skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice article. One nit tho:

> When it came time to sell my events business, it turned out our Balance Sheet was in bad shape because we had collected a lot of revenue that we couldn’t recognize because it was for a future event. That means it was a liability, not an asset. Ouch.

... When someone buys your company, the transaction is done on a ‘zero balance sheet’ meaning they pay extra for assets or take away cash for liabilities.

This was a timing issue and if I had understood it, I could’ve timed the sale of the business more effectively to maximize the purchase price.

Unrecognized revenue is an asset with an offsetting liability. (And if you're using cash-accounting instead of accrual, it's not even revenue yet.) Honestly, the whole thing sounds more like a negotiating tactic, and that you got taken advantage of for not understanding the balance sheet.

Put another way: If you had competing buyers, no one would really have cared that much about whether the revenue was recognized yet or not.
True, but you can buy the streaming service as you use it. There are numerous CDNs out there, and Amazon itself has the same. Amazon did not need to spend an additional billion dollars in order to serve the first 10,000 customers of video.

If the expenses are coming from additional fixed infrastructure then the article is still misleading - the more viewers you have the lower the per viewer cost. The article in no way implies that infrastructure is relevant to their monetary claims.
Mike has a public profile and his activity is public. Its like being able to read peoples public Tweets.

Edit: Location is optional (based on user) and we only give city level with a truncated Lat/Long. Again this is the same as twitter/instagram etc.
Just what I wanted to say.
"OpenFeint Service Shutdown... and nothing of value was lost."
Unfortunately, very few things are in life are actually "fair". "Fair" is also very relative term. The definition of “fair” means one thing to you, one thing to Y-Combinator and something very different to an applicant who got an interview. There are several hundred people across the world right now who had the wind blown out of their sails like you. While I do not personally know anyone at Y-Combinator, from everything I have read, I imagine this is the best system that they have at the moment and are continually refining it. That being said, like anything man-made, it is not perfect and great entrepreneurs will always fall through the cracks. Prove them wrong and be one of those that fell through the cracks.
Echo JS - JavaScript Social News Site
The entire Adobe Creative Suite does that. It's annoying.
I don't follow the social media space very carefully, so I had no idea who he was. I read the article, and thought it was insightful.

Perhaps it was old news from a same source if you follow the space carefully, but I suspect most readers are in my position.

And it's hard to fault a posting that is genuinely insightful for most readers.
His argument would apply to tablets, where Windows 8 does run, about equally well.
Just admit it's a bad implementation and commit to fix it.

Except with Twitter and Instagram, I need to authenticate to get the information about WHERE an action occurred, so at least there's a trail.

With your implementation, I can scan all my competitors users with public profiles (at the very least) and see who's buying what.

If this is a transparency play, then say that and make a stink about it. But when Mike gets the crap kicked out of him, also step up and cover his medical bills.

Edit: Okay.. so the location IS truncated, kudos. Why is this an unauthenticated API?
New "fresh" branch for Fexl (radically simplified version)
As much as I like to make fun of the douchebags, I have to admit that there is some merit to the idea of Twitter as an opt-in marketing channel or a character-limited version of Google Reader — at least those use case are useful to some people. The original Twitter, although authentically social, ranged from boring (I don't care what you had for lunch) to frustrating (you can't have any meaningful discussion in 140-character chunks).
Neither is a "seed box" or private trackers, or anything else that the parent post mentioned. No one in this thread is talking about legal alternatives, because they don't exist. The illegal alternatives are a an insanely better experience, and people are paying for them to boot.

There is a huge opportunity for someone to come in and create the Spotify of video, but it probably won't happen soon because it will be near impossible to work with content providers to create it. Plus there's not a huge incentive, since even Spotify is being sucked dry with licensing fees.

Let's face it: the current state of the industry is not capable of providing a high quality user experience to the consumer (I'm almost 100% convinced). They're all about forcing the consumer to use whatever creates the most money, and if you amass enough power, sure, you can do that. Effectively, they are exercising their legal rights to hold back the quality of the end-user experience. Is it right? It is a moral grey area. They have the right to protect their content and the creators of that content, to ensure they are compensated fairly. But at the same time, it is holding back progress.

In short: if you want the best personal digital entertainment experience, a legal alternative at any cost is not available. There are simply too many providers and too many limitations and services. Furthermore, the quality of illegal methods (which will not be named; the secret ones are indeed the best) are extremely high as to be almost the best possible outcome.

