skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will literally bet money that this is false. There are some startups where you want to charge users, and some that you want to be free and just go for growth, and which strategy you use depends on the nature of the startup, not the state of the economy.

Thinking that every startup has to start charging its users now because the economy is bad is just as mistaken as thinking a few years ago that no startup had to charge its users because the economy was good.
I think this is a point too often forgotten by web entrepreneurs. A product has no intrinsic value - its value is in the eye of the user. This is also to say that every single user has a different value for how much they are willing to pay for your product (which may in fact be $0). Simply because something costs nearly nothing to make, doesn't mean you should sell it for nearly nothing.
5 minutes - 1 take, no joke. Production budget = $0.
The good news is that the wearout of an SSD is a gradual, measurable, monotonic process (because at every point you know how many spare blocks are left), while the failure of a hard disk is a random process.
I know for many things, being relentless is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. It is very easy to get stuck banging your head against a wall instead of finding a saving resource.
Reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit...

The IT guy from the video is a poster there, so there is some useful information if anyone is interested.
it did say - 4gb.

ans yes, i totally agree (re Superfetch)... even with XP, after loading an app once, windows was able to fetch the data again much faster the second time.
They should have showed the tests from power to boot to tests.
It's not AGPL, though, so IIRC you can use it in any web apps you come up with without having to publish source.
Take it easy dude...It's always easy to bash on any product..what is important is whether you are making money out of it or not and whether it's reaching a wider audience or not. Have fun making software :)
Tcpdf - Variable Height Table Rows With MultiCell
not long :)
See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484668
GitHub is good work, and it's made my life measurably more enjoyable. I'm sure hundreds of other programmers can say the same thing.

If that's not valuable, I don't know what is.
It seems to be wired in. It causes some inconvenience in everyday life, but it's very helpful in YC. It's as if I was made to to this.
I have a 64GB SSD in my laptop and I love it. Upon a clean Ubuntu install my system booted in 28 seconds. After tweaking my system some I got my boot time down to 12 seconds.

I tried opening OpenOffice after watching this video and found that OpenOffice writer opens in less than 1 second and opening all Office applications except for database and impress takes less than three seconds 3.

The difference between SSDs and HDs is definitely noticeable.
Ask HN: CTO vs. VP of Engineering
Note: I'm posting this under a different account than I normally use on HN because I want to remain anonymous.

For the last 2+ years I've been the CTO for a technically successful startup. I have successfully navigated the company around some very real disasters and have built a highly dedicated tech team that has excelled at realizing the technical vision of the product; despite whatever curve balls have been thrown at us - externally or internally. In those two+ years, I've worn every hat one could wear (from IA to project management to product development to systems admin to front end development to back end development) and have worn those hats as well as I could. We've staffed up to the point that I no longer am wearing as many hats, which I am grateful for, but still have a few key roles to fill, mostly in the project management category.

Several months ago, we hired a new CEO, whom I partially respect, but don't necessarily like. As is typical, his first criticisms were aimed squarely at the tech team because the tech team is always the first to blame - despite the fact we've always done what we said we would when we said we would. Obviously, as the only part of the company that produces tangibles, it's fairly easy to square operational issues on us. I've fought those criticisms as well as I could, but have been unable to make him see the real problem is the front office's lack of vision and an inability to communicate clearly whatever vision they might have. I've done the best I can given the sheer number of things I am required to do during the day, but, as anyone can correctly surmise, isn't the best I could do if I had a more singular focus. It's really hard to context switch from installing nagios on our production servers to doing IA to doing project management; all within the span of a few hours, day after day. It wears one down.

So he recommends we hire a VP of Engineering, which I agree to. It makes sense. Let that person run the process and let me focus on the bigger picture, architecture, product, etc. But then I read the job description and notice the line where it says this role reports directly to the CEO. Which means, since the entire tech staff is reporting to the VP of E, that I lose my staff. When I bring this up with the CEO, he tells me that I should see this VPE as a peer. Say what? It's bad enough that I have to explain to employees that have been with the company for 2+ years they are going to have a new boss, but now that boss doesn't even report to me?

Am I being paranoid that I'm being marginalized for an ill-perceived picture of the tech team? Is the CEO playing politics? I'm at a complete loss.

Advice?
will the economist links ever be blacklisted? Or am i the only one who finds their journalistic standards to be lacking?
I love this so much. excellent work guys!!!!
I don't think you've seen enough of Reddit or HN, honestly. I have spent wayyy too much time on both, so I feel uniquely qualified to comment ;)

Most discussion on Reddit consists of short attacks (or attempts at jokes). There is plenty of that on HN, sure, but a lot of comments are pretty long explanations of what the poster thinks. I don't find this to be sterile (and I enjoy not knowing about Internet memes anymore).

