skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Build plugins or themes for WordPress. There are 58 million active WP sites now. There are mature markets for listing and promoting what you create. Bonus money if you can tie what you build into generating revenue for customers -- affiliate marketing tools/integrations, plugins or themes that play with existing e-commerce plugins or themes people use, marketing tools, etc. If you can do that, you can justify a $50-100 price tag, and just one sale a day will create the revenue you need.

8 years ago or so, I ran a little ecommerce site with a wholesale/drop-ship product provided by another company. When I needed extra spending money (being a full-time college student at a private university and no savings), I'd clone my own site. I'd design a new theme for the shopping cart software and sell the same product. I'd advertise it on Google AdWords for a few days to get some orders. Then I'd package that all up and list it on eBay -- a fully functional site with existing customers, a supplier, a known conversion rate, and pre-written ad copy and keyword list for the buyer. These days people use Flippa instead of eBay to sell websites, but it's something you could try as a web dev.
This story just gets crazier by the minute.
Agreed. Probably an equal number of lessons to learn from the failures as from those still slogging it out.
Settlers was pretty damn fun, but there haven't been many that I would call AAA hits for the iPhone, despite having purchased something north of $500 worth of games for iOS in the last five years. Maybe a handful that got me as excited as Settlers did.

In general, people don't make fun "deep" games for the iPhone, they make them for the Console/PC. Any studio making something fun and free for the iPhone is probably more interested in extracting $$$ as quickly as possible from you, particular where you see the dreaded IAP. I'll try out Clash of Clans and see if it falls into that dreaded _suck the player in and force him to pay cash_. I suspect there will be Gems that I have to drop $$$ into in order to speed up building things instead of waiting 30 minutes. We'll see.

[Edit: 3 minutes later. Installed it. You need Gems to finish building things in reasonable (<5 minutes, in the case of a Gold storage, 30 minutes. ) time. My guess is the entire purpose of this game is to suck me in to the point at which I start shoveling money for IAP - doesn't this pattern annoy people? Or is it just because they haven't seen it dozens (hundreds?) of times before? I'll play with it for another 10 minutes, but so far, the game pattern looks pretty straight forward and not particularly entertaining or engrossing. I'll try and keep an open mind.]

[Edit 2: I'm sorry - I lasted all of 5 minutes with this thing. Buy Gems. Speed up Building. You can even use Gems to Acquire more "Gold" or more "Elixir" - they don't even attempt to hide the mechanics of cash extraction. It's almost a straightforward "Give us Cash and you can build things really fast and go attack others and win." Probably the shortest time any game has ever lasted on my iPhone, ever. I'm confused as to what fun people see in this...]
> ...the machine is to allow experimenters to perform experiments that are either impossible or morally unethical on biological creatures

Ignoring the fact that whether this ever happens is up for debate, why would it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not torturing a "real" one?

> In a few years, suppose a research decides...

You vastly overestimate what research will produce in a few years.
1. It' still in production: http://techzinglive.com/

2. It's on the list

Edit: Oh, you mean the specific collection of their previous casts. I guess you could say they're not in production any more because that list is a "best of"
How do you think science gets done, if not by persons?

Yes, the author is in error, because he has postulated an arbitrary solution (i.e., one without evidence) to the problem of hearing voices. And, yes, religion also postulates arbirary solutions.

tl;dr The problem isn't that he is going on personal observation and experience; it's that he's made an error in doing so.
Nope, you're doing it again.

You're saying something akin to: 'tyres are useless because cars also need engines; people are already effectively using tyres; often tyres don't work'.

>It seems silly to laud an ineffective design while there are people out there every day clearing landmines with solutions that work. //

Solutions that according to you - strongly implied eve within the parent comment - include rollers.

So

"Mine rollers are useless [for that purpose] and so should never be used to clear mines under any circumstances."

Yes or no?
If they have sense saving money from the few weeks of 6 figure sales to weather the inevitable slump while they iterate or find the next big thing. Giving every employee an equal share of the revenue would be equally short sighted.
Why does this imply that rants about activist judges are idiotic? Yes, judges frequently have to determine what the law means. No, that doesn't mean they have completely free rein.
Failure is bad for SEO. Unless the failure is massive.

