skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be impossible to preserve much savings through the current and coming crisis.

A couple of years ago I went on a binge and read every book about the South Sea Bubble and other aspects of financial disasters that I could find. A story that stuck in my head was of a British magistrate who fought mightly against the South Sea Bubble, publishing pamphlets, launching investigations, militating in the streets and before Parlament, etc. He tried to move all his money into land, but the general inflation of the bubble caused land prices to explode, and the cost of maintance and taxes also rose; as the bubble churned on year after year and kept failing his predictions of it being about to collapse, he eventually declared that "if the world has gone mad one must at some point go with it", gave up, and put all his money into stock. Then it crashed.

I've been thinking residential real estate was abotu to crash since 1999. If I had tried to speculate on that in anyway, I would have lost year after year before the present contraction. Bubbles being figments of crowd psychology, they can go on as long as the participants want.

But, it is a bad idea to give up in disgust and walk away. While your money may not survive the next five years, business connections and experience and even whole businesses probably will. Like a woman trying to re-enter the workforce after spending some years raising children, it can be hard to re-start, so I suspect there is little advantage to being a hermit somewhere for a while. Unless you are retiring anyway.

That said, there is no reason not to hold long memories against the individuals who are doing the most damage in this nonsense, both in business and in politics.
A browser plugin that installs the engine, then it downloads the maps, config files, etc in browser. So I'd guess whatever Quake 3 was coded in, Quake Live is coded in.
Preparing Yourself For The Next Jeff Pulver Business Networking Event - What To Do 
I am not a big fan of 'business networking' events. For most people its a show up and throw up event. The problem is that we are not taught how to make a business networking event effective and how to effectively and strategically prepare for an event. I have found the Jeff Pulver business networking events to be effective because of the "high class"/ hard core entrepreneurial crowd that it attracts.
You're basically asking "What's the net present value of the user?".

Let's say that the average user clicks 1 ad per day, and you get 5 cents per click, then each user is worth 5 cents per day. 5 cents * 365 = $18.25 in revenue per customer per year.

What's your cost? If you're paying $300k / year in salaries, Red Bull, website hosting and office rent to support a website that can handle 20,000 customers, then the cost per customer per year is $15.00.

...so your profit is $3.25 per customer per year.

What's the churn rate? If an average user lasts 2 years, then you're getting $6.50 in total profit per customer.

...except the profit for year two should be "discounted" by some factor (inflation, opportunity cost, risk, etc.). Call the first year $3.25 and the second year $2.50, perhaps.

So: a new customer is worth $5.75.

You can see all of the variables I used above - feel free to substitute your own numbers in.
That's an interesting idea, but doesn't it suggest that the better a song sells, the less revenue the artist receives?
Really? I found it quite stressful. It mostly feels like a driving game.
Okay, but why should votes cost more for a user with more karma? I would think the opposite should be true, that if karma is an indicator of a user's value to the site, someone with more karma should pay less to vote up a newer user.
It's been done before, like the (now defunct?) BioPassword:
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/tech/news/article_1295216....

If high-resolution timestamps for each keystroke aren't too much of a burden it seems like this would be straightforward to implement, given an algorithm like BioPassword's.
It uses a modified version of the id Tech 3 engine (which is written in C) loaded as a browser plugin.
The idea is that matchmaking is handled in the browser so that the game engine is lighter and only has to handle the actual playing of a game.
For those who are wondering, they're funded by YC. Just posting it because I had to look it up.
This looks like a very cool project and I'll definitely play around with it.

But I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that my expectations on the performance and memory characteristics of such a project terrify me a little.
It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-)
I climb everything from 5 grades below my current level to one grade above. I have found that consciously maintaining good technique on the hard routes helps me out a lot. I don't believe in "redpointing," so I usually don't try to force myself up a really hard route that I'm having trouble on. That is how you get injured.

The soreness I get after climbing is the same kind of soreness I used to get during the first two weeks of a weight lifting routine. It is not tendon damage or severe muscle damage because it doesn't last more than a day.
I have been climbing for over a year. I still don't burst out of bed with energy in the morning.
Twice acquired before launched, wow. To what do you attribute this? Were you targeting recognized problems in those industries?
This is not surprising. The concept of customer service in India is very different from what we accept as the norm in the States. Indian businesses have always treated consumers like crap. The socio-economic reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post, but I do want to point out some examples to illustrate the general attitude, and help align the frame of reference better.

