skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Believe me, I am quite familiar with cs3 install issues :( Their installers are horrible. But the comment I was replying to stated as fact that everyone has to uninstall Flash before installing CS3, which (as my data point shows) is not universally true.

To extend your analogy, the original comment is like saying: "If you go to Afghanistan, you will get your head cut off."
Amtrak from Boston to NYC is a pleasant experience but it is very slow and expensive. Even with getting to and from the airport, the plane is faster. The fastest ground transport between the two cities is the Chinatown bus and it only costs $10.

I'm all for more trains but as someone else pointed out, SF to LA is a weird route. Once you get to LA, what do you do? Rent a car? The other direction makes more sense but I wonder if there are many people who actually go from LA to SF on a regular basis. I actually do, and it only costs $40 on Virgin America and hardly anyone is on the plane.

It would make more sense having high speed rail going from SF->PDX->SEA->VAN... at least once you get to those cities you can get around without a car.
Double your productivity without more work or stress
Reddit's Discussion about HN
I have spent a decent amount of time in and around the drug community and one thing I've noticed is that many drug dealers are actually very bright and talented individuals. Were it a legal product, they would be entrepreneurs. There are many aspects of accounting, logistics, and supply chain management that go into being a continually successful purveyor of recreational drugs. It's a fickle industry - made significantly worse by the fear of legal repercussion.
Unfortunately, things being how they are, some are forced to continue this risky lifestyle because legitimate jobs are getting harder and harder to come by and "weed dealer" doesn't really look that good on paper.
Now I'm not saying dealers are these savants backed into a corner by an oppressive government, but the organization of drug trade is actually deeply interesting, if only because it is illegal.

Just my .02
I don't think this is very coherent. It's basically the author's impression of what works and what doesn't. It isn't really substantiated.

A few examples:

he complains about snipd (first example) having too many colors on the frontpage, yet praises Basecamp (last example) even though they have even more colors on their front page.

Comparing Snipd's service to Google, and saying that Google does a better job of conveying information because they have less of it on their frontpage is a bit too easy. Snipd's service is substantially more complicated and unknown than Googles (seen from a user perspective, of course)

It's not a bad post by any means, it should just stress that these are opinions of the author, and not necessarily what has been proven to work.
Google Docs suffers serious security lapse
Add Google News to your website
Will Apple’s ‘Netbook’ be open or closed?
"Disney" is a Corporation. Walt Disney was a (human) person.
I also thought the fixation on Eiffel was odd. Who cares which OO language you choose when you are only worrying about concepts? The reason to use a "real" language would be for its libraries and implementation. For explaining the concepts, it doesn't matter what you use. (Although Java and C++ would be particularly poor choices for explaining OO concepts.)

I was pleased to hear Haskell being called mainstream, however.

Other than that, I didn't get anything out of this article. It contained some words, but they didn't really make much sense.
I don't know if he meant this too but I'd be great to add to the Examples section, a PayPal "Donate" button.

I don't like the standard one, but I'd want users to know it's Paypal. But I don't know if using their logo is be infringement, but you could still use a PayPal-like logo.

I don't like the word "donate", but I'm not sure how that change would effect users actions; that's been the standard for a while. But I like "contribute" and "support".
How the Changing Facebook Home Page Will Affect Application Virality
TechCrunch Now Has An Office
Absolutely! I jotted this up in an hour, thought people here might like it, and submitted it. Consider this to be the rambling opinion of a guy who likes looking at web sites.

he complains about snipd (first example) having too many colors on the frontpage, yet praises Basecamp (last example) even though they have even more colors on their front page.

The problem with Snipd isn't the colors. It's the fact that the colors don't contast well. There's faded-green next to vivid-green, cream with orange, and a lot of colors that don't fit well together. (I think when it was first posted here I said it reminded me of a liver spot, and the blue at the bottom felt like athlete's foot.) The Basecamp one, meanwhile, really pops. You get that really comforting dark-on white, there's lots of padding, and it all feels very cozy. (I particularly like that they contrast the red of the Basecamp page with the green of the sign-up button on top.) It's not perfect, but I thought nitpicking would detract from the message.

Comparing Snipd's service to Google, and saying that Google does a better job of conveying information because they have less of it on their frontpage is a bit too easy. Snipd's service is substantially more complicated and unknown than Googles (seen from a user perspective, of course)

That's worth a completely different write-up: it's a big problem if people don't know why they should use your product. I don't get the point of clipping sites, so I don't know what design would work well for one. On the other hand, there are a lot of search sites, and Google was the one that figured out exactly what they were supposed to do.