Many startups fail for uninteresting reasons.
Right after I posted this I realized I only meant to say dark energy, not dark matter. Why is it speculated that the universe will continue to accelerate its expansion?
TorrentFreak Trolls a Copyright Troll
What does the future hold for the mobile industry?
It’s official: Apple has windows, Microsoft doesn't
Shame your KickStarter doesn't look like it will make it. I haven't seen any press for it anywhere like Kotaku or Destructoid or any of the the major game blogs like Rock Paper Shotgun or 4 Color Rebellion. Any plans on relaunching it with more of a media blast?
why would it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not torturing a "real" one?

Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is moral.
Well it is my opinion that failure stories are far better than successful stories because success is difficult to replicate but failures can be easily avoided.
I think there's two major components to this:

1) Writing about your failures sucks. My first startup got to 6 figure revenue within 18 months, but we really struggled to grow past that. I could write a full debrief on why we failed, but it's pretty low on my "things I want to do" list. I'd imagine quite a few founders with failed startups would have a similar viewpoint.

2) A lot of failures just aren't that exciting. I'd venture a guess that most startups fail because they gradually lose their passion for the problem. When you aren't growing for an extended time, it wears on you. A lot. The only way you survive is if you're obsessed with the problem you're solving. Those that aren't would just slowly fade out.
Morality is properly based on reason. Many people do use a primitive kind of morality that is based on emotion.
When you are sleeping, you can encounter ridiculous situations and accept them because your reality testing is relaxed. In fact everything that is happening to you in a dream is just your own thoughts that you accept as your reality.

Seems to me that between awake and dreaming, as you come to accept more and more things as real then all bets are off. You could imagine hearing chinese and totally accept it. Sort of like a drunken person being convinced their judgment is just fine.
What does the link address in this context? Not being rude just don't understand the link.
Cool site and product!

A small nitpick: You have the NES controller plugging into the power button on the first billboard. The controller ports for the NES are inside the black strip along the right side.
What simulations often lack is any clear validation against reality. The true test of a simulation is it's ability to predict the behaviour of a real system, it's not enough to say "their construction has some similar features so it's probably ok".

Weather simulations are generally reasonable, though limited in this regard. Other scientific simulations tend to be a little more hazy, the main aim of course being to produce a publication.

You said "Hypothesis are proved or disproved, science advances, and we know that much more about how such complex systems indeed work". Could you provide some examples? In my experience I've rarely seen simulations have have proved or disproved hypothesis. This is an honest question, if you have some references to significant results from simulation I'd be interested in reading them.
not if I don't click this link.
Interesting questions, but don't let them trouble you, because I highly doubt there will be strong AI in the next hundred years. (Famous last words...)
Who wants a Firefox phone? Take a visual trip through Firefox’s mobile OS
- The failure may be a sore-spot for those involved, so they might not want to do a postmortem.

- Unless insiders are willing to speak up, there may not be too much to be said from the outside.

- A lot of start-ups that fail are uninteresting. What can be said about the tons of TODO web apps that have probably been created and failed.

- Those involved may be reluctant to speak out because they view the lessons-learned as their leg up on the competition when they get into their next start-up.

I agree that there are a lot of interesting things to discuss regarding failed start-ups, though.
If thats truly required (i dont think it is), the second example could be shown via introspection.
The first few games to use an exponential XP curve may have copied each other, but by now basic things like this are simply conventional wisdom in game design.

