skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically, because the record companies lobby government, the public should engage in illegal behaviour.

News flash: most of corporate America engages in lobbying -- many industries far more aggressively and successfully than music. So if you think the music industry should be shunned for engaging in this activity, why not be consistent and avoid taking aspirin, paracetamol (pharmaceuticals: avoid), avoid using toilet paper (yes, those evil consumer staples companies also vigorously lobby government!), throw away your bank cards, ditch your car, turn off the lights (energy companies, y'know)... you get the idea.

Two wrongs don't make a right. I agree that the corporate interests play too large a role in the formation of public policy, and skew the process for the worse. But liberal democracies give us a forum to address that problem; that being recourse to our elected representatives. What you're advocating is a selective and self-serving lynching of certain industries.

As I mention elsewhere, if you don't agree with the music industry's practices or prices, then you have the right not to purchase (and listen!) to the music. Nobody's forcing you to listen to music -- you do it out of your own free volition because you like it, it gives you pleasure, it, in other words, has value for you. If you feel so strongly about the evils of the music industry that you can't fathom subsidizing some Big Bad Label by buying a CD or download of your favourite artist, pick up a guitar and play that whenever you want to hear music. But don't come here with some hare-brained argument that by stealing music you're doing a "Good Thing". That's just self-serving bullshit.
Economics of the Kindle
Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late
The marginal cost of printing another copy of the WSJ is low relative to the SG&A costs of running a newsroom, so I don't think this phenomenon is unique to web startups. But yeah, it makes sense that network effect businesses might sacrifice revenue for uptake.

That said, the promise of big paydays seems like DHH's point: how many more of those are there? Even if the era of the San Francisco Startup isn't ending, there's also a huge bias in the reporting of outcomes for aspiring SF Startups: we only really hear about the ones "important" enough to get funded.

Most companies that shoot for the moon on VC and free services fail. Your odds of winning with free are not good. You might even be worse off taking VC money; if you bootstrap on a free service and don't strike gold, you die in 6-18 months; if you get funded, you might lose 4 of the best years of your life on something with no chance.

Just my thoughts about your comment.
Such strong feelings about something that doesn't matter that much!

Your body makes chemicals -- these regulate your mood, control your feelings, and so on. Plants also make similar chemicals. You can consume these plants to make up for chemicals that your body doesn't make. That's what drug use is.

I don't see why there's any reason to murder someone else over this. Drugs don't really cause any of society's ills, you can commit crimes and be generally worthless without any help from "illicit" substances.

Also, why do we have such arbitrary lines drawn for what is OK and what should get you killed? Why is it OK to take Tylenol, alcohol, and caffeine, but not marijuana? (Incidentally, marijuana has never caused me ill effects, but non-prescription pain killers have. All drugs have risks, even "legal" ones!)

Anyway, if you have actual answers to these questions, I would really like to hear them.
http://www.vivapixel.com/contact
What is your game design style?
I'm sorry, what? If the options were "Google for $5 a year vs. Altavista", you think Google wouldn't have still have gone public?

Clearly, Google had better ways to make money; when you have something as excellent as Google, you have options. But don't take as your thesis that "even Google had to go free".
People who over-think things are paralyzed by uncertainty when it comes to social interaction because it seems so intellectually intractible. The rules and guidelines aren't meant to encourage their compulsive ratiocination; they're meant to serve as a security blanket, to give people enough courage to actually start interacting. Simply by being short and comprehensible, they provide authoritative reassurance that flirting doesn't require a highly sophisticated understanding. Once a person is reassured enough to get started, the rest will come with experience.
Mark-Jason Dominus proposed a different gimmick, long before LOLcats were invented:

http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide024.htm...
If I had to guess I would say it is by locking the 3 DBAs in a small room and not letting them touch a computer...
It works for a tiny fraction of the whole economy; in fact, even in media, ad-supported content is only a fraction of the revenue --- the motion picture industry is for instance significantly larger than ad-supported network television.
Victory Disease - Turning Victory into Success
IPhone app phones home to foil pirates
"[2] There are aspects of startups where the recipe is to be actively curious. There can be times when what you're doing is almost pure discovery. Unfortunately these times are a small proportion of the whole. On the other hand, they are in research too."

Paul can you please elaborate on the last sentence in the above footnote. The wording is a bit confusing. Thanks!
I think the key is to avoid a certain set of developed traits that might be called "horsemen of the mediocralypse"-- learned laziness, learned helplessness, deference to authority, and discouraged distraction. I'm sure that many others that could be added to the list.