Interestingly, most of your comments here are significantly longer (and more insightful) than those at Reddit. I think it's because you are replying to comments here with actual substance, whereas on Reddit most of the comments are mindless and don't leave much for you to say. I think this is a sign that HN is doing well, or rather, that it works the way I like. (That's why I spend my time here now, rather than on Reddit.)
Lexington is also right next to Cambridge, MA. These locations are totally equivalent to their Y Combinator counterparts.
To follow on to 5), health insurance isn't just about you. It's about those who care about you. Helping to ensure they are not placed in a financial bind caring for you should something serious or catastrophic occur. Most likely, there are people in your life who would feel compelled to help you, even if it is a severe strain for them.

And as someone else commented on another thread here, in the last month or two: An insurance company will likely negotiate much lower charges that you can get as a private individual (in the U.S., at least). Even if you are left with part of the bill to pay, that bill is likely to be significantly smaller than it would have been were you uninsured.
This post contains lots of oversimplifications that don't do justice to Microsoft, Apple, or FOSS.

First, why do you think pragmatism is weird? As jimbokun pointed out, you're framing it as if it's OK to focus on either design or technical merit, but that trying to do well on both (which is what users actually need) is somehow undesirable.

I think your comment about "MBA-driven design" gets to the heart of your misunderstanding about what a PM is. Neither MBAs nor industrial designers are a substitute for PMs (most of whom are software engineers by training). Tell an industrial designer or an MBA to design Exchange's system for handling the million special cases that come up when handling calendar synchronization. What do you do when two appointments are modified concurrently? What happens on the server when someone deletes their local Outlook data file by accident? When do you treat two similar calendar events as duplicates, when do you treat them as separate, and what's the most logical way to let users resolve duplicates/triplicates? How do you handle the many confusions that arise from people traveling across time zones? Which attributes of a person's calendar should be stored on the server, and which should be customizable on each specific device? I know industrial designers and MBAs who work in the software industry, and they would tell you that this isn't their job.

You also say that the middle ground results in weak consumer products like Vista and Windows Mobile. These two data points are cherry-picked. I could equally say that this middle ground results in great products like Office 2007, SharePoint, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and so on (not fair to limit this to consumer products, since Microsoft's biggest focus is on productivity applications. I could point out Apple's lack of success among business users, but I understand that this is not their strong suit and that's OK. Their ability to deliver for a growing set of high-end consumers makes them a huge success in my eyes.)
Hoo boy, this is what everybody was saying at the end of Web 1.0. Evan Williams started a website called theendoffree.com (http://web.archive.org/web/*/theendoffree.com).

Then Web 2.0 happened. Ev starting doing free things again.

Coincidentally, the "End of Free" theory comes in waves, timed to the business cycles.
Too bad this micropayments platform is only available to huge corporations.
Finding keywords in given text using Python
Got this back:

Dancing with the Stars: Your vote was invalid! Check
ABC.com or watch Dancing with the Stars only on ABC
for more information on when voting is open.

Guess I was too late :-(
Sounds to me like he's trying to push you aside.
In my company, the CTO and CEO are the co-founders. The CTO has a PHd and our revolutionary product is pretty much his brain child implemented by the tech staff under them. We also have a VP of Engineering that they hired. (a Director of Eng in their previous venture). However, the VP of Eng reports to the CEO. The CTO has his own set of staff and they basically brainstorm on new ideas. We engineers respect all of them, but the CTO is definitely placed at a higher pedestal because the bread & butter produect being his idea. But, the CTO does not deal with most of the engineering staff except a few members who are working under him for some latest ideas or our product in the R&D phase, not released to the market yet. As an analogy, the CTO is more like a College professor with a bunch of RA's under him :)

I am not sure what your background in your company is. Just wanted to share what i saw in my company.
In the best of times, companies like Digg with fairly massive traffic have found it difficult to actually make a profit. And Digg is a poster-child of web 2.0.

Where does that leave the others dependent on similar user-generated-content-with-a-social-angle (which would describe so many of the consumer-oriented YC companies too)? Call me pessimistic, but I just don't see how the numbers add up to profitability, even ramen profitability for most such sites.