Here's Diablo II's incremental XP vs. level graph — essentially identical:
http://hothardware.com/articleimages/Item1824/D2-XPScale.png
Please, never use the Dojo Toolkit. I was forced to use it on a project and working with it was reinventing the wheel while pulling out hair. It was overly complicated for something that needed to be straightforward and simple.
Custom vs Mass Produced
Great advice on technical mentor! Will start looking for one myself now.
New start-up hubs challenging Silicon Valley
Show HN: /etc/hosts manager for Mac
Interstellar Marines
Piece of string on a reel?
You've triggered the "new age mumbo jumbo completely BS nonsense" alarm. Please proceed directly to containment so your silly ideas don't spread further.
The ending is wrong. The former CEO should not just sulk in darkness. He should be consumed with terror and overwhelming anxiety as he sinks with his gutted office into to the sulphurous underworld, while low-level demon-bureaucrats from Hades emerge from the pit to jab at him with their pitchforks.
Early mockups reveal Windows 8's evolution
I think this why so many programmers (myself included) know absolute zip about law and usually interpret it wrong anyway.
Question I've always had for WP Theme businesses: is there any need / common practice to prevent plugin piracy? Or is the market so big and pirates such a small portion of it that it isn't really something worth worrying about?
The problem is that it's a well understood brain state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia) but if you don't think about it or look it up or realize you're the same as everybody else, you are likely to fill in the blanks with nonsense psychic religiosity.
To be honest, I don't see how this has anything to do with the ethos and general topic of HN. Flagging.
Simulating the Human Brain with Supercomputers
How Team Obama's tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust
The problem is we'll never really know for sure. We don't know if our friends are just ignoring us or if they've even seen our posts. Edgerank is a good idea, when our friends/likes/subscribes get high, but if implemented incorrectly, you can end up missing a lot of updates that are relevant to you.
I think the answer is pretty simple: failed startps are insular. Founders who are able to discuss them won't, either because they've moved on, or because it's painful, embarrassing etc. Discussing failures would be more useful, I imagine, than reading about successes. If such a startup graveyard existed, I'd probably visit quite often.
It's about an entrepreneur who built a business from scratch and how he got to the stage of building said business. That has everything to do with HN. Far more so than a JavaScript date picker or how airport security is "killing us" (which violates the 'If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic' guideline by a country mile.)
The menu lock/unlock is controlled by whichever included carrier profile your SIM card IIN is associated with. My Straight Talk SIM card has an AT&T IIN, so it automatically uses the AT&T carrier profile (to my great annoyance, as if that weren't already clear to everybody :-)). A carrier might decide to not lock the menu for their customers, and if you have a SIM card that has no associated carrier profile, you will automaticall be granted open access to the menu.
Makes me pine for Microsoft to port DirectX to Linux

A single, unified API would actually be pretty awesome.
We pay a lot of attention to the causes of failure. Much of what I've written about startups is about pitfalls and mistakes. I don't name names, but I don't think you need to.
Technically by being here, you could be.
These games take money out of the pockets of kids that can usually ill afford it and are typically not aware of the consequences of their addiction until it is much too late.

And that addiction is there by design, not by accident.

Chalk it up to bad parenting or whatever you want but in the end this is still a scam delivered in the form of a game, aimed squarely at a vulnerable group, one that by law can not enter into binding contracts.

The fact that it brings in an insane amount of money is not an excuse, though I'm sure that there are enough people to who this kind of income is enough to throw away all their ethics and start raking it in.

In-app purchases work because they defer the visualization of the amount actually spent until the phone bill comes in.

Kids literally have no idea how much they're spending on these things (in fact, most adults don't realize it either).

I see enough young kids in my surroundings getting into trouble with parents, debt collectors and all kinds of other nastiness just because games like these cause them to overspend due to the addictive elements embedded purposely in the game.

Apple, for all their oversight on the appstore is 100% complicit in this, apps are routinely thrown out for trivial reasons but mixing teenagers (a vulnerable group if there ever was one) and impulse buys at exorbitant prices is A-ok with them.

And no, this is not a 'blame the computer games for kids behaviors' argument, it is a blame the makers of addictions for the problems stemming from those addictions.

The argument seems to be that if they don't screw them someone else will. But that's nonsense and one of the reasons why marketing stuff directly to kids is illegal in many places.
The Great Winter Migration - Steam for Linux
Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially.

This is a completely unsubstantiated assumption.

As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is moral.

This relies on the unjustified assumption that causing suffering of a non-human is not immoral or amoral.
Well, consider the advantages of running Windows in a VM. (Which admittedly has much fewer ethical issues).
Void for Vagueness
You are correct that their is some privilege but depending on the situation the clean up / fallout of a failed company can really be quite bad.

Many times founders can be left with astronomical debt pretty much guaranteeing bankruptcy being the only way out. Additionally its not unheard for business loans to have a house on the line as collateral. This doesn't mean this is always the situation but is not as rare of a story as one may think.
IMO, it would be counterproductive to employ any kind of obfuscation or license protection. Having access to the code is part of the reason people choose to build their sites on WordPress. More installs than not have some kind of customization done. Plus, you'll have less satisfied customers (inevitably a significant portion will have issues getting the loader/licensing setup to work on their shared host, or will have other issues you can't help them with because they can't debug the code) so less blog writeups / recommendations driving referral sales.

I was in the WP business for a while, with about a quarter million in sales before I sold it off, and did nothing to prevent piracy. It wasn't an issue. Someone pirating the code doesn't hurt me. Anyone that wanted the plugins/themes and had money was going to pay for it, as that's the only way they would get support and updates.
It's like any other piracy as long as you take basic precautions you'll be fine. If you make something worth pirating generally it's worth buying, don't worry about the people who will never buy your product, worry about making the people who do buy it happy.
The O in LZO — a whole career & business built on compression
That's a tough one.

