skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review my startup (vivapixel.com) 
I read HN every day and would love feedback from the community on vivapixel.com. Vivapixel is a new photo sharing site that provides users a safe and fast place to upload, edit and share photos. We have been working on the service for about 3 months and we're looking for feedback/comments/ideas.

Some of the features:
-Albums can be public or private.
-Albums can be shared (allow friend/family to upload photos with a password)
-You can upload photos to your albums via email, each album can have it's own @vivapixel.com email address (this is great for allowing friends and family to email photos to your albums, it's also great for camera-enabled phones like the iPhone or blackberry)
-Site is optimized for speed and ease of use (tring to make the site mom-friendly)
-You can upload videos and share videos.(250mb limit right now)
-Supports: comments, tags, html embedding codes, exif information etc.

Anyone can create a free user account. Thanks and we appreciate any feedback from the HN community.
Hey, the best way to predict the future is to (in|pre)vent it.
There are literally tens of thousands of small software companies that never stopped charging. Downloadable software got really, really viable with the Internet if you execute well. A lot of them aren't necessarily prominent because they've got their own little slice marked off and don't want to clue people in that there is money there.

Some examples off the top of my head:

SourceGear (source control)
HelpSpot (help desk software)
FogCreek (a few products, mostly dev-oriented)
Antair (Blackberry stuff)

I don't have revenue numbers for them and wouldn't tell you if I did, but they all have 6+ employees, which means they are all almost certainly $1 million+ in yearly sales. (A few are substantially more.)

As Eric Sink said once: you don't really have to make a lot of money for the principals of a 3 or 5 man software shop to do VERY well for themselves.
pHash 0.3

11.03.2008

OK OK, not quite a year yet ..
Try Safari 4 on your Mac or PC; or just look at the screenshots in the footnote.

The latest nightly of Google Chrome also works.

I cooked this up as a quick little demo. It uses :hover and :active, which wouldn't work well on the iPhone even if Mobile Safari _was_ up to date with Safari 4's WebKit. An iPhone version could be fixed up easily enough.
I think their point of losing faith is demonstrated by your last line: "...Clearly no one would ever pay..." Is that clear? Are we certain no one would pay a small monthly fee to use Google? What if it was tacked on to your high speed Internet bill?

Having faith in charging is realizing you will and CAN lose 95% of your audience and still make a decent living, simply by charging.
> I think the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that the meaning of the word has shifted. No one writing a dictionary from scratch today would say that hapless meant unlucky. But a couple hundred years ago they might have.

See...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#The_.22euphemism_trea...
It looks interesting...
But can you please make a demo video, or make a demo version that would allow us to make a fast test without requiring creating an account?

EDIT: Also consider providing users a way to transfer their photos from their current service to yours, and to share the photos through multiple platforms... such as facebook.

Also consider letting users to login using their facebook account - Facebook connect.

Also if you require users to sign up, then consider making a small registeration form at the front page, to accelerate the signup process, and make users feel it's easy to do.

EDIT: If you are interested in learning about the user's experience, then consider adding a feedback form, that's easy to be filled.
What would "it" be that HN is getting wrong? The point is to (a) have quality posts on the front page, and (b) encourage a community of people to congregate and share valuable advice/wisdom/information.

Design decisions are simply tools to accomplish these goals. Jeff says disallowing downvotes is "harmful to the community" and explains why he theorizes is the case, but why guess? We have HN, we can examine it and decide for ourselves if HN has been "harmed."

I am all for him beating his chest and extolling the virtues of his complicated system. But I do not see the merit of his comparison to HN: It strikes me as fairly run-of-the-mill Coding Horror-style link-baiting.
It's very similar to Lentzcner & Preston's I-D, yes. We both seem to have independently invented the same general idea and chosen the same obvious name. The differences are the use of a ReSTful protocol, and more elaboration of the registration/name-management aspects. And of course that I haven't submitted it as an I-D :-)

My current draft is far too long, I agree; it describes not only the use of HTTP to retrieve requests (which is equivalent to Donovan Preston's idea), but also the interactions and headers needed to manage the tunnelled service. That latter is something that Lentzcner & Preston haven't addressed yet, I think.
Thanks for reporting all these things!

- the undo is now ok with the "swap" buttotn

- you can "hammer" the increment/decrement buttons

- the error messages are a bit better ('integer expected' and not 'number expected'). What do you mean by "better all around", what do you think of?

- west/east only shadows are possible

- the title is now a link

Thanks!
The Kindle isn't attractive to me because I have an irrational, emotional fondness for books. I like carrying around the current book I'm reading, I like the THUMP! big books make when I put them on the lunch counter, I like the progress of seeing my page marker march down the width, and I like looking at the cover and I like the fact that the actual layout of each book I read is different in subtle ways.