I have been in situations of ramen profitability and after a while (like 2 years) it gets tiresome. Even the most relentlessly resourceful people tend to throw in the towel and move on. This recession (depression?) looks like it will be around for a while.
(MICE) in Pattaya, Thailand at The Royal Cliff Beach Resort
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Ask HN: A smarter Hacker News RSS Feed?
[I posted a similar question to Reddit]

I tend to skip over HN in Google Reader for the simple reason that it's cumbersome to open the feed items, click the link, get taken away from my RSS feed page, and then have to go back when I'm done. Its inconvenient on my laptop or desktop and a deal breaker when I'm using Google Reader on my iPhone (which is great, btw).

Since a lot of the HN stories come from sources with RSS anyways, has anyone thought of trying to grab the actual RSS entry from the feed of the site that is referenced, and showing that in the HN RSS feed? For example, if a link was to a Techcrunch article, instead of showing the HN link in the feed, just show the full entry from the TechCrunch feed right inside the HN feed...
It sounds like from what you are describing, you are more like the VP of Engineering and less the CTO of the company. VP of Engineering should report directly to the CEO and should be responsible for the entire engineering staff, similar to the VP of Sales who also reports directly to the CEO and should be responsible for the entire sales staff. If the CEO believes that he needs a new VP of Engineering, then essentially he is telling you that he is not happy with your performance and he needs to replace you.
I take doses of Greens+ from time to time. I like it. I tried Piracetam and others but didn't put the effort in to identify how they affected me.
Seconded. Key for exercise: Find something that doesn't bore you to death. If most kinds of exercise do, you're not alone. Me, I get immensely bored of any generic cardio pretty quickly. I found the solution by chance: Bring a book while doing exercise bike. I can only read at about 60-70% of normal speed, and can only go 50-70% intensity, but I can do a couple hours of light/medium cardio while reading a good book. Weighttraining, martial arts, fencing, ultimate frisbee, golf, snowboarding, scubadiving, and occasionally pickup games of whatever in the snow have appealed to me. That might sound like a lot of activities, but I've tried dozens more and had them "not do it for me" and was bored or didn't enjoy them.

Eventually I found what works for me: things where I can think about tactics as I play or are played in really beautiful nature. Weight training also surprised me in how much I liked it once I got into it. Things without tactics or nature usually don't do it for me, but everyone's different and get into different things. Some people like to turn their mind off during exercise, some people like being really stimulated or distracted. Trial and error, plus not being discouraged if you dislike the first x kinds of exercise you try is the way.
You could probably do that with Yahoo Pipes. I use a feed that pulls in the article's comments page (because I read comments first):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=23159aed1a913917f...
The CEO has decided that you have technical ability but not management ability. He doesn't want to lose your nagios-installation skills but he thinks that an imaginary person whom he has not yet met or hired will be better than you at leading the tech team. He's happy to let you keep the fancy CTO title and perks so you don't lose face, or because he doesn't want a confrontation.

I would guess based on your comments and the fact that you're asking this question that politics are not your strong suit. "Politics", b.t.w., is just the natural state of people working together... it can be dysfunctional or functional, but as soon as you have 3 people, you have some kind of politics.

Since politics are a major component of management, you may actually be happier not doing management.

In situations like this the CEO is probably overestimating his ability to find a Magical VP Technology that will magically solve all his problems (unless he has someone in mind, a buddy from a previous company, for example). Likely he will spend 6-9 months trying to find someone, finally hire someone imperfect in despair, and spend the next year or two discovering that person is incompetent, too. But now I'm really just projecting.

If you don't like the CEO it may be time to move on. Life is to short to work with people you don't enjoy spending time with.
Agree with only showing users who have thumbnails. This is what twitter does in its public feed, for example.
personally i think opensource contributions are a mainstay. if you aren't already doing this, it's to bad b/c it helps. this advice doesn't apply just to rubyonrails either, but it's cool to read as a reminder.
Another way to make exercise interesting is to do something interesting while doing it. I ran into a friend recently who had lost a lot of weight. He said it was simply from using an elliptical machine while he read email. This seemed a very clever way to take advantage of the excessive amount of time one ends up spending on email.
I had no idea that anyone was completely black-and-white colorblind. Imagine how abstract the concept of "color" would be if you've never seen it.
"...programming is a dirty job"

hell yes!
This is a rough question - but are there areas in the tech area that you see requiring improvement? If so, what are they? Irrespective of the political state, do you see the CTO/VPeng setup redressing them?
"There is now widespread acceptance that investors can behave irrationally" <- Get out of here. People are irrational?