My mother lives in New Delhi and often visits me in the States. She still can’t get over how easy it is to return stuff to stores here. In India, once you’ve purchased something, it’s yours for life. You can’t get a refund if you are not 'completely satisfied with your purchase’. Keep or trash; there is no ‘like’. This applies even if the product is defective. If you are lucky, or willing to yell at the store manager, you might get store credit.

You don’t like the movie selection on Delta? I once flew a ‘discount carrier’ from Bangalore to Delhi and had to stare at a 6" display ad for a refrigerator three hours straight, because it was pasted on the back of the headrest in front of me, and the seat next to me, and every other seat on the plane.

If your server in a San Francisco restaurant isn’t friendly, you give the restaurant two stars on Yelp. In India, if my server is friendly, I have reason to be suspicious. Surprisingly, I have seen this attitude towards customer service even in Indian stores and restaurants in the Bay Area. Note: if you’re white, your Indian server in an Indian restaurant is more likely to be friendly and hospitable. Not so much if you’re Indian, perhaps because they know you know, or perhaps because awe of the ‘white-skinned colonizing foreigner’ is still deeply entrenched in our culture.

Airtel, and pretty much all wireless carriers in India often send you ‘free’ text messages advertising their newest ring tones, pricing schemes and partner offers. "AT&T does that too!" you say, but not twenty-five times a day. I don’t know if people even understand the concept of opting out.

Let’s talk about less superficial issues - landlines stop working arbitrarily. There are times when I can’t reach my mother because her phone (and hence DSL) service has been knocked out by rain or wind or the latest ‘big dig’. Even when the phone lines work, DSL doesn’t work well and VoIP is spotty. Hour-long power outages are common. Four hour outages are even more common (and I'm talking big cities here). Running water around the clock? Only for the tiny new economic class that gets written about in the New York Times. I think it was the mid-nineties, when I heard about a week-long power outage in a Delhi neighborhood and the consequent lynching of local power grid officials by an irate mob.

Having grown up in the Indian middle-class, I am used to bad customer service, though I must admit the States is softening me. So when I see complaints about Airtel intercepting client HTTP requests, I can empathize, but it makes me wonder about much bigger customer service issues that never make it to the front page of HN.
Applying the 80/20 rule, metabolisms most certainly are not more complex than than a simple input/output equation for a vast majority of people.

We have been around in this planet for thousands of years, a vast majority of which spent by a vast majority of people in a non-obese way. Evolution has tuned our bodies not to be overweight so long as we don't change the equation of calories in to calories expended.

Our modern North American lifestyles have adjusted both sides of the equation, hence, obesity is an epidemic. Adjusting the equation back is a huge step forward, regardless of outliers.

Look at the military. Diets aside, the simple reason there are no large obesity issues within the organization is that they purposefully modify the output side of the equation. Diets don't work because the modification to the input side is always only a temporary change.

We eat too much and move too little. Duh. While the dynamics become more complex at the elite athlete level, and there is a segment of the population that could be considered outliers, if we all simply made the equation balance, we'd see a huge drop in obesity rates.

It isn't rocket science.
It looks like BioPassword works best on short, often repeated phrases like login names and passwords. I'm not sure how it would work for larger, unpracticed blocks of text. Etherpad would also need to store information about the timing of when each key is pressed, and based on the demo it doesn't look like they're doing that.
Pitching Hacks, The Book - Venture Hacks
Getting people to upgrade to a cellphone that surfs the web is a significant revenue stream. In the US Apples profit per iPhone is more than it's direct cost to consumers so IMO making it "free" is not that big of a deal. Toss in AT&T's profit and the numbers get insane.
but if your browser-based game requires yet another plugin to be installed, you've kinda missed the point imho

I guess you could think of it that way. And it's probably true for most web applications...

But then you realize it's fucking Quake III. In all its glory, in your browser, against friends, and free. Yeah I'd install a plugin.
The problem is that finance is not really an engineering problem. Issues arise because the techniques used to distribute risk change the market value of the underlying assets. This was a major cause of the MBS issue. Financial engineering allowed risk from MBS's to be more easily distributed. This increased the demand for these securities, which increased their value. The price of the assets increased, even though the underlying value of the assets was exactly the same. Much of the value created by financial engineering is an illusion.
You should be able to send pms to other hacker news users.
You should be able to send pms to other hacker news users.
This is Prateek from Muziboo.com, listed as one of the competitors who doesn't get it :)

While Zed has excellent points, here are somethings I find kinda moot

"Even if these companies open things up for musicians to sell their music, you’d still be stuck at having to sell through another company that doesn’t really add value."
I don't think this is entirely true. The company is giving you a distribution channel, helping you accept payments and lots of other things in general. The very popular musicians with a dedicated following may be able to sell on their sites easily but I am not sure about the other 90%. I think these companies provide a lot of value to them

* They don’t ask you to prove you’re the author or that you’re “signed”.
I agree about the signed part but I don't think its a good idea for the sites to allow people to sell whatever they put up and assume they are not selling someone else's stuff.