The world is a very dumb place-- full of social injustices and inefficiencies, and run by the wrong people since the dawn of time. But there are always some people able to succeed in spite of these problems on account of having a very high level of resilience, and thus an innate resistance against the "horsemen".
Give us a break with this "mom & pop" stuff. You want to compare Google to 37signals? Fine, I'll compare Apple to Twitter.
Findjango, a django search vertical.  Written in Django.
LA to SF - 382 miles (along I-5)

Rome to Milan - 357 miles

Not that much difference. Either way would take a couple hours at the 170mph figure they are citing, and you are right to point out that anything under about 4 hours is going to beat planes, where you waste a couple hours in pre/post flight.

Los Angeles to Las Vegas seems like a prime route, at 278 miles. I have had to drive that a few times, and the traffic on I-15 is often so heavy as to be nearly at a standstill. Las Vegas would probably see an obvious boost in weekenders as well.

I think there are other targets outside Cali and the NE too. The KC -> St Louis stretch of I-70 is very heavily trafficked, and is 250 miles, which is long enough that trains beat cars but short enough that they can also beat airlines.
Because ISPs are terrible at picking winning technologies that are worth paying for. If they provided all their users with a search engine 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been google, it would have been some lame competitor.
Shameless plug:

myspace.com/thesignalsuk
myspace.com/martinpercossi

That's the music I'm writing when I'm not programming! [You'll note that I don't benefit from the recording expertise I mention above ;) ]
RealIT Video Blog - Joe Reflects On Page Size and Caching In Dev
Your logo's border looks particularly thick. It doesn't look very good on such a minimalist site.

"Vivapixel helps you store and share your photos and videos !"

There shouldn't be a space before the exclamation point. Furthermore, there shouldn't be an exclamation point at all. You're not making us excited right now, you're selling your product. It looks better if you're confident enough to stick to a period.

The checkboxes look very generic. Why not use a font-specific checkbox, if you need checks at all?

Bold fonts to me suggest slovenliness. Any reason you can't use a normal font thickness, and experiment with sizes to emphasize?

Work on the quality of your writing. If you've got three bullet points, it helps if they're about equal in length. "Crystal clear photos & videos" is overlong and doesn't say anything: aren't all photos crystal clear online? Does crystal clear video mean HD? (I'd also tell you to hyphenate crystal-clear, but it would be better to go with another phrase entirely.) "Safe and Fast" should see the f in "Fast" lowercased. Furthermore, these aren't points you should be making. I don't think of photo sites as unsafe or slow. You bringing these up makes me wonder just how fast and safe you are. (It's like the proverbial restaurant that advertises "Our meat doesn't come from cats.")

I notice all the photos up front were taken by Dave. Any chance of getting other photographers/some spoof accounts to look better? Also, for the love of Pete remove the border from that photo. Nothing adds to slightly disorienting clutter than vaguely noticeable borders around things that should remain borderless.

The "create new account" button isn't clickable. Make it so I can click that button.

Don't give us a tour using thumbnails on the front page. That's cluttered. If you had more going on, thumbnails would be fine, but as it is it looks pretty cluttered. Also, work on the spacing. If you've got to have thumbnails, give them some space. Don't jam text up against the photo. Again, work on spacing (between commas in the second thumbnail) and punctuation (the first thumbnail has a sentence that doesn't end in a period) and capitalization (a lot of offenders here).

There are a few other things - the spacing of the top links, the links in the footer - but those are minor compared to your main problem, which is that this splash page doesn't make me want to sign up. I don't see the advantage, beyond having a cool web site URL, to using this above Flickr.

Remember that a good design means convincing people they want to use you. Right now, that's not happening, and that's a problem.
Amazon S3 Simple Backup Script - s3backup
Don't sign 360 contracts.
I sometimes get annoyed at English's lack of symmetry.

The opposite of... is not...
worthless worthful
senseless senseful
wasteful wasteless
handful handless
moreover lessover (moreunder?)
I don't know, it seems paralyzing to try and keep that stuff in mind and react in real time.

I agree with the rest will come with experience but I'd preface that with just go out and hang out near other people.
Not competitive compared to what?

Combined spending by federal, state, and local governments on roads and airports amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Not exactly a profitable enterprise. Throw in the billions spent by end users of these roads on their own vehicles, and it's hard to see why there is such a fuss over the funding of trains.

I'm not saying they are always the best solution in every situation. Planes will continue to win for long distances, and roads will continue to win for short ones, but there is a definite middle ground where trains shine.

Having some double standard about profitability and competitiveness when we subsidize airports and highways to the tune of hundreds of billions a year seems rather disingenuous.

