skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a great point, and one of the things VCs see a lot are startups that perform all kinds of contortions to boost their app store chart rankings right before they raise money.

Because there are not very many ways to boost your rankings legitimately aside from true organic growth, sometimes this means paying for sketchy marketing techniques that can actually result in Apple banning your app when they find out.

I think the honest thing to do is probably to measure actual user engagement in the app. The high quality app startups that pitch us use something like Mixpanel (disclosure: one of our investments itself) to do this -- in fact, this is one of the reasons we invested in Mixpanel.
Yes, I'd say it's now more common than not, at least with startups we've funded.
Interesting -- looks as though the speculation as to the nature of CRIME was pretty much dead-on. Took years for anyone to realize that compression introduced a vulnerability into HTTPS, but as soon as everyone knew that there was something there, the nature of the attack was immediately guessed.

(Although I'd be much more worried if the community had discovered a different vulnerability!)
Yeah. I hate to say it, but when it comes to the iPhone, I'm in it for the hardware at this point. iOS is fast, but lame.
Ahh cool. Stickyjs does the same stuff too :) thanks
Stacks up as in "it's crap compared to"? If you know how a digital sensor works (and photography for that matter), you know damn well that the sensor in an iPhone is small, which has a direct impact on the dynamic range of light coming in.

In its category (phone cameras) the iPhone is decent enough (though not even the best) but comparing it to a high-end full-frame DSLR is really rotten apples to freshly picked Jaffa oranges.
Any reliable text extraction APIs?
Emphasis on RELIABLE.<p>I've tried both AlchemyAPI and Diffbot's API for author extraction to unreliable avail.<p>Both fail at, for example determining that Joel Klien is the author of:
http://swampland.time.com/2012/09/21/latest-column-romneys-imaginary-campaign/?iid=sl-article-arenapage<p>I did some testing to generate a larger sample size:<p>-----

Deets at Quora: http://www.quora.com/Information-Extraction/Any-RELIABLE-author-extraction-APIs
about a week or two after Craigslist filed the lawsuit against 3taps, they put a "noarchive" tag on their listings pages. Since then, their content isnt available in search engine caches.
I think that's true. I also think that the cliche of the venture-backed entrepreneur who goes for growth yet has no idea how the company will generate revenue is mostly false. Most of the smart entrepreneurs I know who are apparently pursuing that strategy actually know exactly how they're going to make money, they just don't say much about it up front.
I honestly have no idea how I would function as a self-analytical human being without the ability to wrangle my thoughts into text. I think I have a decent knack for it, but when I think back to high school I realise I was lucky to scrape through with passable written English. Even now at university most people I meet are severely limited writers, incompetent even. And I imagine the situation must be even worse among the wider population. Maybe this is a new way to think about literacy - not if you can read and write basic sentences, but can you argue, can you convince - are you comfortable on the page, can you dance with your words?
>"However, I got annoyed because I thought you were being extremely closed minded by seeming to find it somehow dishonest or greedy"

I do find it somewhat dishonest and greedy. That's my opinion, and I'm entitled to it as a Canadian who is personally affected by such things. You know we're running huge deficits here, right? I don't think my tax dollars should subsidize the education of someone who has not or does not plan on contributing to the tax base of this country. That's an unsustainable policy. Next thing you know, people are angry and we have immigration policies similar to the US.

It's as simple as that, even though you tried your hardest to turn it into some Lou Dobbs-type xenophobic argument. But you're more than welcome to come here and get educated. I'd even love for you to stay after you graduate, unlike the US.

And yes, it looks to me like the author did his best to take advantage of "the best of both worlds" and found out the hard way that things don't really work that way. Immigration is no joke; ask people who are taking it seriously. He tried to slip one past the decision makers (I'm not a programmer, I'm an analyst!) and they shut it down and told him to follow the proper channels. He did, and now all is well. Sad story?

>"I found that to be such an outrageously bleak, ridiculous and restrictive view of the obligations of migrants, that I decided to ridicule it."

That I expect people who don't live here to not receive tuition subsidies? Yeah, ludicrous. If you think that is so outrageous, the world must be a dark, dark place in your eyes. Not that I couldn't tell by your anger.
That's a little bit like saying the optimal strategy for running the Boston Marathon is to start running naked from the Arctic Circle three weeks prior.
Not to mention active, ongoing development, including regularly adding new features and a several hundred thousand strong community. It's not a Facebook-killer, but it's a reasonable social network as-is.
I think the intended idea is U($) = k*$, a linear relationship between dollars earned and utility, or (its derivative) a horizontal line on marginal utility. Typical economically rational adults have utility curves that eventually flatten out, with the marginal utility falling to zero.
The typical metrics are DAUs and MAUs, with attention paid to DAU:MAU ratio, and then some gauge of activity within each session. For some companies that means length of session, but for other companies you'd want something else (e.g. services that actually want users to leave, like search engines).