Another problem that I have certainly seen in places like India is the fact that bands really crave for an audience and give out their music for free a lot of times. The same music is also available for purchase on some other sites. I feel thats cheating the guy who is buying music. He should know that he can get the same music for free elsewhere and then pay if he wants to. I think this is where the companies providing such services will have a lot of overhead and they do need to take a cut out of the sales.
I think hot water leaches more stuff from your pipes, but it's probably not a big deal. The value in using less water is it takes money and time to heat extra water.

PS: There are lots of ways you can make it cheaper or faster such as covering the pot while you wait for the water to boil. In the end it's not a big deal, but if it's saving you time and money why not?
Why don't you just email them via their profile? Most people have their email stored there.

Those that don't probably don't care to hear from you either way.
No, we have a fixed portion that goes to the fans, and the artist decides how much that is. Also, early buyers get bigger cuts, so it pays not to wait if you like a song.
You'd be right to be terrified, it's not exactly zippy. It's a toy, but I'm releasing it because it's got a couple of nice features (friendly REPL, lazy evaluation) and it's more complete in some areas than other toy Schemes I've tried. Also I figured it might be a nice example implementation for people who know Ruby. If you have optimisation suggestions or links to stuff I should read on the subject I'd be delighted.
The Periodic Table Of Doomsday Economic Charts
In your experience (pigeon holed as a teen), do you see your technical discrimination as the exception or the rule?
in addition, I'm pretty sure the novelty is that while yes, this could be done in a standalone .exe, the barrier of entry for anyone already surfing the web (i.e. everyone) is ridiculously low.
Damn. People are evil. Thanks for posting this...it's a good remember that even in the web community, which seems generally friendly and helpful, you have to watch your back.

Don't suppose you want to post her name so the rest of us can avoid her? :)
Most people in a small (<50 people) company would understand.
There's quite a bit of good information on this page about how to spend money on yourself, but there's one important thing missing: how to give money away. I think the most difficult money-related issue I've had to deal with is deciding how much of my income I'm going to keep for myself and how much I'm going to give to those who need it more than I do.

When you come out of school and land right in the middle class, as most professional developers do, it's pretty easy to take care of your basic needs. What's more difficult is balancing your (often frivolous) wants and needs in the present, with your needs in the future (retirement), with the basic needs of others. I don't see many people talking about how to do this in a responsible and morally satisfying way.
Plug Computers: Green, Small, Cheap and Maybe the Future
Ask HN: how do you sync your software's data?
How do you sync data from different mac applications written in cocoa and web applications? Are you using custom code or there are common libraries for doing this?
Microsoft does some crazy things for backwards compatibility. Here's one of my favorites related to the Display Control Panel: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/01/10/511201....
Second Estimate Can Reduce Planning And Purchasing Errors
As for whether or not the data structure exists, it does. :) The std::map in C++ is a sorted dictionary, for instance.

But it can be uncommon to require this, usually for two reasons. One, the data set may be huge. And two, much of your code may not even "care" if the data is sorted. In either of those cases, if automatic sorting occurs, a lot of compute time may be wasted for no net benefit. (A solution is to have data sorted "on demand" within the code that actually cares about sort order.)
Ask PG: Working with infants
Feel free to ignore if there is too personal.

A few months back we were all congratulating you on the birth of a kid. It appears that your output (essays, posts, etc) appear to have increased since then!

Any suggestions on how to keep productive during those the first few months?

I have some fond memories of writing code with a newborn on my lap, but I'd like to stay ahead of the curve this time.
An NDA and a legal contract about ownership are completely different things.
This is absolutely fucking retarded. We are in the age of the internet where I can communicate directly with someone who likes my work, and yet I’m still paying some middle man to do nothing other than move some bits around on a piece of plastic.

That's the most important part. There's a lot of stuff that should be made quicker and easier by the Internet, but nope, there's still the middle man waiting to delay the process and make some cash.
[video] Concurrency in Clojure
I think some of the things you learn as you get more business experience include:

* That you have almost no ability to enforce contracts as an early-stage business, because lawsuits are too expensive.

