skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was looking up information about the book Punk Marketing a few days ago, and somebody gives an anecdote about a presentation they gave where the first slide was titled "How to Market to Generation Y", and the second slide was titled "You can't.", and that was the entire presentation. And there's some truth to that. The more people advertise, the more people get bored. So excitement becomes the only thing that matters.

Until my current project I always thought that excitement was something that you simulated to get users. The guy who built and marketed Zoints, the start-up I did work for in high school, would IM me and talk about these campaigns he wanted to run on forums where Zoints employees would become forum members to talk about how much they loved the network (it was a social network for forums, essentially). And I thought, Oh, this is how you generate excitement. Then I started demoing Cirqueti to people in January, and suddenly I was getting absolutely ridiculous feedback. Things like, I'd talk to somebody about it on IM, and they would go to their college and talk to their professor or their class about it. One guy keeps bringing friends onto his IM account to ask me questions about it.

It's insane, and it's a terrific feeling, and more than that it's genuine. I love it, because it means I don't have to lie or oversell what I've got: from the initial reaction it doesn't at all look like that'll be necessary, and I can focus on just making it better. And the best part of that is it's not marketing. Like, this isn't some cynical attempt to gain users. It's much more honest, because they're doing it on their own. I've seen that with a lot of web sites, in particular Facebook, which ran no ads on competing web sites (unlike TagWorld, which people thought was a big potential competitor, and which would advertise everywhere). I love it. It shows that if you've actually made something good, then you don't have to worry about advertising and you can just be yourself and do your own thing.
The space elevator is one of my favorite topics. To date, no other technology to provide cheap access to space seems as viable.

For more info, here are a few links:

http://www.spaceward.org

http://www.spaceelevatorblog.com/

Also, this video isn't really technical, but I found it motivational:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKKy33rb0U
"If there are tons of people using GS's unofficial support forums instead of your own, that tells you that your system is broken, and needs to be repaired."

Or it means that they have good placement on google results. When I search for "37signals help", the third result is the getsatisfaction page.

Now, in this case the actual 37signals page came up first, but 37signals receives a fair amount of incoming links due to the popularity of their blog. In the case of a company that doesn't play quite as well with PageRank, might getsatisfaction be the number one result? It doesn't seem that unreasonable that some people might end up there instead of the actual support avenues.
The flip side is that if a company is to create a good QA site for an another company...Wouldn't they want it to be so official looking that the user would not be able to see the difference?
>You have a very arrogant world view. You are assuming you know what's better for a borrower (call him B) than he does himself.

We're talking about the kinds of dumbasses who take out payday loans. Arrogant or not, he probably does know what's better for the borrower than the borrower does himself.
I think you just hit the nail on the head. I was wondering why Hulu would take the time to implement such a braindead "encryption" scheme. All you need is a JavaScript interpreter to break this.

But now they can sue anyone who serves their content because it's circumventing their broken encryption scheme. DMCA is quite a nifty bit of legislation.

Hell, publishers once sued someone successfully under DMCA for breaking an "encryption" scheme based on rot13. I kid you not: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-116424.html?legacy=zdnn
Was that from a Japanese paper?

(I think this thread's the first time I've seen Lebowski quotes infiltrate Hacker News, and I don't know if that's a bad thing or an awesome thing.)
Yes. I think this whole thing has been valuable in terms of discussion, which is why I'm glad Fried actually took things out into the realm of open, transparent communication in his first post.
Scala doesn't support nested annotations. That will most likely change with 2.8.0 when Scala gets optional and default arguments (nested annotations being a convenient side-effect).

That said, most real-world uses of nested annotations in Java can also be configured with XML (I know, yuck). Or you can always write a wrapper interface in Java and use that from Scala, since Scala supports mixed compilation projects. Needing nested annotations in Scala won't be a show-stopper, just inconvenient.
If that comment was in response to tokenadult, you might want to contemplate using the reply link below his comment next time.
Here's some info on the trajectory of developments over the last ten years:

http://www.spaceward.org/elevator-when
For whatever reason, this thread's had a lot of people very quickly downvoted. Though I've got to say, humor's always hit-and-miss on HN. I think that because you started your topic off with a joke, it stood out more than the actual point you were making.

Remember that it wasn't just 10 months for that one thing. From what this entry said, they got multiple complaints along the line of "They aren't responding to me on GS so their customer service sucks". That 10-month one was just the first.
"GS has every right to create a forum where customers can air grievances"

Yes. They have no right to make it look like they represent the company in question, though. GS's defense is that they mostly do represent such companies...and yet they use the same setup for companies that may not even know their site exists.

