Mine have always been the ones that make something people want.
It's kind of old and most probably a dupe.
Good point. One of the things I love in Silicon Valley is that I can hire any profile I want. If my dream candidate must have worked 5 years at Google on search and then two years at Salesforce because that's what I need, I know there is someone out there that fits that criteria.

You can't replicate any of that stuff anywhere else. By definition, if you want to compete with Silicon Valley, you will want to hire some people from your competitors. So you have to be here as well. QED (any way around this dilemma, I'd love to hear).

You can refer to an article I wrote last year called "The limits of the Silicon Valley model". Unfortunately, it was in print only for an Indian magazine, I can't find a link to it.
So... shun the superficial Web 2.0 social networks in favor of the new, innovative technology with more substance: virtual sex toys.

It's absolutely inspiring.
Are there plans for adding PostgreSQL?
A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age
wow! counted as the second time i saw a photo of max without his slide shirt on.
A letter from President Obama
How many paying customers do you need to get to $50M in revenue?

Lets say you create some webapp that you charge $20/mo for.
To get to $50M a year, you need to get 200,000 paying customers.

The question then is what is harder to achieve, 200k paying customers, or 4bn page views/month.
From the Wikipedia article on Silicon Valley "It was in Silicon Valley that the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed, and has been the site of electronic innovation for over four decades"

These were all truly innovative ideas, and they made enough money to give Silicon Valley it's name.

The problem with truly innovative ideas is not that they are impossible to make money with. The problem is that it's a homerun business where a few succeed and most fail. VC's have known this for ages, which is why they invest in innovation.
Long hours link to dementia risk
Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality Over Quantity
Great, that would definitely make me sleep better at night. Particularly if it could be automated so that I would have a dump delivered every night.

And good luck with it :-)
I think the ones that go for the intersection between what people want and what will genuinely improve people's lives are the best.
That actually is kind of funny:

http://images.google.com/images?q=max%20levchin
I have two unused copies of XP Home sitting around unused because I could not find installation media. I was able to torrent a copy in under 30 minutes, but unfortunately the way it was hacked breaks the key authentication so I can't use it to register my legitimate key.

Several hours ago I could have been up and running with a working but hacked version. Now I am just frustrated and irritating everyone I know with calls searching for XP Home media. Turns out everyone I know has Pro.

I was already planning on dual-booting Ubuntu (the XP install is only for games because I am too lazy to play with WINE), so I guess now it's .5 and 1.5?
To some extent, yes. But it can be dangerous to go too far down that road. You're saying in effect you're going to give them what you think they should want, instead of what they do want. You have to be extra careful when doing that. Historically it has been responsible for a lot of bad things.
hey can you give me the password foe extraction plzz
You need many of those same lines of code to do password recovery if you store plaintext.
I disagree, if the school has to babysit a few brats in order to fund a new lab or to let low income merit students in for free then it is a net benefit to society.
Ok, I see your point.

For some ads, there is no geo-data. To fix that for the next release, we'll list ALL ads, not just the mappable ones, in the Ad Widget. And we'll indicate in the table if the ad is on the map.

One good side effect though is the ads on the map tend to be less spammy than the non-mapped ads. I assume this is because the spam ads often embed their spam in HTML and don't use CraigsList's structure well. A good landlord is going to make sure their ad links to a Google Map on CraigsList, which also means we will index them.
The value of traffic rises very sharply when it becomes more targeted though. The value of traffic on http://bountii.com is worth orders of magnitude more than on a random Facebook page, because it's all people who are just about to buy something.
Starting on page 17, Buffet discusses the failures of Freddie and Fannie and their oversight committee, the OFHEO. It's a fascinating read.

This particular caption is my favorite on derivatives:

"Improved “transparency” – a favorite remedy of politicians, commentators and financial regulators for averting future train wrecks – won’t cure the problems that derivatives pose. I know of no reporting mechanism that would come close to describing and measuring the risks in a huge and complex portfolio of derivatives. Auditors can’t audit these contracts, and regulators can’t regulate them. When I read the pages of “disclosure” in 10-Ks of companies that are entangled with these instruments, all I end up knowing is that I don’t know what is going on in their portfolios (and then I reach for some aspirin)."