I was thinking about using Zooomr rather than Snipd, but Zooomr is so incredibly awful that I didn't want to use it in an article like this. Zooomr I can't help but laugh at. Snipd actually works very well: they just have an ugly front page.
Economic Advice from an Entrepreneur that is Actually Doable in this Congressional Session
Capabilities for Python?
You should make this a poll, and don't forget the "I'm still not ramen profitable" option that most people will choose :-)
Eleven months from empty text editor to 'ramen profitability'. Only one product was developed but about four others were considered before I focused on a clearly defined market filled with customers who were willing to pay for software.

The position I started from was zero debt and about two years of comfortable living expenses saved. That turned out to be essential.

Contract work was offered and was very tempting to accept, but I knew if I took it I'd find it difficult to focus on product development -- so I passed it up. Once you have a steady income (whether from a salaried job or from contracts), it's very difficult to go back to working for zero dollars per hour and an unproven idea you think might work one day.
I see your point about the bad interaction between indentation-based block delimitation and parens for function parameter delimitation.

But I think something like Ruby's block syntax should be doable, and probably you can even pass multiple blocks, with some limitations on which parameters can receive them. Here's another shot at it, just for fun: http://codepad.org/mVigj978
Tarsnap reaches profitability
Not really.

If A is failing, you can tell as you're going, and adjust. It obviously still requires skill, but it's just the time tested "make something, charge for it" model. As soon as you get users, by definition, you get revenue, and if you're competent, that means profit.

With B, you are deferring all or some of your income to some later stage. If it's not going to work out, you might not know that until the last minute when you're supporting a large userbase. You might never find a business model. OR you might hit gold.

Both models are just as valid as each other, it just depends on which you prefer, and which one is more appropriate to a particular set of circumstances.
the onus is on you to support that point with evidence

I'm not claiming to be an absolute authority on these matters, but merely trying to breed some discussion around the topic. I don't think it's a clear cut case.

Most of the problems NAT-unfriendly technologies were supposed to solve have instead been solved by brute force

My argument is that over time the brute force required may possibly exceed the work of an actual migration away from IPv4 to something better.

The rest of your comment just ignores my argument, which is that individuals don't need routable IP addresses for the Internet to work.

In that case, my bad. And this is certainly true for large parts of the internet. If this remains true with the evolution of VoIP, SIP and other unified, global communication protocols taking over for traditional telephony, is probably another matter.

as long as the next YouTube can get reachable servers online, what do I care whether my iPencil has a 1918 address?

If routable IPs become such a scarcity only rich people can afford it, expect to see internet creativity drop significantly. Part of what makes internet great today is that anyone can contribute and put something online if they want to.

Sorry if I can't get all worked up over whether my phone can talk to your phone over direct BitTorrent.

That's obviously an extreme, but on the other extreme, if nobody except commercial entities can afford routable IPs, technologies like BitTorrent will die because there will be no connectible peers.
The 50 Media Sites Bloggers Link To The Most
Not if you consider the people you meet as being possible resources.

A good friend once told me that a big barrier to my success would be that I tended to be a loner. He was right and it's a reason I force myself to be more social and outgoing. People are interesting in their own right, and at some time in the future, someone you met briefly a long time ago might be just the person you need to break through a barrier.
Glad you replied - I wasn't quite sure about submitting the comment, since it might sound like a grumpy old man telling the kids to get off his lawn. I see you don't take it that way :-)

And for something jotted up in an hour it's pretty spectacular :-)
RC4 Cipher alone secure enough?
Before anyone asks, I'm not going to say how much profit tarsnap made in February, except to say that it's significantly less than I spent on insulin (I'm a type 1 diabetic) -- I belong to the crazy set of people who get very uncomfortable at discussions about income.

To be honest, I wouldn't have posted this at all, except for one important thing -- the fact that tarsnap is self-supporting (as I mention in the post) means that people have a much stronger reason to trust that it will continue to exist in the future.
Five months.
Solar water-heating: payback in two years
Follow Tim Ferriss and he donates $3 to charity
mark is wrong on one count....US treasuries DO have a de-facto guarantee within the jurisdiction of the US govt. this doesn't mean their value is gauranteed, the value of the bond may fluctuate with a variety of factors...but, US treasuries can be redeemed with created accounts by a 1982 law, making them the fiat equivalent of the US dollar itself. whether you can do anything with those dollars is another issue, but thats not an assurance issue, its a trade issue
Guide on Private Equity and VC for Entrepreneurs [pdf]
As an example of the markets you are talking about, imagine 3 people aged 25-35, starting a new business. I am that market, and I have made at least a dozen purchases. Each time it was like this:

* hit some roadblock on the way to accomplish X
* find 3-6 solutions, pick the one most valued/recommended/easiest/etc
* slap down the debit card
* never think about that roadblock again

My lower bound is probably 5:1. If you can save me five hours of work per year for the price of one hour's income, I'll take it. A good example is DNS hosting, or a SkypeIn number.