Consumer-grievance forums have been around for years. They don't impersonate companies.
Augmenting Python's strftime
It's insane. Game magazines were writing about how "no company survives past the second generation" and how gaming was hardcore and nobody wanted to play video games and gamers were super elite. Then the Wii was announced and the reaction among gamers was universally "nobody wants to play games that are basically toys." I was a Nintendo fan, Gamecube and all, and I had lots of yelling arguments with my friends* over how the PS3 was awesome, but the Wii would blow people's minds. I love that it succeeded, because Nintendo and its corporate culture deserve that kind of success. (PG wants to write about the 5 best people in start-ups? Shigeru Miyamoto takes my #2 slot. He designed not just the systems but the games, and he's an incredible human being.)

*That was in high school, of course, where people have those ridiculous gaming arguments. Now I'm in college and my superathlete roommate just bought Pokemon Diamond on eBay.
Yes, but had they not had their pages looking semi-official, there would be no reason to use GS, now would there?

As I've said somewhere lower in the comments, two things would have made a world of difference here.

1. GS should have had an e-mail notification system in place. They should notify any company, much less 37Signals, that there's been a question posted on their forums. Same can be said for UserVoice and any other third-party site who wants to get into this game. Had they notified the support people at 37Signals, none of this would have come to bear.

2. Jason, no matter how angry he is/was, should have NOT used a public forum for dealing with this issue immediately. Had he talked to GS's admins/support through e-mail privately, there'd be no need for this hubbub. If the e-mail route did not work, then I agree with denouncing GS publicly.

All I'm alluding to here is maturity. There are good ways of handling issues and then there are bad ones. Even if Jason has a good point about GS's business conduct, it's lost, not just on me, based solely on his approach to it.
Perhaps you missed this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543368
Opensim April 1st prank was devastatingly fun
Shocking News: Scientists Say Workplace Social Networking Increases Productivity
Ask HN: Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes?
Yet PostOnce found it best to be cautious - it looks like that account was created just to write this post.
Great comment. The idea that "everything is public" is the best thing about the Internet. Transparency is awesome.
Flat, Flexible Speakers
Of course, had there been a bug in your "automated system" and you did not intend on violating the law in the first place, you'd still want to be publicly embarrassed just because the person who's angry with you did not have the manners to do it privately?
filing DMCA requests to take down 3rd party customer support sites

No, don't confuse the issue. Copyright and trademark are not the same. (And are distinct from patents and trade secrets, for that matter.)

The DMCA is about copyright. None of the posts on GS violate copyright. [1] And, if one does, a DMCA notice can be used to take it down, but not to take the whole site down.

This GS incident is (or would be, if and when lawyers enter the picture) a trademark dispute. GS stands accused of misusing other companies' trademarks in a way that creates customer confusion: Customers see a trademarked logo and a trademarked name on the GS pages, and are misled into thinking they are visiting a site that is officially associated with the trademark holder.

You can say any damn thing about Comcast you want. [2] And I believe you can even use Comcast's trademarks in the process, so long as you do so for the purpose of commentary (and not, say, to compete with Comcast in the cable business), and so long as there isn't evidence that you're misleading people into thinking that your site is officially associated with Comcast.

P.S. I am not a lawyer. Though sometimes I wish I were. I certainly spend enough time talking about IP law.

---

[1] Well, very few, anyway. Obviously anyone could put up posts on GS that violated copyright.

[2] Well, okay, anything that you honestly believe is true. You're not allowed to defame them.
Where Startups Are Headed: Rapid, Lean and Micro
Lifespan at birth or at adulthood? I thought it was accepted that lifespan at adulthood for hunter-gatherer types was often essentially of modern length, and it was agriculture that lowered it (while increasing number of children) until modern times?
http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/cto.html

Millions of numbers in a single megabyte may be interesting.
Macintosh.

BTW I think his main contribution to Pixar was leaving them alone (but note his talent in selecting them).
Also, your argument is fallacious. A digital good does not really have any instrinsic value in and of itself, only what people make of it.

Whereas a dollar bill is worth just that, a dollar.
Sadly, quite a few people are having trouble grasping that critical blog posts are the absolute least of your worries when you break laws and infringe on others' identities. Or that being nice, smart people running a startup with some fanboys is not actually a get-out-of-jail card for your misbehavior.
'Hey I'm Dead' The Story Of The Very Lively Ant
Exercises That Protect Against Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
We have an "official" page on GS. But I am astounded at how good their SEO is:

[dawdle support]: http://www.google.com/search?q=dawdle+support&ie=utf-8&#...

[dawdle help]: http://www.google.com/search?q=dawdle+help&ie=utf-8&...

But this is pretty old hat for online retailers:

[dawdle reviews]: http://www.google.com/search?q=dawdle+reviews&ie=utf-8&#...