And I wholeheartedly agree with your statement about government involvement leading to perverse decisions, but remember that this is the case whether we are talking about trains or highways or any other big spending project.
Does anyone else look at the web page's source to see what bits of an essay are there but commented out?
flammable/inflammable?
APIs != XML, see the JSON output from Twitter for example
Not only that, but this is it's second appearance at HN, and I think this time it's on someone else's blog = spam. Flagged.
I thought about the same thing the other day, because url shorteners are really only useful for applications like Twitter or Mobile devices where size matters, but for anywhere else a more readable URL is much more useful if the destination website doesn't have it already.
Thanks for the comments, spend so much time on the code that we sometimes forget the look and feel (as well as punctuation)
Nice: you can defrag a Windows drive in 5 seconds.

Sad: in 2009 you still have to defrag your Windows drives.
Fine, I'll compare Apple to Twitter

[coke came out my nose]
I read that as "Times of pure discovery are a small proportion of research too."
It's great but it won't solve the problem that programmers can't design. I did the error hundred times to think that nice colors generates nice websites but in fact, colors should be the last detail in designing. Layout should be king. But I'm just a programmer...
His Catalog Announcement: Traffic Doubled, New Features
I think his point is that you're not profitable until you can pay your living expenses with your income. You aren't "ramen profitable" when you're living off of credit cards to make ends meet.
Well, the intent is to design a systematic way of setting up a relay for HTTP requests from a public internet through a gateway to an application that otherwise wouldn't be publicly addressable. Without a protocol like the one I've drafted, setting up HTTP servers or CGI scripts stays ad-hoc, requiring local access to the gateway server and DNS and firewall configuration.
It's also GPL so if you base your application on it it'll have to have a very liberal license too.
Should have compared cubes instead of squares
The Search Continues for World’s Best Programmer (part 3)
On the other hand, perhaps they could get together to sort out a standardised payment method that would make paying for stuff online as easy as it is to purchase an iPhone app. No doubt, this would make them loads money and allow many more sites to charge money from their users.
The only downsides I see are from the venture capital perspective. I view microlending as being a form of investment that can actually work--that people will actually pump money into. I see this as an upside for microlending; however it's a bad thing for our economy and venture capital because it's an indication that we're lending to others, but not allowed to EASILY invest without being accredited.
We are talking about bi-directional communications between the client and server. Specifically, server initiated requests to the client. So the major issue that you can overcome with this would be overcoming some NAT/firewall issues.

This proposal would be to convert HTTP from being a client making requests to a server to (effectively) a server making / receiving requests from another server. So your browser would also be a (mini) server, handling requests from the main server.

This is largely for people that want to use HTTP as a message-passing protocol, but use it in a bi-directional manner between possibly NAT'd hosts.
That is a great way to sum up how I felt about it. For example, the facial.= expressions - I was always able to intuit a real smile vs. a fake one, but only if I am not thinking about it.
Precisely. Being "relentlessly resourceful" essentially boils down to a highly advanced game of Make Vs. Buy. MacGyver would almost invariably always answer "Make!"

PG's article also reminded me of a comment I posted on here awhile go regarding a question somebody asked about "skimping" on certain things:

Assuming that by "skimp on" you mean "spend sparingly on a necessity," I'll preemptively refrain from rambling about what's probably not necessary for a tech startup.

Of course, one of my new hobbies, since making the voyage out here, has been to practice the wonderfully fun and interesting "make vs buy" comparison game. You can, and probably will have many opportunities to play this game as a startup founder. This game involves simply asking yourself and/or your team numerous questions of a basic logistical nature:

A) How much does X cost to make, if I get to (or have to, depending on the day) make it myself? B) How much does X cost to buy? C) What are the costs, inclusive of shipping/assembly, for scenarios A and B? D) Do I have anything that can be improvised or are there any possible substitutes that can serve the ultimate purpose of X (i.e. using a door as a desk) in the mean-time? E) How long can I "live" with the improvised substitute or the idea of an improvised substitute? F) How much of the actual value of X is imagined; that is, how much have my perceptions been influenced by hype or advertising?

Questions E and F can get complicated, as they relate quite a bit back to the original posit about "necessities" and such. Probably I'm too tired to go into them at the moment, so perhaps in the morning.

I therefore recommend being pretty weary of anything involving hidden "lock-in" costs resultant from usurping alternatives; for example, anything involving a contract probably fits into this category.

Regarding brand loyalty. . . remember that there's a big difference between purchasing actual quality and purchasing advertised "quality." When factoring in costs associated with advertising, the make vs. buy comparison game really can take a person full circle.

Original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167896
I don't have an answer for you, my point was that the majority of users who will find your service will have their photos elsewhere already and it requires something to make them move.

Photos are a saturated market. I don't have any killer features to suggest, and I don't mean to make it sound like you're dead in the water - far from it. You're a young startup with a fairly solid site from the looks of it, it just didn't show me anything which would entice me to move photos to your site.