All kidding aside, I started my university studies in economics before switching over to management halfway through. The thing about efficient markets isn't that economics is claiming that things are instantly, always, 100% priced correctly, it's that they'll price themselves correctly over time and in aggregate. Econ doesn't say that no one will make a bad purchase ever, it says that if you wait around for a while, the "invisible hand of the market" will do its thing and price things correctly. If people are "overpaying" for gasoline, more people will start digging and refining oil to take those profits. The more people that start producing, the more prices will have to fall to compete, until prices get sane again. If lots of speculators get involved as they have recently, they'll artificially decrease supply by stocking reserves until they need to eventually unload those reserves, resulting in - as we saw - prices going up, up, up - and then crashing down, down, down when the speculators have to unload their oil on the market. Funny how everyone who complained about speculators and gas for the last few years aren't talking about how cool it is to have gas in the $2 to $3 range again.

So sure, housing was overheated for a few years. Then people realized it, and you can see what's happening now. It's not really a pleasant thing that people make bad decisions that aren't obviously bad decisions at the time, but it's been the nature of reality for as long as reality has been around. Nowdays, instead of worrying nonstop about droughts, famine, floods, plague, we're worrying about things that are relatively much less painless. There's still unpredictability and people don't act perfectly in any given timeframe, but things tend to straighten themselves out if you give it a while.
I just passed my 7th year of self-employment and have been through many ups and downs. I have learned a lot but still have a lot of questions. I don't comment much on HN, but I respect and trust this community quite a bit. I think a support group is a great idea. Anyone else?
I just started fooling w/ it and MIA "Paper Planes" is at the top along w/ the FLOBOTS "handlebars." Are either of these guys indy? Could a Rolling Stones song make it on here? If there is no criteria by which you are too big, won't it degenerate into the top 40?
Designing a document database
Git's DAG is just a bunch of branches
I think it'd definitely be a good idea to make submission upvotes not count towards karma, or be counted separately.
I think this bottleneck is easily (and still amazingly) noticed when storing things in RAM rather than on disk. For instance, immediately after a restart of our production database it can take up to a minute to run certain queries. Give it a few seconds to load everything into RAM, though, and it's nearly instant. I've noticed the same thing when switching from file-based to RAM-based queuing.

Everybody thinks, "duh, RAM (or SSD or w/e) is faster than disk" but sometimes these sorts of real-world tests still amaze.
I definitely agree that there will always be and should be services that are free while others that are paid.

However, I think what we saw in the last 5 years was an unhealthy focus on free where products that people may have been willing to pay for were driven to free because they were either subsidized by VC dollars, subsidized by cash cow business like Google's search, or eventual acquisitions by acquirers not necessarily looking for sustainable businesses. This may well have eroded a lot of potential value in that consumers have gotten used to these services being free and will likely not be willing to pay for them in the future.
It's true that ad models are not right for all, or even most companies.

However, in the BIG internet business, I think the key is to build a website for everyone. Maybe that's a freemium model or maybe that's an ad model. But it's gotta be some sort of model that gives everyone access.

The web is the only medium that reaches billions of people, and the Googles, the Flickrs, the Amazons of the world build a business that everyone can access and use, for free.

You can build a small internet business for a subset of people, but the businesses that make the big bucks, that get funded, and that change the world are apps for everyone.

That's why I got into this business - to build a machine for everyone to use. It's an exciting thing. It used to be that the most important thing you could do to influence the world was to write a book. Now it's making a website.
Hi micks56, I would like to ask someone who has a grounding in both law and technology some questions not directly related to this discussion but to software for lawyers in general. Your profile doesn't have an email ID. Care to email me at heuristix at gmail or reply back with your email id?
I will literally bet money that this is false.

You already do.

A lot of genuinely smart individuals post, comment, or author a lot of the content that appears here. Many accomplishments abound, including:

1) selling a shareware app written years ago.

2) founding and editing the top tech blog.

3) making a lot of money playing poker seriously.

4) completing their degrees early in life.

5) having written thousands of small and large programs over the past thirty years.

6) having an influential role at a company ten years ago.

Those who are in the game and not for the glitz are the ones whose opinion matters, and that opinion is to go for it, by definition. They go for it, and make decisions that put the company, customers, and themselves in the best position whenever decisions needs to be made.
This is a really nice book, though the topics therein are complicated enough that each chapter needs thoughtful contemplation to both fully understand and to spell out some of the details.

A MUST for anyone who wants to run any sort of e-commerce site that does anything nontrivial, or anything else where you need to set up the incentives for various parties properly
Pdiff: Perceptual Image Difference Utility