I know that in theory it would be cheaper to read books on a Kindle, but I suspect I would read less. Buying a book is an investment. Because I've spent money on it, I have the mentality that I should read it to justify the cost. I think this mentality since it reinforces my commitment to read a book.

Finally, I like that I can treat books casually. I don't abuse my books, but I make no attempt to coddle them - their value to me is being able to repeatedly get at information, not their condition. I doubt a Kindle is as resilient as a book.
The indie software scene is pretty good in the Mac world. No, I'm not talking about the iPhone here. The iPhone hype will soon die out and we'll see more useful applications and fewer fart buttons. I'm talking about desktop software here.

I don't know how well indie developers in the Windows world are doing, but I'm sure they're making respectable amounts of money, too.

(There isn't enough commercial software for Linux to say anything about the Linux software scene.)
I just quit a lucrative job in Vietnam and will be moving back to the Bay to seek a marketing position with a tech company. Obviously not a good time, I know. But like you, I've found a path I'm excited about pursuing and need to move on and make it happen. It's only been 2 weeks since I quit - and have some plans to travel and live in Vietnam while I begin the job search. Not a bad place to be while you're jobless and seeking! It also works because I'm single and have no debt. I hope my 1 Year post won't include me being broke, i.e., I hope I find a job, but sounds like there may be some more payoff coming to you with Yonkly and the book. Thanks for sharing such a personal story. Good luck!
Free to Freemium: Lessons learned from YouSendIt.com
it is up again. Sorry for the downtime, but I didn't expect such traffic!
If we were going by that story, wouldn't the moral be "It's okay if your product is faulty at first, so long as you're far enough ahead that you can fix things before you develop competition"?
Yeah, but if you didn't even realize that 18" is way too close that's a bigger problem.
"Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn't intended to be. It doesn't have a sense of self or opinions or feelings."

Too bad for that because right away I was thinking "Wow! It's a sentient version of Google only a bazillion times better!" but then I realized it's just a parser that turns natural language questions into queries against a large dataset then I became all sad and disappointed.
Thanks for the pointer re: Safari. I'll fix that.

What this is doing is twofold: letting HTTP push be used consistently, with long-polling pushed out to the edges of the network, where it belongs; and making it less of a burden to spin up and shut down HTTP-based services.

The registration and management aspect -- enrollment, in short -- is to HTTP as DHCP is to IP, if you like. It lets you avoid the equivalent of manually assigning IP numbers.
Keep in mind, the authors are using the American date system.
That's November 3, 2008, not March 11th.
Charging for stuff is the "mom 'n' pop" way of doing things; if you want to get big, that's going to be extraordinary hard. Youtube, Digg, Facebook, Myspace, etc, none of those would be as big as they are today if they charged users.

However becoming big is hard, so you're left with a big decision — a hard, if not impossible road to become massive while still being profitable and not charging users, or target only the (smaller) paying audience, but remain profitable from near enough day one. Or you could of course meet in the middle with a freemium model.

I don't see the problem with the free model, you just can't charge for everything.
VLC is good for pretty much every format of video on OS X.
Well this post sure makes an incisive point about the power of... successive powers of 2? We could add just 4 bits to IPv4 addresses and address any reasonable addressing argument, providing 10-20 static IP addresses for every man, woman, and child on the planet. That's not the challenge.

The challenges are:

* It is extremely painful to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6, not just because of the obvious stuff (like renumbering and upgrading routers) but also because tons of important programs are written to assume an IP address is 4 bytes long, or fits in a scalar data type.

* The argument for enduring that pain is weak. There are 6 billion people in the world, so we can't number them directly. But I haven't had a static IP address in years and years, and if you offered me an address out of 172/8 for my laptop I wouldn't take it. Most of the Internet works fine through NAT, and the trend is towards more NAT-friendliness.

* Any argument about the scarcity of IP addresses is clouded by the fact that IP addresses are doled out OPEC-style by a cartel of standards groups with an ideological bias towards hastening IPv6 adoption. There's no liquid market for netblocks, so we don't know what they're actually worth. Of course, if we had such a market, we'd probably find out that they're not worth all that much to people with laptops, and readily affordable for people with servers.

Put differently, in a vain attempt to steer this back to the topic at hand: you could make a similar point about the sheer size and flexibility of ASN.1 and X.500 directory naming schemes. But nobody's talking about chucking the DNS to get that.
You make a good point. I was actually going to edit my post but for some reason it didn't let me.

If it was a simple case of having something tacked onto my ISP bill, then I'd be far more likely to pay for things. I think that's an area ripe for development. Why ISPs haven't attacked it yet I don't know.