If there was a way to make quick money that worked, lots of people would be doing it. With enough people doing it, some people get very good at it and are able to consolidate and raise barriers to entry. So now that previously very attractive thing is slightly less attractive because there's more ramp up required.

Fortunately, you do have valuable skills. Unfortunately, as you point out, even putting those to optimal use requires significant ramp up--you've got to build a name for yourself or you've got to start some kind of consulting company and build a client list. Then suddenly you're in the consulting business. If you just jump into it and take whatever you can get, you'll make significantly less.

It's not even a matter of doing something you'd rather not do--there are tons of people out there that will do things most people don't want to do for very little money--and they do it for a living.

So of those, you could try hitting odesk or elance or any number of freelancing websites to pick up a quick gig--but even that requires a sales pipeline that takes some time to get going. Personally, I'd put it on a credit card if I were in a similar situation, and lacking that, would probably start selling stuff.
> Why does this imply that rants about activist judges are idiotic?

Because all, or nearly all, such rants are idiotic when you know how Common Law works.
I think you have a better bead on it that I can do; it's about perspective. And, obviously: all I have to go on is what's actually written in this post. I have a feeling that people are going to project their own experiences into that post and read my response accordingly. I have no idea what you've been through; I just know what this person says they've dealt with.

Please understand, though: it's not that someone is worse-off than this startup founder. There's always someone worse off. The unemployed factory worker is in a far better position than an impoverished rural Chinese farmer. It's that most people are worse-off than the startup founder. Even most Americans.
I think you know what "I'm not saying that startup people are so lucky that they're not allowed to be unhappy when their companies fail" means.
Care to explain what the law really means then? Because I just read what the law _says_, but to me it still sounds pretty vague, and its unclear exactly what constitutes "authorization".
Lawyer here, and I have a fairly good working understanding of our common law system. Nevertheless, I think there is some truth to the rants about activist judges legislating from the bench.
Has Elon Musk ever fired a great employee that missed a deadline or budget?
Agreed. I still don't understand why the comments about USE flags are supposed to be comical. I haven't used Gentoo for a while now because the downsides outweigh the plusses for me, but I think USE flags are definitely one of the plusses.

Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!

No, but when this or that package failed to compile and I didn't even have X yet let alone Firefox (for Google)- that was when I first really started learning about Linux.
I don't know if you do mobile design or just development, but the payouts on 99Designs can be pretty good and the contests (from my experience three years ago) go pretty quick.

If you're capable of cloning the style that their clients seem to choose most of the time your success rate can be rather high, but it can also be very frustrating to do a lot of work and by chance not win any contests.

It's pretty shallow work artistically, and can be a gamble. But you could probably rack up $2000 in a month if you really committed.

http://99designs.com/mobile-app-design/contests
Indeed. But maybe it's too late, or maybe I've had one scotch too many... I'm not sure what you're getting at with "I am saying something else that is more subtle than that" though.
Are you reading this blog? If so, you are committing a crime under 18 USC 1030(a) (better known as the “Computer Fraud & Abuse Act” or “CFAA”). That’s because I did not explicitly authorize you to access this site, but you accessed it anyway. Your screen has a resolution of 1280x800. I know this, because (with malice aforethought) I clearly violated 18 USC 1030(a)(5)(A) by knowingly causing the transmission of JavaScript code to your browser to discover this information.

Jesus, Rob. You know this isn't true. Under the CFAA, you can't simply declare your blog "off limits" and then press charges. I have to access the site with the intent to commit fraud. And my access to your site has to further that fraud.
You are reading this and you used a special key id=4812496. You are under arrest.
Well, that all depends on what Apple's internal corporate culture's value system is, doesn't it? If they want to continue to give off the impression that the end-user is their direct customer and that they prize that end-user's experience above all else, then they need to distance themselves from things like this.

I think that Apple has worked very hard to cast this image of themselves as the champion of the end-user. If that's the case, then they need to start proving it with mobile devices like the iPhone, which occupies a market segment where users have traditionally not been regarded as much more than pawns. I feel as though Apple here is treating this situation like their ongoing business relationship with AT&T and other carriers is more important than satisfying the needs of their customers whenever the two are in conflict. I suspect that Apple wouldn't want that kind of press.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4KrhDZQ088

A popular debate about what knowing the brain's wiring diagram will bring us
Which section of this law criminalizes merely accessing something without authorization?