One of the things that impresses us in pitches is when the entrepreneur has really thought through what the best metrics are for that particular service.
I made a-padmapper-like-service called CLMapper here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omonmigaleaafgpkgo...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/01/clmapper-is-a-padmapper-alt...
Maybe. Who really knows why Apple does anything?
OK. But remember the old Paul Graham, who talked about things like this:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/the-startup-curve.html

Seems like there's a lot of non-startup in that startup curve, if we are using the new Paul Graham's definitions.
Your math is looking wrong. Because working in a startup is an investment.
There are other solutions, too. It might simply be infeasible to accelerate an FTL device to sufficiently relativistic speeds. Or what if there were fields coming off of FTL devices that interfered with the speed when they criss-crossed. That one would stop any sort of loop and it wouldn't require the universe to somehow specifically forbid paradoxes.
Remember Skype? It's very much peer-to-peer, with various node types, third-party traffic forwarding, encryption end to end, QoS issues to manage, NATs and firewalls to handle, etc.

Did you try to install a recent Skype version? Download an executable, run, enter your login and password, and it just works.

Execution matters, you know.
Zaarly is a dynamic company which continuously seeks to help provide people with their needs!
Yes, that's why VCs are hoping for.

I doubt that a free photo-sharing app is going to be as profitable as Apple, for example.
Encryption is a method of converting a plaintext secrecy problem into a key distribution problem.

This is a case where you can't have your ciphertext and decrypt it too. If you encrypt the user's password, you can't store the decryption key in the same place.

Well, you can, but it's just pushing the problem around with no security benefit.
Show HN: AzureFS – I mounted Azure Cloud Storage as filesystem on Linux
BitTorrent is capable of being decentralized from day one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Trackerless_...
Thank you for taking time to answer.
just because something starts as a free photosharing app doesn't mean it stays that way. One of pg's main points is that entrepreneurs see a way in that is often undervalued by others for a variety of reasons. When MSFT came along people underestimated the value of the OS, for Apple it was the PC, in Intel's second coming (first being memory) it was the microprocessor which even Intel itself underestimated for a while. Before Apple's rebirth phones and music players were seen as a small, relatively commoditized business. I dare say that a large part of FB is a free photo sharing app...
I do.

Though I let them sit around in my inbox as a reminder to reply to them in an equally thoughtful manner. Sigh.
I've always viewed complex numbers in the opposite way.

Start with the set of real numbers. Then join to that set the symbol i, with the property that i*i=-1, (probably other stuff in formal math).

Then, out of convenience, treat expressions of the form a+bi as a single number.
A long thread like this and no mention of price elasticity?
Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.
Personally as I said before I do not advocate real name policies, but I am for fixing such problems if possible. For example, the illusion that people are perfect is obsolete in this day and age.
Show HN: A new android benchmark
The problem with such remote storage APIs and fuse is that you should sacrifice consistency or speed. I once tried out a s3 wrapper and it was caching some data about fs and ended up being inconsistent.
Not only that, but each time the app launches, it phones home to Appcelerator. This is by default, and you can only disable it by turning off Analytics in the config.
I think you kind of have to look at it from Makerbot's perspective - they themselves have invested a lot into the hardware/software (aside from the community), and other people are already beginning to rip them off (like the guy who took the exact design and manufactured it in China for his Kickstarter campaign). I admit, I might be misunderstanding the current situation, but this is my take on it given what I have learned thus far. I will happily buy closed-source hardware/software, so long as it is good.
Show HN: Initial Round - Smarter Interviews for JS/Python/Ruby Devs
USAToday.com new design and iterations - 'iPad Inspired'
Is MakerBot getting dictated by house of Pettis?

"We are in Brooklyn with client MakerBot. Disclosure: CEO of MakerBot is my son, Bre Pettis. Join us for a streaming press conference at 3:00 pm EDT at www.makerbot.com" - from facebook status of BrandSolutions

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=49754425358...

Bre admitted that they are one of angel investors and "his folks" on this blog post last year.
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/08/23/all-star-lineup-inve...

Something smokes...
You may be interested in David Cope's work with his program Emily Howell. It can create quite convincing (and beautiful) new works in the style of any composer, given a sufficient input database.
Overcome These Challenges When Selling To Startups
Most people can't just invest in startups. You need to be an accredited investor, which rules out most people who haven't had a liquidity event or are independently wealthy. The restrictions on what your net worth needs to be are here: http://startuplawyer.com/startup-law-glossary/accredited-inv...
I'm kind of surprised there isn't more patent defense on the doctrine of teachability. That is, my defense is that your patent is written such that it doesn't teach me how to do what you did, therefore it is invalid, no matter what the content.