I also find it hilarious that he ends by trying to sell his shareholders auto insurance at their annual meeting next month:

"GEICO will have a booth staffed by a number of its top counselors from around the country, all of them ready to supply you with auto insurance quotes. In most cases, GEICO will be able to give you a shareholder discount (usually 8%). This special offer is permitted by 44 of the 50 jurisdictions in which we operate. (One supplemental point: The discount is not additive if you qualify for another, such as that given certain groups.) Bring the details of your existing insurance and check out whether we can save you money. For at least 50% of you, I believe we can."
Caving into bullies (aka, here we go again)
Occam's razor suggests that the reason the current ideas seem boring is that you don't understand yet which ones have big potential. Microprocessors seem a great idea in retrospect, because we've seen now what they turned into, but initially hardly anyone cared about them, even within Intel.
Right, but those are both less convenient than just buying water when you feel like it, and throwing out the bottle afterward. People are happy to pay for convenience (and that seems quite rational to me).
max is a marketing GENIUS. searching for someone's name and it inevitably turns up x*results of advertisements for his company ;)

i say this is a predictor of success. if you search someone's full name, count how many times you see their shirt with their company logo. until i have enough money as max to throw around, i'll pose with a 8.5x11 sheet of paper with my logo written or printed on it.
That explains why pretty much all laptops still have that RJ45 telephone socket (and the dialup modem of course). I used to wonder.
Are you making a distinction between storing for verification and storing for use? The right way to store passwords when you use them to verify authentication is to hash (twitter verifying a login). The right way to store passwords when you need to use them to gain access on behalf of a user is to encrypt them (any third party "twitter application"). I ask because the first google result for "bcrypt" is http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/ which is distinctly not hashing, where as the second one is for a ruby library interface to bcrypt hashing.
I think the extensibility is huge for emacs. It's very easy to do and very powerful.

But here's the really cool thing: I barely know any Lisp. The most I've extended emacs is adding key bindings. But I haven't been compelled to learn enough Lisp to add some awesome feature yet.

It's so easy to extend that most users never need to. Google has yielded every language mode and feature I've ever really wanted. I'm sure I'll start hacking on it sometime, but there's already so much out there that I have an emacs much better than emacs out of the box without having written more than 2 lines of what's in my .emacs and my .emacs.d/
From your response, I gather that you may have taken my comment the wrong way. Just to clarify, I mentioned the book's size, in an effort to point out that the book can be read quickly over the course of a weekend (that's what I did), which is a positive thing. Javascript: The Good Parts and K&R are a couple of shelfs apart in my bookcase, and I must say that the former is much thinner and above all a quicker read. K&R is awesome, but I don't expect anyone to get through it in a weekend.
Dish Network already does this, but I've only seen it during commericals for PPV content or (periodically) cars. It displays a little "Hit Select for more info" text/icon. It makes sense to do it for PPV, since the thing being advertised can be provided right there. For real-life goods, I've never wanted the show I'm watching to be interrupted so it's never made sense to me why they'd take you away from the reason you're watching TV to begin with. Your idea of showing it afterward, or adding it to a list of things you're interested in so that you can review them at your leisure is interesting though.
Won't somebody think of the virtual children!
First, they're working in a field most people overlook, where one can therefore grow slowly and gradually. Second, they're an extraordinarily tight and self-sufficient group. Most startups like to be around other startups, but the Wufoos don't seem to need it.
And it doesn't mean they're storing it in cleartext either. For some reason I don't think he'd understand how virtual attributes work, though...
The ability to get government funding increases the success probability of various startups. What happens downstream will affect success rates.

I.e., if flagsfororphans.com goes well, VC's win. If it gets into trouble, the possibility of future government funding may let the VC's recoup some of their investment.

This makes VC's prefer flagsfororphans.com to satanictitleinsurance.com, which obviously does not have the same possibility of government funding.
Evite is willing to sacrifice security for usability. Which makes sense, because it doesn't really matter if someone hacks your Evite account.
Wasn't sniping, sorry. I really liked this book.
I think the implication was that the water didn't need treatment at the municipal level because it comes so clean from the source. Once any city water reaches your tap, it is potable and does not require extra filtration except to improve flavour. Unless you're one of those fluoride conspiracy nuts.
First, bcrypt is a one-way hash algorithm.