If everyone's out digging for gold, start selling shovels.
do you really have this many bookmarks that you can't find em?
The underclass can't get IP addresses today. Hust because we make hundreds of billions of numbers available tomorrow, doesn't mean those people will be routable for fractions of a cent. There are plenty of logistical problems (RIB size, portability) besides the artificial "scarcity" of IP addresses that retard universal fixed addressing.

The rest of your argument just seems like hand-waving. What fraction of "creativity" on the Internet depends on end-station addressing? Web applications don't care what number your laptop claims, and neither does email or IM. If addressing is hurting creativity, it's because you're being creative at the wrong layer of the stack.
Domain Name Registrars and Domain Parking Services Compared
Good idea! Any idea how to convert this post into a poll?
>> "Google didn't have to be free; they chose to be"

I read that, and thought "That makes absolutely no sense, because they would have failed if they had not been free".

Please explain how Google would have grown to its current size, had it charged users to use its search.

Google chose to be free, because the alternative would have been certain failure.
I don't see any reason to discuss Jeff's ignorant article yet again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948
While I certainly think this is interesting, I also think it is dangerous to draw their attention.

When you see a mob of unruly teenagers, you should pretend not to notice them and walk on.
Could you elaborate on the modeling that needs that machinery?
The Future of Risk Mitigation in Venture Capital
What constructive purpose does this sentence have?

> I doubt it ["relentlessly resourceful"] could be made more precise.
I'll be darned. It even has GPL3 highlighted and I missed it. I'll have to change me wish to a more personal one.
Is The Free Ride Over For Web Startups?
Call me cynical or angry, but why do the marketeers and attention whores always have to ruin everything?

He says he's willing to donate up to $50K, and an anonymous other person will donate up to $100K. So just donate the money already, why I do I have to follow you? Not like my follow adds any value or interest in what you're doing.

There seems to be a growing trend of trying to use Twitter as a fundraising platform and as some kind of social-awareness medium. Hell, maybe that's their emerging business model, but if it is, I'm not interested.

This is really nothing new, but Twitter seems to really reduce the barrier to entry for attention whoreing more than anything else in the past. As that activity increases, I find my own use of Twitter decreasing.
> I'm prepared to admit that there are certain things that come through better on video, that there are quite a few learners who learn better via video, and that great lectures have a wonderful charm that complements written material nicely.

Same here... there's no reason one can't have both for each of the 5 points (both text and video)
How to Improve Your Startup Pitch
Do people call you "PG" in real life?
Sure, but the user still has to have paypal setup, credit card, etc.

Going the ISP route is far cleaner, since they already have a billing relationship with the customer.
This is the HN discussion about the Reddit Discussion about HN
Yes, I'm not discounting where the money can come from.

Getting big off VC without a viable profit stream is what I have an issue with.
I didn't say it's not possible, but it's a massive hurdle for users.
I'm from the US, and thought hapless meant, roughly, wandering about with no clear purpose, and consequently not achieving a good outcome.

I find the dictionary definition very surprising.
DrupalCon DC 2009 Videos
Is that Ramen profitable (i.e. it pays for your basic living expenses) or just profitable in the sense that it pays for your server expenses?
I don't know about converting. Just go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll and link to your new post from this one (unless there really is a way to convert it to a poll).
Congrats Colin for sticking with it for 2 years and even more amazing, being a lone founder and remaining focused.
i think a lot of these fears are played up by society in order to induce good worker bee syndrome. losing your material wealth ain't shit in the face of freedom. programmers have the most in demand skill in the world right now. if you go broke you can always come back.
as Borat said to the chicken: live your life!
I left the previous startup last January (was there about five years). Between travels I did a few projects:

- Contract app development.
- Wrote some graphics code for fun (real-time voxel renderer).
- Wrote a web app as an experiment (web clippings tool).

What I learned: Contract development is not for me. Writing code for myself is much more satisfying, the graphics project was really a lot of fun. From the clippings app (clipng.com, it works and I use it but it could use some polish) I learned that working on your own is a lot harder than working in a team. At the same time, finding co-founders is really difficult.

In January I decided to join up with a seed-stage company whose CEO I met at a networking event. They have a good business model but needed someone to take over engineering and get the product shipped. So far that's working out well from a business standpoint and it has me at ramen-sustainable cash flow. Total time to sustainable: 1 year, 2 months.

Right now I have four ideas in-queue that I think would make good businesses but finding a co-founder is my first priority. If anyone reading this is in the Bay area and looking a project let me know.
Congratulations!

"What guarantee can I provide that the tarsnap service will continue to operate?" - lots of upstarts get this question, and rightfully so. I've been wondering, would it be possible to set up some kind of foundation that would take over the data if a company goes out of business? This way users can get to their data, and port it to somewhere else, even if the company goes bankrupt. If it is possible this would give a lot of potential customers one less worry.
...