It is a very complicated situation. "Legal alternative" is synonymous with "worse" right now, but I do hope that improves.
It seems to me like a lot of startups featured here make his #1 mistake - treating employees like friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4790767 immediately comes to mind). A lot of the job offers featured here mention fridges packed full of beer and going out together after work. I'm all for having fun together as a team, but I think younger entrepreneurs probably often have a difficult time drawing the line between their business/personal relationships with employees, especially those around their same age.
Thanks for all that public information.
edit: I should really be thanking immad for confirming this data is available for open and free consumption without restrictions.
I thought your first post in this thread was missing the point a bit (i.e., these platforms exist for social integration, so rolling your own doesn't really address the bigger goal of these systems. But this one? This is great stuff. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
haven't used quora enough to discern but it seems to be selective. sometime i get the roadblock, other times not
This is a fair and worthwhile distinction...still, Twitter is one of those services that seems hard to "get" without a good college-try at it -- I only joined because our company more-or-less said everyone should make an account. And now I'm thankful that happened because the mechanisms of Twitter make it a unique platform for consuming and sharing information...and yet without using it, I could not be convinced that it was nothing more than blogging for people who liked blogging about really trivial things.
please, take all my upvotes
So long as everybody is paying their own internet bill, I don't see why the ISPs should have any right to complain.
Not only that, but it's also a bit of a stretch to draw any connection between NewsCorp's stewardship of MySpace and Twitter's developer strategy. There is no real connection there.

Chernin is not going to be leading or planning developer-relations strategies for the platform. Most likely, to your point, he's going to be there to develop content and media partnerships. He's one of the most powerful and connected people in Hollywood, and has been for 30-something years now. That's the value he's bringing. He's not a tech guy, nor does Twitter need him to be.

Small, mildly embarrassing flub of a first tweet, but Dalton's drawing way too many far-out inferences from it.
Forever.fm - infinite dj
If I was the content owner I would do the deal as per view, and with overall minimum payments. That way you get a minimum payment for your time and you share in the success of the content.
I'm not sure how that disqualifies this from Turing completeness any more than finite pointer sizes disqualify every other language from Turing completeness.
Unlike music, software can be (and almost always is) grotesquely defective in ways that aren't obvious to the user right away.
(this is when in the Ctrl+P fuzzy-file-search box, so the colon : in that context also jumps to the line number in the found file)
My point was simply to spur the industry on to build an open source implementation that anyone can use and run, a la PhoneGap, Apache or PostgreSQL.

I wasn't missing the point. OpenFeint was built on the backs of indie developers, and they sold out and didn't protect the indie developer. Okay, so selling out isn't so bad, but why then make the developers do all the work to get compatibility when THEY were the ones that made you rich?
They're not too big on marketing. Doesn't matter; it still works great.
The real thing:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/transcript-ron-pauls-farewell-...

Some great stuff in there, I just wish it was about half its length. Would tighten up the points a lot.
I have to disagree with author on some of the points. And looks like he doesn't like the fact that FB and Twitter are part media, part software companies.

"a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter."

What's wrong in being media company? We all agree that software is eating the world, so why is it bad if Twitter is "disrupting" real-time media consumption? I loved Twitter's Olympics coverage. Even though I was thousands of miles away from London, I could feel the excitement.

Same for Hurricane Sandy. It was so useful to get latest news update in such a terrible time (for everyone involved). I was caught in another disaster few years back and the biggest problem was not getting important news updates from credible agencies/people. Twitter solved that problem for Hurricane Sandy coverage.

Twitter/FB are becoming like "breaking news" for every news. Be it earthquakes, celebrity gossip, world cups, olympics or new product launches!
I visited Istanbul earlier this year, and it amazed me how bargaining and selling was so ingrained in the culture. Every store, every restaurant, even the hotel... it's just a different way of dealing with customers.

And here in Canada/USA, some stores have sales people that don't want to disturb you. They sit quietly in their chair in the back of the store, don't dare approach you, and don't speak until spoken to. That's not sales, that's "question answerer".

Real sales has an active component.
I can certainly point to instances where I've been seriously influenced by sales tactics, though they're usually situations where I was already looking for a certain type of product or service.

But in-person, like this? I'd think most people who live in major cities have become immune to approaches from random people - scammers, beggars, whatever. (Except for people selling the homeless newspaper, they're cool.)

If someone requests my attention and they're not asking a normal person question (like directions), I don't engage with them. Sorry. End of interaction, I have no interest in your crap, I have other things to do.
No idea, but trying to write lisp in anything other than Emacs/SLIME seems like an exercise in purest madness.
IMO, this is not an issue for Amazon as Amazon Instant Video is still a support business for Amazon. It is used to sell more Prime subscriptions (and more Kindles as well). It seems that now Amazon is testing if it could be a viable standalone business but it’s not guaranteed.

It seems like SVOD services are generally “support businesses” that aim to promote a company’s main product/service that is sold at a higher margin. For instance, DISH Network offers access to Blockbuster SVOD platform as an add-on to its pay-TV subscription (the idea here is to get more pay-TV subscribers). Comcast XFINITY SVOD service is provided on top of other Comcast services and aims to attract more pay-TV and broadband subscribers. We could even argue that Netflix Instant Streaming was first used to support Netflix “DVD by Mail” business (even if it might not be completely the case here).