I think it would be great to see the courts adopt that standard. It's there in the law, and repairs the problem of the obviousness standard, which is to say that the patent troll just pays some expert to say "it isn't obvious to me!" and done. But teachability is a much more defense-friendly requirement: the jury typically won't be able to understand it, so if the defense brings a line of smart people who say "this is gibberish" that ought to be very compelling.
I'm a rational anarchist. Make all the laws (and policies) you want, and I'll follow the ones I like.
thanks for these thoughts.
Actually, we only think that it can be described in a consistent way. We have proven it consistent using set theory , but Godwell's theorems tell us that we cannot prove a system to be consistent without using something outside of said system (unless the system is inconsistent). This means that there is some level in our chain of proofs that cannot be proven consistent.
Depends on how you define "a lot". I think the percentage of jail breakers is considerable lower in the general public than "a lot"
Is Apple Losing Its Way?
Nobody I've read is claiming they have a right to access Twitter API. Twitter is legally entitled to do whatever the hell they want. Most of what I've read falls in one of two categories:

1) Criticism of Twitter for implementing a policy that has generated so much ill-will for the company, and essentially prevented 3rd party devs from solidifying Twitter as a kind of a microblogging platform of the Net. Clearly Twitter believes this will serve them better. Most people disagree.

2) Warning for trusting closed platforms.
conservative != slowing

What is WP8 innovating on? Yes, it looks different, but... that's not really the point here is it? It looks gorgeous. I happen to think WP8 > Android (ICS/JB) > iOS in appearance, but it's pretty damn apparent to me that Android > iOS > WP8 in terms of shipping functionality. (And maybe flip the first two for app availability).

I don't see how "Android has a complete feature set" means it's conservative... it's not like they've been removing features from Andorid...
"If it's not something you know it needs to be something you own" -- Agreed, and I much prefer to authenticate with something I know. I'd rather not have all my accounts bound to some tangible object that can be lost, broken, or revoked by a central authority. I absolutely do not want my credit card company or anyone else to be the middleman every time I authenticate to any service. If that happens, they pretty much own me. Imagine what would happen if, for whatever reason, they stopped authenticating me.

Granted, if I authenticate with something I know, there's a small chance I'll lose it due to memory loss. (Car accident, etc.) But that seems much less likely than me losing something I own.
Another great tweak I have going is 5 column springboard and five icon dock. This gives me a grid of 25 apps per screen, pair this with Shrink to change the icon sizes to 90% of original size, you can hardly tell the difference and your phone is that much more useful.

The best thing is that it allows you to have the ESSENTIAL apps: phone, mail, browser, music and messages all in the bottom tray.
Huh? No offense but just jailbreaking your phone and then using it the same as always is going to have ZERO effect on your phone. If you use it with weird apps or have an animated homescreen background, yeah, you're going to see a battery hit. Just like if you install an app that streams music over 3g all day (regardless of whether or not you've jailbroken).
You'd make a great henchman in a totalitarian regime.
Both.

Consider how ARM might initiate a licensing transaction with Samsung. Don't you think Samsung will want its engineers to go over the design extensively to see how it'll work with their manufacturing process, etc, before committing to buy? Without IP protection, how does ARM give Samsung the blueprints without giving up any leverage they have in the transaction? What's to stop Samsung from just taking the blueprints and not paying? What keeps Samsung from turning around and selling the blueprints to other people at a lower price?

Moreover, sure ARM might be better at designing microprocessors, but once ARM does the heavy lifting, it's much easier for Samsung to hire its own people to do updates. They might not be as good as ARM's people, but its hard to argue with free.

I worked for two tech companies that sold only IP. We were in the business of developing the software that was incorporated into heavy-duty networking equipment and military radios. Our customers were companies like Raytheon, etc. Our competitive advantage was our expertise and our size. We could do experimental stuff much quicker than the big companies with more internal bureaucracy and more risk aversion. But there is no way we could match their manufacturing, distribution, and sales expertise. That wasn't up our alley. It's very difficult to conceive of working relationships like this without being able to transact in IP. The type of work we did was kind of like crypto in the sense that it took years and millions of dollars to figure out what worked, but it was pretty straightforward to verify the working solution. Without being able to patent the product of that research, we'd have no leverage against the companies that had the big manufacturing muscle. As soon as we showed them our designs they could just run with it. If we shipped them binaries, they could easily just reverse engineer them.

I think peoples' opposition to IP really stems from the fact that most of the patents people are exposed to are pretty crappy. It causes them to think of the average software patent as something they could stumble onto accidentally. But that's more of an opposition to the bar used for software patents rather than an opposition to the concept. Realize that highly complex inventions like OFDM are the subject of patents too.
Recruiter?
Why do you state this?