"Now, this is only under the most limited definition of profitable: In February, tarsnap had more income than expenses; but it isn't paying me a salary yet. Tarsnap isn't making enough profit to pay for my living expenses (Paul Graham uses the wonderful phrase "ramen profitable" to describe this), never mind matching what I could earn by working elsewhere; and it hasn't made enough profit to cover its accrued losses (either those in the three months between moving into public beta and becoming profitable, or the expenses during the lengthy unpaid private beta testing period), never mind matching what I could have earned over the past two years if I had decided not to work on tarsnap."
Congratulations! There should be an award for this, perhaps a tee shirt that says "Ramen Profitable".
I worked on my project (a pretty large web game) for a year before we launched it. Money started coming in right away. We had coverage on wired.com which was a nice spike, but I only got confident enough to start withdrawing a regular salary after another 12 months.

So technically 24 months, which is longer than the other posts I'm seeing here so far.
Never at the rate I am going :-/
How to get a page into Google in one hour
> We don't subsidize highways; the total taxes collected more than cover the costs.

Sorry, but this is a commonly held misconception. From this article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,274113,00.html

"Close to two-thirds of the trust fund's $40 billion in receipts last year came from the gasoline tax."

So the trust fund, which is made up of gas and diesel taxes, amounts to about $40 billion a year.

As I have pointed out before here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260824

Total federal outlays were about $67 billion that same year, and states and local governments usually throw in billions more.

And besides, I never claimed you can't fund rail via use taxes. But subsidizing roads to the tune of billions a year and expecting rail infrastructure to compete without such subsidies is just silly.
It's not less valuable, it's just that in that situation the "product" is not your product...the user base is your product. There is a fundamental difference between improving a product for customer.paying-user and improving the user base for your customer.paying-advertiser.
Today was the first day of our first billing mo. with our first customer. Our second customer will place us clearly in the realm of "Ramen Profitability".

It took four ideas, a co-founder revolving door, one false start and copious amounts of luck to get here.

Altogether, 11 months so far. While working the day job. I'm constantly exhausted.
"I Quit" Day Zero
Ah, doh... should have read TFA :-) Thanks.
I didn't quit my job until I was ramen profitable and then some. However, the ramen profitability went away after a while. Things can grow as well as shrink. My second business is not yet ramen profitable.
Congratulations on becoming "Ramen Profitable". If you decided to email 5 enterprises everyday about "Yonkly For Businesses", I bet you would do even better. Great work.
Apple's first D.C. store: Design by committee
I think it will be a little while before you're nicely profitable, but I'd say it will come. Backups are just the worst thing ever. Getting the data to unreliable tape drives, rotating the tapes, dealing with finite capacity physical hardware, making sure that it's secure (both from people stealing the data and disaster happening to the data). It's a nightmare and one that I'm happy to replace with Tarsnap.

With Tarsnap, I can simply run a cron that creates a backup with the date in the name and I'm done. I never have to eliminate old versions since they all take the storage space of an incremental. I never have to worry about where we're storing the tapes (a crappy basement a block from our main building shudder). I never have to worry about people getting past the little security in the building. Most importantly, I don't need to do anything. The cron does it. I don't have to monitor tape capacity, constantly test whether the tapes are any good, deal with incrementals vs. full backups, etc.

There's no longer any excuse for having poor backups. Tarsnap allows you to do full backups as often as you want while only using the space of incremental. It's paranoid secure and replicated on S3.

Congratulations! You deserve for this service to become the premier backup solution for many IT departments.
Just because we make hundreds of billions of numbers available tomorrow

Actually its more like 4 billion billion billion billion IPs.

There are plenty of logistical problems (RIB size, portability) besides the artificial "scarcity" of IP addresses that retard universal fixed addressing.

This is indeed true. If you want a small RIB size you need hierarchial address assignment. If you want portability, you need to break hierarchial address assignment. That being said, if portability becomes a limited issue, routing doesn't have to be much worse than it is today, where it is pretty much random.

What fraction of "creativity" on the Internet depends on end-station addressing?

Today I can put up a server on any DSL, have a public IP (and DynDNS if it's dynamic) and I can serve up new stuff to the entire internet without having to pay for hosting. Granted, that is not a business-class solution by any means, but anyone can do it.

If you all of a sudden have to use commercial hosting to put something online, you are 100% at their mercy. What they offer, how they offer it, it will have to work on their server-setup unless you are willing to pay premium for a VPS etc etc.

You want to develop some new kind of project/service which doesn't run over HTTP or on Apache? It sure must be encouraging to know that 99% of the internet wont be able to run or host your stuff since you are at the hosting provider's mercy and they have no plans deploying untested software.

If addressing is hurting creativity, it's because you're being creative at the wrong layer of the stack.

I'll assume this comment means you misunderstood what I was thinking about.
About a year, give or take.