The margins on those SVOD services are low compare to the “pay-TV or “DVD by Mail” business. In Q3 2012, Netflix contribution margin for its domestic streaming business was 16.4% vs 48% for its domestic “DVD by Mail” business. As pointed out earlier, for SVOD to work, you need volume. Thus, Netflix strong push for its international expansion. Amazon might pull it off, but it will require significant investment outside the US to work out.
This just in! Unsubscribing generates $5.8 billion in sales for businesses other than those that got unsubscribed!
Another great point. There's so much obsession with billing credit cards I've never seen this mentioned in any pricing blog.
Taj mahal hotel bombay is also cool
Hah, sorry if I am :) Not sure how I can significantly improve things without writing a blog post or something :|

Anyway. Thanks for chiming in :)
Well, if you're Zaid on Twitter, and that's your original account, you signed up about a year after Twitter launched.
ah, on further inspection: I had created a symbolic link to /usr/bin

The actual executable is buried in Sublime's .app directory:

Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl
The last bit is sort of true and not. Obviously you don't have to know Javascript to write Coffeescript any more than you have to know C to write Javascript (or how your machine architecture works to write C).

But it certainly helps. And you'll never write good code without a solid understanding of the runtime your syntax is sitting on. But I don't think that's any more true of CS/JS than it is for any other environment. Java progammers need to understand the JVM, C people want some ability to read disassembly and understand calling conventions, people writing code generators need to understand the hardware pipeline they are optimizing for.

It's turtles all the way down.
Uh, two space indentation in Python? Consistency is valuable. Everyone else who writes Python uses four spaces.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#indentation
Show HN: We are building an Uber for laundry
Hi Guys,
We are building an Uber for laundry. Please help us out and join our beta. Thanks for your support.
J
the trailing 'ubl' has always seemed excessive to me:

alias s='subl'
Yeah, my dream is a Typescript + Coffeescript dialect.
Are you scraping the site directly? Have you heard of the official api? http://www.hnsearch.com/api
You sound angry, calm down.

I fail to see your point. I could also just go here http://www.heyzap.com/profile/mike_midkiff and scrape for the same data.
Wow.. EVEN better than I thought. I can get all the developers sales and stats just following a single, unauthenticated link:

http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot

{
"game": {
"checkins_count": 876134,
"developer_name": "RUNNERGAMES",
"activity_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/activity,
"android_package": "com.game.BubbleShoot",
"tips_and_questions_count": 773,
"checkins_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/activity...,
"description": null,
"players_count": 52612,
"questions_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/activity...,
"web_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/game/Kqh-bubble-shoot,
"players_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/players,
"url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot,
"tips_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/activity...,
"thumbnail_url": "http://d2ruqtjkg8og7r.cloudfront.net/mobile_game_icon_com.ga...,
"name": "Bubble Shoot",
"id": "Kqh-bubble-shoot",
"android_price": "Free"
}
}

AND if I go HERE, I can see ALL the checkins with their locations, again without authentication:
http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot/activity

{
"activity": [
{
"type": "checkin",
"like_count": 0,
"message": "",
"comment_count": 0,
"created_at": 1353111191,
"user": {
"display_name": "emil",
"profile_image_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/legacy/images/users/default_user_photo...,
"web_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/profile/emilgousfendi,
"url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/users/emilgousfendi,
"username": "emilgousfendi",
"id": "emilgousfendi"
},
"location": {
"truncated_longitude": 106.963,
"city": "Bekasi",
"truncated_latitude": -6.356,
"country": "ID"
},
"updated_at": 1353111191,
"id": 192146287,
"time_ago": "just now",
"game": {
"android_package": "com.game.BubbleShoot",
"web_url": "http://www.heyzap.com/game/Kqh-bubble-shoot,
"url": "http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/games/Kqh-bubble-shoot,
"thumbnail_url": "http://d2ruqtjkg8og7r.cloudfront.net/mobile_game_icon_com.ga...,
"name": "Bubble Shoot",
"android_price": "Free",
"id": "Kqh-bubble-shoot"
}
},

...
I read the language spec and skipped everything but the code samples. It wasn't too bad, but yeah, not a cheatsheet.
It shows dd/mm/yyyy for me - Chrome 23, Windows 7 set to en-AU locale.
The telling part is that they say...

"Custora's research shows that stores on average lose roughly 1.75% of revenue every year due to unsubscribes."

This is remarkably similar (in amount) to loss through shrinkage at bricks and mortar stores, which is estimated at 1.7% (according to one source I bothered to find) [1] - but while retailers take steps to reduce shrinkage, there is a cost/benefit balance in play and a certain amount is inevitable, maybe the same is true of unsubscribe

I'm more curious about how that 1.75% compares from other sources of lost revenue; how does it compare to the cost of processing returns, or fraud, or just basic transaction costs, &c?