As for your feedback on Flickr, you and I may feel that way, but the millions of users they have are in love with the service. Swaying someone who loves a product is like trying to convince someone to switch religions, it's nigh impossible.

I'll look forward to seeing how your site shapes up over time.
I have a Sony Reader which despite very similar flaws to those described by Nielsen I rather like.

For me the killer feature is not cost, despite my own nasty physical-book habit. No, the value is in being able to take a significant reading library with me when I travel.

In addition to that, I like being able to download and read Gutenberg texts that might not be available to me in physical form without a significant delay.
"Clearly no one would ever pay to be able to use google to search" - So if Google started charging you a dollar a month tommorrow you would gladly start using Altavista instead?

I Don't think it's quite that clear.
Are you kidding me?

Perhaps it's your own personal situation, but I would certainly pay for something as high quality as google is. Hell, I pay for fricken cable TV, and google is much more valuable than hockey games and the the odd HBO drama.

I think if you're going to ask "What would I pay for this?" you have to be honest with yourself and with your product. Are you the only guy you know without a cellphone? Are you living everyday on Ramen? Sometimes, "you" needs to be qualified. Assuming you are average though, it is a good start.
There are a whole mess of questions wrapped up in this project, some of the interesting ones are:

1. Can a targeted search provide a better experience than G/Y/M?

2. Even if that search is a better experience, would anyone use it?

3. Managing relevancy on results from unreliable sources.

I think, depending on my integrating more resources and greatly improving the handling of mediocre resources (i.e. the current results of the solr based search for my blog's content, which are often totally irrelevant...), search verticals will be an interesting trend to watch.
While I'm not going to dismiss your argument entirely, it basically boils down to "Migrating to IPv6 is hard. Let's go shopping". Now the question which would be reasonable to ask is how hard would this migration actually be, coupled with how needed it actually is.

Right now you might say "There are 6 billion people in the world. Exploiting the existing address-space more efficiently, coupled with NAT will be 'good enough'". This may or may not be true as for now.

However, fast forward one generation, 30 years, whatever. Lets (optimistically? pessimistically?) assume world population is doubled. How about now? Will squeezing the existing address-space coupled with NAT be enough?

At this point there will be 3 people per IP address. And most people will probably have more networked devices than ever, accustomed to being able to work with data independent of network location.

Sure we can add hacks on hacks to make this viable, but at some point we will have to toss IPv4 out and accept that there will be a painful migration. At some point these hacks will cause more pain than a migration away from IPv4.

The question is not as much if we will have to ditch IPv4 but when. If your argument is that we have too much stuff which relies on current IPv4 configuration now, imagine in 30 years.

In short: Your primary concern is not going to get any better.
I contacted someone with a serious member badge and she says it was given to her for free and she never asked for it.
I contend that advertising is basically overpriced in general, and was a house of cards waiting to fall.

Once the internet allowed an accurate assessment of how well particular ads worked, its vulnerabilities were laid bare.

Note that I'm not suggesting it doesn't work at all, just that it has been overvalued.
This is an excellent tool. I especially like the built-in preview systems and the "color-blind" modes, so that I can be sure I'm generating enough contrast for those users.

Kudos.
Probably much higher. I'd bet that it's 50% at least. Aside from health insurance, one of the biggest hurdles to startup generation is the uncertain career effect. Being YC-funded essentially means that Paul Graham is vouching for your time.

Think about college. Aside from the independently wealthy, no one would dedicate 4 years of life to study, given what would be the career costs of doing so-- an empty resume, a younger boss-- except for the fact that a prestigious institution is willing to sign for the time, making it a career-advancing endeavor. In this case, people are actually willing to pay for it. While there are some glaring inefficiencies in the college model, most would argue that it's a good thing for people to be better educated.

The effect of Y-Combinator is similar. YC is the Harvard of angel investors, and no one who has heard of YC would discredit a founder for time at a YC startup, even if it failed. The result of it is that more people are willing to do startups due to the reduced career risk-- a very good thing.
I agree, but you're using this word "EASILY", and from what I can see it is basically "IMPOSSIBLE" for a startup to tap the pool of upper-middle-class professionals for investment capital, even though most startups and many professionals would be a good match for each other.
Yes, but even on simple sites and simple layouts, you still need to be sure that you are using a decent color pallete, especially when you don't have / can't afford to hire a designer for what you're working on.
Which Is More Beautiful Architecture - FP or OOP?
Spoken like someone who wasn't old enough to see pets.com crash and burn really.

The basic model of capitalism is that if you can't exchange some for of payment for your product, it has no value. You need to create real value in the mind of the customer.

If you don't to that, no matter how much VC you have, you will die.