Ad supported is still a pretty good model though and will be around forever. It does depend on who your users are though.
More startups merging with each other
So here are my thoughts:

1) You give me no reason to use you rather than Flickr or Facebook. What is the reason YOUR site is better? I'm not saying it isn't, but that needs to be on your frontpage. You have to assume your customer is going to have photos online elsewhere.

2) Frontpage signup button took me to an Oops page, so I can't even register to try the service. Looks like it goes to signup.php rather than /signup

3) A pet peeve. If you're going to allow me to login without authorizing my account, just log me in after I register. Why make me re-authorize myself.

4) Creating an album before upload is an extra step. Allow me to create the album in the upload process, sure require it, but I want to begin uploading images right away.

After playing with the site some, I still don't have an understanding what makes your site a killer site in the crowded market. What is it that makes you better than Flickr, Facebook or Myspace for my photos?
I am the type of person who prefers written text to video... I can envision the following:

1. Scene-setting --> introductory paragraph

2. Proposing a problem --> video/animation of the problem at hand

3. Derivation --> written and recorded in something like EtherPad, so one can see not only the result, but the process of writing it.

4. Summary --> summary paragraph

5. Questions --> nested comments a la HN/reddit/etc. As a bonus, add the ability to highlight and right-click on any part of the text, and add a comment there.
Make sure to practice at least a few times in front of some friends to get the jitters out. I have to present once or twice a semester and I always need a few dry runs to get the jitters out. If I really was presenting to a large audience I would have to practice many, many times to have it all down pat and not look nervous.
I don't care that much for concerts or merchandise, I'd rather prefer the artists to spend more time creating new recordings than burning out on tours.
Ah yes, the US-only "middle endian" theory of date notation. Wonderful. Not confusing at all. OK, November, I stand corrected.
Interviews with Entrepreneurs Discussing How They Made Their 1st Million
The Eurostar and TGV trains do some basic security (metal detectors) now. I'm not sure if the TGV does it on all routes all the time, but I definitely remember it from Geneva to Paris in 2005 and Marseilles to somewhere in 2007.
Why not? You don't have to go through these checks when getting on BART, Muni, or Greyhound. I regularly board high speed trains here in Europe with only random security checks (usually dogs roaming the stations).

Airplane security for all passengers came about primarily because of hijackings, and was later adapted (badly) to bombs and suicide tactics. Planes are a more suitable target for these types of attacks because of many reasons, including the virtually unlimited amount of possible destinations (unfortunately also including the ground or buildings). Even a small explosion on a plane can bring it down, and there is already an existing factor of fear when flying.

The current level of airline security is still ridiculous, given all of this, but it would be doubly so on a train system. Hijacking a train is borderline pointless, crashing one into something is next to impossible, and derailing from on-board would be a pretty large challenge. Trains are also at ground-level, which is less than ideal for hostage scenarios.

Trains are only a sexy target because they have a large number of people on them, and even then people are relatively spaced out along a long line. In my opinion this makes them even less attractive to a terrorist than any other crowded space.
Pop culture is the best and only guide we have. Dave Hickey said the cultures that write love songs are the ones that don't have rigid scripts for love and courtship. We listen to love songs because we accept few limitations and instead use a shared collection of stories to orient ourselves in the vast space of possibilities.

So, what part of pop culture tells us how to flirt? (If you say reality television, I will climb out of your monitor and stab you in the face.)
Swears aren't a gimmick. They're a part of the English language.

When DHH tells a hypothetical person to fuck off, that carries certain undertones. We're all aware of those because it's part of the English language. Same with him calling a product a piece of shit. If he said "This product is severely lacking," that means something difference than "This product is a piece of shit."

I don't know where this taboo against professional swearing comes from, but curse words are a natural part of the English language and should be used as such.

Meanwhile, using LOLcats says nothing good about you. "Hi, I'm immature enough that while you're supposed to regard what I'm saying, I still think that text attached to cats is funny." "Hello, I missed the meme bandwagon and I'm catching up three years later." I would respect somebody using "All Your Base" more than I'd respect LOLcats, and that's not saying I'd respect AYB at all.
Computer furniture, medical computer carts, rack mount cabinet
Hergo Computer Furniture - desks, carts, racks, rack mount cabinets, rack mount enclosures and more. Get your computer furniture online.
TheOfficialBoard Launches With Wiki Org Charts For 20,000 Companies
The title is pure linkbait.

While interesting, this is a sales pitch and not much about the product itself. Flagged.
Ah, the "witty put down" at its finest! While nothing of this sort has worked to date, the same could have been said of powered flight on December 16, 1903. In any event... Thanks for making me smile :-)
Thanks for sharing this. Very inspirational.

Where are you hosting your site? Are you hosting at Dreamhost (whois data)? I don't see anything on their site about ASP.Net apps. If not, where are you hosting it or are you doing it yourself in a data center?