Maybe it's significant, maybe it's noise, but without anything to compare it to, who knows

[1] http://www.jrrobertssecurity.com/security-news/security-crim...
I am pretty sure they at least need to sign it, which is why the common (overreaching and abusive) employment contracts include a clause saying that the employee will facilitate the filing of such paperwork.

I think naming and shaming is a good tactic. People should not be signing contracts with clauses like that in the first place, and if there is potential for future shame, maybe it'll make them think a bit more about it.
Whispers are out that early sales of Windows 8 are far below MS’s expectations
Great explanation, thanks for the writeup.
And for schools or any other organization.
Blundering Taliban chief reveals names of 400 recipients on e-mail list
Excellent to see Balanced getting love for the great product they've built! Congrats guys!!
1) These script kiddies are not Anonymous;

2) The majority of the sites affected appear to be hosted with a single company;

3) If any of the deleted databases held important information, there will be backups.

Edit: 4) The leaked passwords appear to be site-specific; all are six characters long, around a third of them are '123456'
Wouldn't it be better if you instead knew a good bit of c++/obj-c, c#/java, php, matlab, python, etc.

It's just like investing, you are putting all your eggs in one basket. I don't think Ruby's future is especially in trouble, but it is certainly not as secure as the basket of languages I included above.

Also ruby is only really used for a small subset of tasks. With the basket of languages I included you could really do anything from microcontroller programming to making video games to website dev.
I've worked with managers who could successfully drink with employees as well as fire under performers (often in a way which didn't end the beer relationship), but all of them had multiple decades of experience.

I suppose it's much, much easier to avoid the need for a line entirely than to learn how to draw it.
> Do you think by going to a physician and having a checkup that the hospital or doctor's network should now have the right to sell the fact that you have some skin condition to Johnson & Johnson so they can target you with advertising?

With the healthcare situation in America right now, I could imagine a lot of people would gladly trade that for a 10% cost reduction....
updated. feel free to contact us at support@virurl.com
"Don't take pricing advice from Hacker News"

Huh, I've seen more recommendations for higher prices than lower on here lately.
How much do you charge? Can you put a numeric dollar figure right on your front page instead of (or perhaps next to) where you say "Save up to 30% versus traditional wash and fold. With door-to-door service!" ? Thanks.
This article starts by claiming developers have only a superficial knowledge of the languages they use, and on that basis, it argues we should teach languages in a more superficial way.

But it's unclear what benefit we'd supposedly reap by teaching languages in a more superficial way?

If there is a substantive point to this article (aside from the pretentious suggestion has a deeper knowledge of programming than everyone else), I failed to understand his point.
My back of the armchair calculations estimate that he's off by about 2 orders of a magnitude.
Extremely valuable competencies for marketplace payments - excited to see you guys grow.
Keep in mind this was his Farewell Address. He was going to get his licks in, esp. that bit about "psychopathic authoritarians" (which I took to include the other members of Congress). There was absolutely no reason or incentive for him to make it shorter than the allotted time he had.

Ron Paul is the only US politician I've ever wanted to cross the street for. I'm hoping his youth movement produces more leaders who value freedom and liberty as much as he does.
I'd definitely agree that America is not a real haggling culture for day-to-day shopping. But most of us are pretty used to pitchmen wanting our money.

This seems like to OP just wanted to be sold on something to observe sales techniques. Had he really never talked to a vendor before? Did he actually forget what he was doing and get caught up in the moment, or was this the outcome he was planning all along? Hard to say.
Mostly employees snooping and the types of warrentless government backdoors/fishing/cooperation that seems to be en vogue.
I am SOOO not angry, just shocked.

HeyZap didn't build the games that power them, the developers did. HeyZap, in releasing information such as installs, etc., to unauthenticated API calls is saying "This is HEYZAP's data".

It's not. It's the developers data too.

Without that developers game, you'd have NO data, and each player is a customer of the developer once they buy the game. They're not just HeyZap's users, they are paid customers of that developer.

Treat your developers businesses with respect and limit information to the developer and let them decide if they want to release it.
Happens to be the way to deal with procrastination and analysis paralysis as well. It's easier to just do something and then course correct, than to try to calculate the best possible path before even starting out.
Either way, you can bet the major news companies will either make a huge deal of this, or say nothing at all...
This is the exact reason Twitter needs to change or accept it will never have true long-term mass market appeal. It's UX is targeted at geeks and not for the average user. This was great for getting off the ground, but the fact that these things still exist is pretty sad. I'm not at all surprised their new CEO didn't get this. In fact it underlies the need for the to pivot even more.
Mathematical Hacker