* That actual lawsuits take years to resolve, usually longer than the expected lifetime of your company.

* That it is very easy to strangle business opportunities by letting them get tied up in legal negotiations.

* That in the end, there is usually a lot less value in the information you're trying to protect than you think there is.
That's true, but for contractors the two are often combined in the same IP agreement.
Those are not the equivalent of British tabloids, they're just called by the same name.

As an aside, someone once pointed out to me that the National Enquirer is distinct from the other trashy tabloids. They never have the wacky "aliens stole my lunch" stories. They're focused on the gossip/celebrity domain and do a good job of it, as measured by: (1) they almost never lose a lawsuit, and thus (2) they rarely get sued. This person argued that the difference between the NE and "serious" papers was not one of accuracy or quality (making allowances for the lowbrow material) but rather in their willingness to pay for stories and photos.

I've tested this theory many times since while standing in queues at supermarkets, and I must say it checks out.
Malattie della pelle : Ambientalmente
It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.
It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.

Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite, because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting their founders':

http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-to...

It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft.
Interesting. I would have given the same answer some time ago, yet lately I have the feeling that I learn more from installing, configure and dive into somebody else' code and extend / change it than writing something from scratch. I guess both are valid 'methods' to learn, although the latter benefits open source projects like laconi.ca as well.
I wrote about 100k lines of C++ with my first daughter sleeping on my shoulder. When they are at the "sleep alot" age it can work well if you are willing to synchronize to their schedule. Of course you could put them in the crib at that time to, but she didn't like it and where is the fun in that.
Twitter’s public/private space design, aka “How to find girls on Twitter”
There are no "official" numbers -- presumably those only come directly from Apple -- but that doesn't mean other people aren't tracking sales. As of September, a market research firm indicated the iPhone was selling roughly half as well in Japan as Apple was expecting:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122143317323034023.html?mod=...

The main reasons for poor sales given in that article are lack of hardware features, lack of emoji (Japanese emoticons), and high price. I believe a software update since then has added emoji, but the price has apparently not changed since August until now, so there is reason to suspect that sales are still slow... especially since Apple is not eager to divulge the numbers.

The number of iPhone apps created by Japanese developers is not necessarily an indicator of popularity in Japan, since many of the apps could have been developed with the intent to eventually sell on the global marketplace (or locally for the iPod Touch).
"I doubt everyone will abandon their word processing software and user Etherpad."

They will probably give up Word for something, eventually. Especially among the current generation, writing is something done online; a blog, an email, a tweet, writing on someone's wall. At some point, it stops making sense to have a word processor distinct from the web. Right now, Word has more features that people like than online writing tools, but that will change over time. Online writing tools are a more natural fit for collaboration and integration with words' final destinations.

Microsoft could make the online tool that replaces Word, but it is probably too dangerous to their current revenue stream. I don't think they can get the same revenue for an online version of Word, and it would be difficult for them to rationalize trying a new business model that may never regain the revenue they get now.

(And yes, I'm basically just making the Innovator's Dilemma argument for word processors.)
> whatever your session cleanup strategy is

... not really. If you're using cookie-store (the Rails default) or mem-cache-store (the fast, scalable option) there isn't any need for a session cleanup strategy.

I can definitely agree with the point on documentation - killer docs with real-life scenario examples are really key in adoption for stuff like this.
Not every site needs an 'inbox', soaking up server-side state and adding complexity ot the interface.

However, there are two similar facilities I'd like to see that might better satisfy the same need:

- A directed-edge 'requests contact' toggle. That is, rather than delivering (and queuing) arbitrary messages, allow the one message, 'user X wants you to contact them'. It would be up to user X to ensure contact info is in their public profile.

- A threaded 'private reply', in public conversations, that only the author of the parent comment can see. My main use for this would be to politely point out little things (typos, broken links, etc.) the author may want to correct during the 2-hour editing grace period. There's no need to clutter the main thread with these, especially if the correction is quickly applied.

If such 'private threaded replies' were abused in either content (insults/harassment) or volume (long private threads that should be shared with the community or taken to other channels), checks could be added. Perhaps the target could choose to make the comment public, or they could limited to N replies deep, etc.
You have to be pretty relaxed to be good at Quake for example - otherwise you cannot get into "the zone" and think clearly (there IS actually room for thought in Quake).