From my view, sales is often a numbers game. In order to get x sales, y appointments must be set, z connections made. I am yet to find a good method for measuring this outside a CRM. Excel is good for about 50 contacts.. After that, it's a mess.
Seminal article - fantastic. I immediately calculated growth rate for Mightbuy.it - posted them here: http://blog.mightbuy.it/2012/09/22/user-growth/

The total #s are pretty embarrassing but the growth rate actually looks good, at around 10% currently - except the rate of growth of the growth is decreasing.. how meaningful is growth rate for such short time periods?

In my case I'm closer to the first stage of just making a product people want, but seems useful to keep track of this rate already.

PS - please sign up and help a brother out.
Make an expanding text UI with jQuery Expando
Apple Introduces Four Television Spots for the iPhone 5
Is there some way I can play with it without making an account?
If data is deliberately made available to the public, then it's public data. Even if's made available for free, that won't stop some on the web from trying to repackage it and derive commercial benefit from it. We've seen this many times. These folks have been very lucky that the validity of their assumptions has not been thoroughly tested in court. Somehow they become convinced they own the data. In reality they are merely the distributor.

Even if CL wins, e.g., they are granted an injunction to stop another site from scraping, scrapers can just get the same data from search engine caches. It's hard to argue trespass to chattels when the alleged trespasser never touches your servers. Moreover, search engines are themselves scrapers so clearly scraping is not per se a damaging activity in CL's view, only when it suits CL to view it that way. Arguing that robots.txt is a "license" is a stretch. It's designed to be read by a machine not a human.

And what if CL loses? What are the stakes then? Well, I'll let you answer that one. What exactly does 3taps have to lose?

CL claims they own the copyrights to facts and descriptions uploaded by CL users. Are users aware of this? Is it reasonable?

3taps' Answer should be a fun read.
https://www.bucketlistly.com
USC 35 is freely available on the internet. You would be making a mistake to think that all the people who disagree with you do so because they know nothing about it. Especially when there are more than just design & utility patents out there -- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/patdesc.htm
That's such a great idea that I wonder what legal barriers there are against using it. There are a few patent lawyers on HN. Maybe one of them can explain.
Above: An example of a weak appeal to emotion
In the end which font(s) have you found that render well or that you recommend? Any monospace in particular?

Edit: P.S. I feel that I was too harsh in discounting CentOS as a "difficult" server distro. It is, for the reasons in your reply, probably one of the better choices. I can't knock that and it is a good enterprise recommendation - for older hardware in particular.
Theres a difference between maximizing feteatures and allowing users/3rd parties to add their features. I like that Apple keeps their products (relatively) simple. I am not even entirely apposed to a walled garden app-store. What I do not like is that they took technical measures to prevent users from installing apps that they do not approve.
How is this different than Feist v. Rural in your mind? A fact is not copyrightable and is scrapable according to that case. I don't see how having copyrighted content next to non-copyrighted content affords any protection to the non-copyrighted content.
As someone who had the promise of Google Plus completely ruined when the nymwars chased my largely-pseudonymous-on-the-Internet circles away, I plan to be either consistently lying when presented with this "is this their real name?" dialogue box, or simply rolling a die to choose my answer.
Samsung To Launch "Tizen Mobile OS" Based Galaxy S3
This is probably the most insightful article on startups ever written. I was blind, and now I see. Thank you, Paul.
Sequoia's Jim Goetz On Enterprise Startups
I do find it somewhat dishonest and greedy. That's my opinion, and I'm entitled to it as a Canadian who is personally affected by such things.

And I'm entitled as a random person on the internet, to point out that I find your stated opinion to be completely and utterly insane on several different levels. It is almost fractally wrong.

And if you really have a problem with this case on economic grounds, let me reassure you, there is no mass imbalance of people from Canada who moved to the US when they were kids, then moved back to Canada to go to university, then left to work in the US, when compared to kids from the US who move to Canada, leave to go to university in the US and then come back to work in Canada. Issues like this are just noise in the system, monetarily speaking they tend to cancel out.

Also, this guy is only trying to get a work visa and temporary migrants regularly move back to their country of origin after a while. Which is likely to be better for the Canadian tax office in the long run, depriving him of education and therefore a job and therefore making sure he will probably never pay much tax and possibly even end up on welfare, or on the other hand educate him, despite that he has not managed to pay much tax yet, mainly for reasons of being a kid at the time, then let him work at Microsoft in the US, with a reasonable probability of him at some point moving back to Canada with a first class resume and tons of money to spend?

And if the argument about tax is that his mother didn't pay tax in Canada while he was a child being educated in the US while living with her, or that he should somehow be stopped from emigrating for an offer of employment at Microsoft until he has worked off his university bill, then I think the appropriate response is ridicule. As that is nothing but pure economic calvinism of the meanest and small minded sort.