Second, the whole fuss about Twitter and OAuth is the degree to which people are not OK with giving their passwords to other people to use.
I do not know another successful Google, Skype, Craigslist

That's because these companies are so successful they've killed off all their competitors.
Atlanta feels more like Chicago than SF to me -- the sprawl is worse, the weather is better (but it's certainly not the California coast), and the meathead culture is substantial although I'm not sure I can compare it to Chicago's.

The Olympics were a good thing for the downtown area, and there is some government willpower to make it more appealing to entrpreneurs -- notably in biotech. With the CDC, Emory, and Georgia Tech, things could certainly be worse for startups, but I still wouldn't pick Atlanta as a likely new startup hub. The same government support that keeps the city afloat also feels a bit stifling. Poverty in the city center and sprawl everywhere else is depressing. And the general perception of Georgia in the existing startup hubs is even worse than the area actually is; offering a group of hackers $1 million to move to the deep South sounds like a mind game or a social experiment, not a serious offer.

Compare: When the last tech bubble burst it seemed like a lot of engineers left the Bay Area and resettled around San Diego. La Jolla has UCSD, a pool of biotech serial entrpreneurs and angels, even better weather than Palo Alto, and decent burritos and pho. Public transportation could be better, and it is getting better. So, it would take some extreme persuasion to keep me from heading right back to the west coast when I finish grad school.
How do multi-byte Unicode characters work over SMS? Languages that use an average of four bytes per character can only send 35 character messages? I'm not so sure "fair" is really part of the discussion. Twitter still has SMS turned on in some countries that use wide characters, right?
An excellent response by a linguistics Professor is here

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1186
Aquafina and Dasani, bottled water from the Coke and Pepsi companies, are made with municipal source water that is filtered to improve the taste. Dasani here in the Toronto area comes from Brampton, Ontario tap water, and there is nothing special about Brampton tap water.
The fun part aside, are there any real use cases for tweetbymail?

At the peak of .Com days, there was a startup that promised to bridge e-mail and snail mail: one can use their service to email people who don't have an email account or connectivity, and it would be delivered through snail mail.
This is not news. It has been this way for over a decade.
I'm actually am much more productive in cooler environments, and I really enjoy fall and winter here in Boston. Heat drains my energy and makes me lazy.

My 2100 sq. ft. condo in Boston costs about $40/month to heat in the winter, but $350/month to cool in the summer. I look forward to the cool seasons.
Growing up in and with wealth is almost a prerequisite for "brattiness" these days. People from poorer families can't afford to be bratty. Besides, poor folks are usually much more grateful and gracious than their silver-spoon counterparts.
Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield
An oldie but a goodie, both the post and the issue. IDE editors suck. Emacs as an IDE sucks. Somebody needs to get us out of this mess :-( Since I don't think emacs will ever be a decent IDE, I think the day will come when somebody writes a good programmer's editor that is designed for embedding in an IDE. Then people can build their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink IDEs around it, and programmers can use the same editor to edit source files in their IDE that they use for editing text files in their terminal sessions.
Ask HN: Site idea for project matching
I think it would be useful to have some sort of HN-centric site contains a database of users, interests, and skill sets. The purpose would be to connect people interested in working on projects together.

For instance, I'd be interested in jumping in on any projects that are oriented towards finance or motorcycles. I have some useful relationships in both fields and pay close attention to any posts on HN on those topics. However, I sometimes go a few days without checking the site and I may miss some valuable material or worse even - a chance to connect with someone that has the same interests.

If there was a database out there, I could go quickly search it. See who else has overlapping interests, maybe read their HN username to get an idea about the person, and reach out to them if we have something in common.

Does this strike a chord with anyone else? Or does this idea exist in the wild somewhere that I am not aware of? It seems fairly simple to build and I'd be happy to help out with css/html or basic php if anyone else is interested in slapping something together.. I'd do it myself but my coding isn't quite there yet..
Samsung F480 Gold Touch Screen Unlocked
Samsung F480, a very beautiful mobile phone for you with very beautiful look and different functions. The F480 is clearly intent on establishing itself as a fantastic model of Samsung. expandable memory up to 8GB and you can enjoy superior sound.
Chicago isn't a sprawl city. San Diego and San Jose definitely are. I don't know what a "meathead culture" is, but your favorite band is more likely to play here than in Atlanta or San Francisco.