Thanks.
Follow cost: Is that Twitter celebrity worth the pain?
Does something like this exist for RSS feeds or blogs?
The web didn't invent advertising as a business model. It has worked and been around for a very long time.
Oftentimes, the people complaining about everything are the people classy enough to recognize how many things are worth complaining about.

Do you have a link to one of Mena's presentations?
Flickr is a good service, don't get me wrong, but I'm not a big fan for big brother or someone trying to stuff ads down my throat all the time (just my 2cents)

Facebook, don't keep the originals, only the cropped versions of the photos... also what about the millions of folks who don't have a facebook account ?

Frontpage button: Sorry. fixed it !

I never claimed my site to be "killer", it's new and will get better over time... It's by having users who use the site and want a better experience that the site will evolve.

What would make the site "killer" in your opinion ?

thanks for the comments.
I can see the advantage to expanding the pool of potential building blocks with which we can make biomolecules. I can see how this would enable novel biomolecules to be made. I can see why you would need custom ribosomes to build these new biomolecules.

I can't see why you need to do this in artificial lifeforms rather than E.coli.

If it is possible to do this in E.coli then the hard task, modifying the ribosomes to support manufacturing these novel biomolecules, is still to come.
There was a 1 hour interview where Karl Popper's ideas were investigated on "Ideas: How to think about science" from CBC.ca. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html#episode2... is the link.

It was the most intellectually stimulating interview I've heard in years. Pretty much all 24 hours of the series actually. I highly recommend it.

As an aside though, I have some criticism about this text:

>It is not only social scientists who would have to change their approach under elective modernism. If we are to choose the values that underpin scientific thinking to underpin society, scientists must think of themselves as moral leaders. But they must teach fallibility, not absolute truth. Whenever a scientist, acting in the name of science, cheats, cynically manipulates, claims to speak with the voice of capitalism, the voice of a god, or even the voice of a doctrinaire atheist, it diminishes not only science but the whole of our society.

Science's motto is "On No Man's Word".

> Science, then, can provide us with a set of values — not findings — for how to run our lives, and that includes our social and political lives. But it can do this only if we accept that assessing scientific findings is a far more difficult task than was once believed, and that those findings do not lead straight to political conclusions. Scientists can guide us only by admitting their weaknesses, and, concomitantly, when we outsiders judge scientists, we must do it not to the standard of truth, but to the much softer standard of expertise.

Science is not about moral values. Science needs to be regulated by moral values. Science is like a self assembling jigsaw puzzle. It needs to be directed. Just like we can make a conscious choice to investigate technologies of destruction instead of stem cell research. Just like we can subjugate genetic research into Monsanto's killer seeds.

I think all in all, I am paraphrasing ideas put forth in the afore-mentioned interviews...
Atlantica Online vs. Puzzle Pirates: Microtransactions vs. Dual Currency
"Almost any participant sport or hobby can involve flirting. The level of flirtatious behaviour, however, often tends to be inversely related to the standards achieved by participants and their enthusiasm for the activity."

Damn, so much for meeting someone while doing something I actually like. The good news is I've always wanted to join a book club but never have because I don't like the books they read. I didn't realize my distaste for chick lit would actually work to my advantage.
Working on the transfer function now, hope to be done ASAP.

Facebook connect, hmmm will look into this...

thanks for the comments
I have a lot of nerdy friends who love discussing politics. Some of them also code. I don't think it's fair to make the generalization that politics isn't fun to discuss.
How much time are you spending on the marketing aspect of Yonkly? If you aren't and started spending an hour or two a day -- seriously attacking it, you might be able to get ramen profitable quickly.

For instance, the site doesn't quickly drive home why I need your service. It kind of muddles around. If you tightened things up, starting an affiliate program, did some AdWords, etc. you might be able to focus on the project 100% once it pays the mortgage.

Google 'yonkly' -- it's strange what it comes up with. That type of thing needs to be fixed. Just a couple ideas, hope this helps -- I launched my web service last month and we are already ramen profitable.
The Kindle is good for books that aren't so valuable to you. I bought books like the Fark one, several classics I'm not emotionally invested in, etc. That way, I have more money to spend on the books that really matter to me, and I've got a convenient want to read a lot of books at once.
You're quite welcome! Glad to hear it.

Anyone with questions about using/changing the source code is welcome to contact me at mokelly@hlcam.com. I'd be very proud to have this incorporated into HN...
The Jetpack: An Idea Whose Time Has Never Come, but Won't Go Away
I think he could definitely have picked his phrases a little bit more carefully.

"It might sound scary initially, but it would be on life support, entirely dependent on us for survival" he said. "It would be highly dependent on someone feeding it a variety, probably 30 or more, small molecules. It wouldn’t be likely to escape into the environment and even if it did it would be ill equipped to survive."