I totally, totally get why 37signals is upset - but, sadly, what GS is doing isn't new. I'm envious that Jason has a big enough soapbox to get things changed; we certainly don't. That's why I'm thrilled he's being as public as he is.
Check the comments out. This started because a "very, very angry customer" yelled at them about their questions not getting answered. Still on the fence about GS?
Testing Ajax Web Applications - PyCon
Nah, that's still a part of 2.0.
Every time you try to make GS out to be the victim here, you provide another hook for us to keep debating this. Look at the comment scores and the balance of comments. GS isn't winning this debate. In fact, not only are they not winning it, but 37signals has now also managed to impress a lot of us with Sarah Hatter's customer service skills, which builds a case for doing this work in-house.

There's something to learn from this, and it's not trademark law --- it's how not to handle a PR crisis.
I've come to learn from experience that once an organization or site tries to implement explicitly what emerged from its community, it's almost universally panned by the community.

That's because features often come from the community rather than from built-in functionality. The users still control that process. Once it's built in, it becomes law, and that sucks.
Ask HN: Should I outsource development outside the US?
I am trying to launch a startup that requires development of a nontrivial web site. Right now the team is myself (CTO), two CEOs, legal counsel, and an accountant. We want to keep it as small as possible, and, as I don't have time to do the development myself, we are going to outsource it. My preference has been to use a US-based team, for a few reasons. I like the idea of being able to communicate with the developers in some situations, rather than (only) a manager. Also, we may want to establish some sort of long-term relationship for maintenance purposes (and possible new features later on). And, well...foreign development teams kind of have a slightly negative stereotype that I guess I was buying into without really thinking about it (I have no experience of my own to go on).

However, it turns out the cost of having this site built in the US may end up being a bit higher than we had expected, so I'm doing some rethinking. So my question is whether the above reasons for using a US-based team are legitimate or if I was just wrong. Should I consider teams not based in the US? If so, what are some red flags I should look out for? Any advice?
I don't actually agree with you, but I upvoted you because I think your point is at least legitimate.

I wish people on HN would stop downvoting comments simply because they disagree with them. Different perspectives add value to conversation!
If the only way to make your product work is to co-opt the branding and identity of another company, you have a business model problem. Are you sure you're really advocating for GS here?
But there absolutely was a need for this public flogging for all the hundreds of companies who care about their customer relationship who may not be aware of GS' dubious tactics.
The big new idea that's said to be uncharted territory reminds me of research from the 90s, actually:

"We also exploit the tight integration between versioning and incremental analysis to provide a novel history-sensitive approach to error handling. Our error recovery mechanism reports problems in terms of the user's own changes in a language-independent, non-correcting, automated, and fully incremental manner."

http://techreports.lib.berkeley.edu/accessPages/CSD-97-946?a...

(Excellent thesis, BTW.)
Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976. (To mentions of billg, he founded MS in 1975.) That was over 30 years ago. While it is nitpicking, I'd like to see them cleared out for more novel choices.
Found one more for you:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186563
Does information beget information? If so, their model will probably prove quite lucrative.
Also, because maybe Fried doesn't give a shit about whether GS gets their act together (as long as they fix the page), but does care that the 100 other startups that have the bright idea of grabbing 37signals logos have some idea that they're going to get smacked down for doing that.
Does information beget information?
One nice thing from Thor Muller in the comments:

"Very clear feedback, which we’re grateful for and will take to the drawing board. And yes, we are as serious as can be about removing all confusion. As we’re in the midst of significant design effort, we will see changes continue to hit the site regularly. It should be no surprise that we welcome public feedback about it as it happens.

My apologies again."

Yes, that's what they should have been saying all along instead of playing the poor-misunderstood-and-bullied-community-site card. However, they may be taking matters seriously enough to actually fix their approach.
Oh, there are many lessons to be learned, here. :) Hopefully GS is learning them, too.
Your startup sounds rather technical "a nontrivial web site," yet you have two CEOs, a lawyer and an accountant. In my opinion, you need to let go of at least one of the CEOs and outsource the lawyer and accountant until you have a need for them full time.

Why do you have two CEOs? Fortune 500 companies only have one. This sounds very much like an idea cooked up by some "business guys" who thought they'd farm the real work of a tech startup out to their buddy in IT. I've been there and I haven't seen it work.

In my opinion, there's a place for outsourced work, but it isn't when a startup is developing it's core technology assets. That requres heads down devlopment by a team of dedicated engineers for a period of months. That's exactly why YCombinator was set up. To deal with the minimal business setup and let the team just dig in for a quarter and see what happens.
Hey you know what? Not making a case for Ruby here. Just picking one very small part of Alex's argument and critiquing it.
This has been discussed many times. See:

http://searchyc.com/ask+outsource
Exactly - I do not think the coding Mark Zuckerburg or Larry Page/Sergey Brin did while they were students was trivial + it lead to two "game changing" companies, so to speak.
I'd had to up-vote a few people in these threads who've said things I disagreed with, but were at least valid. However, I'm clearly not the only one doing that; a lot of suddenly-downvoted stuff that wasn't outright GS fanboying has re-emerged pretty quickly.
all hail the new slumlord! good god that's what this world needs...
JRuby is what, a few times faster than Ruby 1.8.x? In a situation where Ruby was too slow, even after optimization by experienced Ruby coders, I don't see how switching to JRuby would have helped. Is there a crucial performance difference (threading maybe, or libraries) that would have made JRuby scale better than Ruby in this case?
(iPhone 3beta2 Jailbroken) Cat. Bag. Mouse.
And here's something I'd like to see in the future: A persistent OS-provided facility for explaining the origin of configuration decisions.

Linux has most configuration in text files, which is already better than binary files, but sometimes you have to do a lot of digging around in documentation to determine what statements of what files determine what configuration options.

In many ways, the links between configuration files are opaque as if they were dynamic (try determining semantic links between disparate config files using standard unix tools), however it's clear that most configuration is in fact mostly static and so it would be great to be able to access this data (like dependencies) easily to aid with automatic dependency management and debugging.

It would be great if in most cases, when the actual configuration differs from what you expect, you could ask the system why and it would tell you all the specific statements of config files that affected the configuration of the particular thing you're asking about (at various levels of granularity and abstraction). You could then easily see what you need to change to have the configuration you want.
That's just not scalable. You can't politely contact every company that's screwing you over and ask nicely for them to stop. It's a bit naive to think that a blog post was the nuclear option - this very well could have been a lawsuit.
Achieving "It's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you than a large number kind of like you" is a lot easier with a really good support person.
Short URL hints / autodiscovery RFC
Love it or hate it URL shorteners are here to stay. Here is a draft proposal for a simple spec that would allow them to play nice with sites that already have their own short URLs
I've heard so many stories of the much abused and misunderstood Tesla, usually coming from people I'd politely call "free-energy wackjobs". Even this article, which is one of the fairer versions I've heard, doesn't touch on why this has never been implemented or experimented upon further. It can't be for lack of interest or ignorance or for startup cost either (or else I'm sure YC would have funded someone to build these towers).

So HN, anyone with more electrical knowledge than I know why this doesn't work or why it wouldn't scale or any other engineering challenges that have kept this from being more than a pipe dream?
I love this guy's ViEmu and definitely will pay for his new toy codekana.
I got through #1 and #2, which says that entrepreneurs (M)ust read "billionaire bloggers" and (M)ust read "selected twitter streams", and then my attention span snapped and I went and read a couple twitters before taking the time to post another comment on Hacker News. I am awesome at entrepreneuring. I think I'll go ask my partners for a raise.
Tell HN: New TV show, The Entrepreneurs, debuts tonight @ 9pm eastern on CNBC
apologies for the duplicate!
That's just general skepticism, which is great, and certainly should be the default reaction to an article like this.

But when you said "It's not spam, it's just so very wrong." you made it sound like you must know of some hard evidence that actually debunked the article, rather than just the same general skepticism that tokenadult already expressed.

I'm pretty sure Femur was asking you for some more details of that evidence.
So the networks would rather Boxee users download full HD, ad-free versions of their shows from the Pirate Bay rather than watch the low-def versions with ads from Hulu?

And then they complain about losing money...
No, they can advocate for themselves. I'm advocating for maturity in the resolution of such problems.

I've never denied that what GS was at best misleading, however, I don't think that going public without trying to resolve matters privately is very mature. In this case, GS has responded positively, but things could have shaped differently had there been another Jason Fried on the other side.
This paper is from 1998. That's pretty recent if you consider that most really fundamental CS papers are much older and that it takes a while for academia results to have a practical impact on actual implementations.
I know they tried to add NT to their portfolio, but they kept using IRIX for their supercomputing systems, as well as for their higher-end workstations until they switched to Linux for the supercomputers, and completely gave up on workstations.

Today their systems almost all use Linux.

Obviously, they didn't switch to NT, they switched to Linux.
If you read the whole article, this would be clear:

Mr. Goldstein had spent a summer during college at the Chicago Board of Trade interning with David Shorr, one of his mother's patients. Mr. Shorr left the trading floor in 2003 because of an injury and was looking for a new venture. He hit on the payday loan business — "You borrow money at one rate and you lend it out at a higher rate," Mr. Shorr says — and e-mailed Mr. Goldstein to get his thoughts. "Al sent me an e-mail back with bullet points, action items, and I realized my first action item had to be to get him," Mr. Shorr says.
He offered Mr. Goldstein a 75% pay cut but also the chance to build a business from scratch. Mr. Goldstein jumped.
And sold it for a LOT less than they paid for it. That couldn't have helped their financial situation any.